Made in Myrtle Street (Prequel) Read Online Free PDF Page B

looks alright though now since we stuck the aniseed ball into the hole. My best friend, Amy, had a big nail sticking out at the front of her clogs that she didn’t know about and it stuck in the coalman’s horse when she was pinching a ride on its back and it jumped a bit and some sacks fell off. The coalman wasn’t very pleased so I borrowed your hammer and that shoe thing to knock it back in. When I hit the nail her clog went up in the air and knocked the dog off the mantelpiece but it wasn’t my fault because it just jumped up and the nail could have stuck in Amy if we didn’t try to knock it back in.
    I told Grandma and she said that she would swap it for her dog but Mam said I had to tell you anyway, so I am sorry because I know that you liked it.
    I don’t think that there is a ‘h’ in front of haxident but I couldn’t find axident in your dictionary and our Edward said that is how to spell it and Mam keeps telling me to hurry up because she hasn’t got all day to be waiting. Our Edward has been cleaning his delivery bike from the greengrocers all morning because he says that it will go faster but he can hardly hold it up.
    Mam let me help her to whitewash the backyard yesterday so that it will look nice for when you get back. She just let me do the bottom bits so that I wouldn’t get splashed. I was being very careful and didn’t mean to get it on the cat but anyway it looked better with white patches on it like a cow.
    I hope that you will be safe when you go to another country because in our books at school there seems to be a lot of fierce people with knives and spears. Be careful if you go to the pub with Mr Murphy when you get there.
    I’m going now because our Mary is getting on my nerves crying all the time even when I push her dummy back in.
    Love
    Laura
     
    ***
     
    They had been still going through their intensive training and drilling when they had heard on the 5th September that they were to be sent to Egypt.
    Boarding their train for Southampton on the 9th September their worries and concerns for the families left at home were overwhelmed, for the moment, by the scale of the operation. It took forty trains to move the 15,500 men, their horses and guns and all the support equipment down to the south coast. The next day they boarded HMT ‘Neuralia' at Southampton and at midnight they crept out of the harbour under a dark sky and a total blackout. As they looked back their last view of England was of a multitude of searchlights stabbing the blackness of the night.
    Staring out into the darkness at the receding columns of light, Edward felt more profoundly than ever the trauma of the separation from the family that he had abandoned in Myrtle Street. Laura would have put little Mary in bed with her by now whilst the other kids would be in the next room, topping and tailing in the one big bed. The widening gap of the black sea was the final act in the separation. It denied him the right to walk back if his family cried out. Would the community around Myrtle Street embrace and protect its own in the same way that those who surrounded him as a child had? There was a different feel to the area where he now lived. It had grown dramatically in the last twenty years with the opening of the Docks and the upsurge in industrial development in Trafford Park. New shops and offices had been springing up everywhere and there was generally a greater sense of scheduled urgency.
    But the old Salford above the railway line where he had grown up still had a much more traditional village feel about it. It was dominated by the large cattle market and the public houses that had been built to serve it but dotted around the area there was a selection of factories, cotton mills, stables, a variety theatre and the new Picture House. He had taken Laura there a couple of times to see the cinematograph shows.
    He had been born in this top village in 1882, eight years after his parents had moved from Hulme pushing a borrowed