Life: An Exploded Diagram Read Online Free PDF Page A

five in the morning to knead bread dough had proved beyond him. His rent and board more or less canceled out his wages.) The two women lived off their garden produce, the eggs from their dozen hens, and seasonal fieldwork.
    To Win’s satisfaction, Ruth was plain. She attracted no particular attention. She was a quiet, almost solemn, child. The only problem was her hair, which was ember-red and rather beautiful. Win recognized the danger of it and kept it cropped into a short bob. Win’s sentimental mother protested, weakly, but Win cited head lice and other horrors and snipped away with the kitchen scissors.
    When Ruth was five, she went to school. For the first week, Win walked her there. Then, astonishingly, she announced that she had found herself a job at the new Borstead Steam Laundry. Win was made of sterner stuff than Stanley; she set off for Borstead at six thirty the following Monday with her head lowered into an early autumn drizzle.
    Win made that walk twice a day, six days a week, for the next three years. In all that time, she missed only four days of work, when deep snow made the road impassable. (Those days were deducted from her wages, of course, so she returned to work as soon as the snow turned to icy slush. In old age, when walking became a burning agony to her, she loudly regretted it.)
    Then, in 1926, her mode of travel to work changed, and this change echoed down Ruth’s life. In that year, the laundry acquired two electrically powered delivery vans that resembled the milk floats that had recently appeared in Norwich. The drivers’ cabins were blunt, open-sided wedges with a single seat. Steering was by means of a handle like a boat’s tiller. Behind the cabins, the floors of the vans were just large enough to carry ten large laundry hampers and six small ones. The tin sides of the vehicles were painted a smart maroon with the legend BORSTEAD MODERN STEAM LAUNDRY painted in curly yellow lettering. It took very little skill to operate these machines, so one of the driving jobs went to the weirdly cheerful Willy Page, who happened to live in Bratton Morley. He was some sort of cousin to Win and was gormlessly in love with her. At the end of his working day, Willy was allowed to drive his van home. So it made sense for him to hang around, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, until Win finished her shift, then let her hop into the back. Equally, it made sense to drive her to work in the mornings and take Ruth to school at the same time. Mother and daughter sat in the back of the slow, jolting van, trying to ignore Willy’s chatter, watching the road and sky unfurl their seasons.
    All of which meant that Ruth arrived at school before the other pupils. It was not the same school that Win had attended. Saint Nicholas’s Elementary School was the converted chapter house of Saint Nicholas’s Priory on the outskirts of the town, on the road to Yarmouth. It had a door for boys and a door for girls and a contested outdoor lavatory. The teacher was no longer the angry and mustachioed Miss Draper. She had been replaced by Miss Selcott, a sensitive and somewhat despairing young woman from the Home Counties. Ruth had no idea where or what the Home Counties were. She pictured a distant place bathed in warm light and populated by happy families. A place from which Miss Selcott had been tragically exiled, perhaps by Romance. So, out of kindness, during the hour or so before the other pupils arrived, Ruth formed a bond with Miss Selcott. While Ruth moved silently among the desks, distributing exercise books and filling the ink pots, she listened to Miss Selcott reciting the verses of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Thomas Hardy. At the ends of the days, between the departure of the other children and the soft whine of Willy’s van, she would do likewise. In this way, Ruth acquired something of her teacher’s voice and learned that love was a form of distress.
    Arithmetic, however, was neat and unambiguous and had nothing