Jacky Daydream Read Online Free PDF

sewing. She’d made all those fancy outfits for that doll of hers, and a few natty bits and bobs for little Jack and Barbara. Perhaps she ought to be properly trained?
    He apprenticed her to a milliner. Hilda Ellen stitched away, pins in her pursed mouth, plaiting straw into hats, like some poor princess in a fairy story.
    Then, in 1914, war broke out. Papa went to buy presents for Jack and Barbara at Christmas and found there were hardly any toys in the shops. All the best dolls and toy animals were made in Germany, only we were of course at war with the Germans now. Papa was ever enterprising. Now was the perfect time to start up his own doll factory. He knew nothing about doll-making but that didn’t deter him. It should be simple enough. He just needed to take some doll to pieces to see exactly how it was made.
    Hilda Ellen came home after a long stint at the milliner’s. She went upstairs to free her soft hair from its pins and brush it into a fluffy cloud round her shoulders. She looked up at the shelf to nod at Mabel and her lovely longer tresses. Mabel wasn’t there.
    Mabel was dismembered in a workroom, cut up like meat on a butcher’s block. Even her beautiful blue glass eyes were poked into the hollow of her severed head.
    Hilda Ellen met my grandfather, George Alfred, the next year. She was walking arm in arm with a girlfriend over Blackheath, deliberately slowing down as they went past the soldiers’ convalescent home, giggling when the poor bandaged boys lounging in deckchairs in the garden called out compliments.
    George Alfred took a shine to little blonde Hilda Ellen. He asked her if she’d care to go out with him. She liked the look of this dark handsome soldier with his arm in a sling. She said yes. She’d have said yes if he’d been pug-ugly and bandaged like a mummy. She couldn’t wait to leave home.
----
    This is a difficult question! Which of my books is dedicated to my grandma – and can you give me a reason why I chose that book in particular?
----
     
    Look in the front of
The Suitcase Kid
. It says:
    In memory of Hilda Ellen Smeed
    There are
several
reasons why I chose this book for my grandma. It’s about Andy, who has to move backwards and forwards after her parents split up, living one week with Mum, one week with Dad, never having her own room, her own space, her own
life
. I thought the young Hilda Ellen had a lot in common with Andy.

    I also have Andy becoming very close to an elderly couple, Mr and Mrs Peters. Mrs Peters has arthritis but still manages to sew, just like my grandma. Mrs Peters gives Andy her own sewing box for Christmas.
    It’s got all these little compartments stuffed with threads and needles and a silver thimble and a tape measure that snaps back into place when you touch the button. The compartment tray lifts out and at the bottom are all sorts of materials from her own scrap bag, soft silks and velvets and different cottons with tiny sprigs of flowers and minute checks and pin-head dots, all perfect for making into dresses for Radish. She’s got so many little outfits now she wants me to change her all day long so that she can show them all off.
    I’ve made her a dance-frock that covers her paws, a velvet cloak lined with cotton wool fur, even a little sailor-suit with a big white collar and a white cap with special ear-holes.

 
    7
    Telling Stories
    I ONCE ASKED my grandma what was the most important thing that had ever happened to her.
    ‘Buying our house,’ she said.
    I was surprised at the time. It seemed such a sad thing to say. It was such an
ordinary
house too, a suburban semi – two bedrooms and a box room, with no distinguishing features. But now I can see that she didn’t necessarily mean the bricks and mortar and all the dark heavy furniture and the dull Axminster carpets. I think she meant she’d got a home at last.
    She had a peaceful life living with my grandfather. I never once heard them quarrel. The very worst thing they would call