Great Meadow Read Online Free PDF

Cooper’s Beauty Treatment, 121A Hampstead Road, London’, and so I just picked it up and gave it to her, and she looked a bit funny and said, ‘Nosey Parker.’ I said I wasn’t, so she said, ‘Well now that you’ve got it, put it in the post box,’ because there was one stuck on a wooden post by the gate with ‘ER VII’ in curly red letters. So I did.
    â€˜Can you see any cows?’ she said as we opened the creaky gate. But there weren’t any, and anyway they were usually Aleford’s heifers and not cows, only, she said that didn’t make tuppence worth of difference to her, cows were cows, whatever you liked to call them and she’d rather go round by road than up the field and be trampled to death by those great things.
    â€˜They’d run away if you just shook your fist at them,’ said Brian Thing.
    â€˜Would they indeed,’ said Lally. ‘And me in my red andwhite polka dot? Drive them mad it would. Shake my fist! Bet you’ve never been surrounded by a whole herd of them, have you? All snuffling and thumping the grass, with those huge eyes, and they lower their heads and get ready to charge you. I know. I was caught like that once, wasn’t I?’
    â€˜She had a terrible turn,’ said my sister. ‘So would I have.’
    â€˜Just up the top, I saw them right down almost at the Court and the faster I went the faster they came until they were all round me.
Terrible
it was. Enough to turn you white.’
    â€˜She had to have smelling-salts,’ said my sister. ‘In a little green bottle, and it makes your eyes stingy.’
    â€˜It’s ammonia,’ said Brian Thing.
    â€˜Whatever it is,’ said Lally, ‘I had to have it.’
    â€˜Smells just like wet beds,’ said my sister and ran up the hill because she knew she’d have got a box on the ears for that.
    â€˜Take no notice,’ Lally said. ‘Best ignore that kind of behaviour, I’ll deal with Maddemoselle myself later. Running wild the two of them . . . I don’t know. And me responsible. And by the by,’ she said suddenly turning to me, ‘if you’re wondering why I didn’t send my letter from the post office but from the box by the gate, and I am as sure as sure you are, it’s because I don’t want Miss Maltravers knowing where I send my letters to. She’s a terrible gossip, that woman, she’s got a tongue like the clapper of a bell, all over the place, any bit of news she spreads it. So that’s why.’
    â€˜Was it secret then? The letter?’
    â€œCourse not. Secret! Whatever next. Private, that’s all,’ she said. ‘And you just M.Y.O.B.’
    Meaning ‘Mind Your Own Business’. So I thought that was pretty interesting to tell my sister a bit later on. If I could remember the lady’s name.
    The lane beside the Star Inn ran right up on to the Downs. If you went all the way up you would pretty soon come to Long Burgh, which was about the top really. From there you could look all round you and see everywhere, as if it was all your own. Far down, at the bottom, was the village, and quite far away was Alciston and Berwick, and then the river wavering through the valley all silvery in the sun. Past that you could see our house and the church in the trees and right on to Windover Hill. There was never any noise up there, just the larks going twittering up in the sky, and the wind coming in from the sea where it was all golden and blue, and across it, I mean really miles away so that you couldn’t tell, was France. Brian Thing said that he had been there once and that it was quite decent except they ate terrible mucked-up food. So I didn’t say anything, because I rather liked mucked-up food . . . anyway, French mucked-up.
    We were going to see the witch’s caravan, because it was his last day and I was a bit curious, and wondering about all the cats and so