Me Myself Milly Read Online Free PDF

the owner. She was an elderly lady who lived in New Zealand but she was very ill and died,
leaving the house to her great-nephew, David, who she’d never met. He was finishing his degree at Newcastle University and after he’d done his finals he came down to view his property
and he never left. He fell in love with Jeanie and the house and the city; so Mum and her friends didn’t have to move out.
    When we were little there were about seven adults and three other children living in King Street. Mum had a theory that, although she’d given birth to us, we were humans, and one human
couldn’t own another human and, besides, the whole world was one big family, so we were to call her Summer and not Mummy. This didn’t quite work out because when I was little I had
trouble with my ‘s’ sounds so I called her Mummer, which sounds like Mama anyhow.
    If we fell over and cried someone would pick us up and comfort us. If we wanted a bedtime story there was always someone willing to tell us one. And as the cooking was shared, a different
person gave us our tea every night. If it wasn’t always Mummer we didn’t care or even notice.

Chapter Five
    I was alone in my room, flicking through
How to Make Friends
and pretending that I wasn’t panicking about starting at the new school next week. The book suggested
that you should always act naturally. Well, that wasn’t going to work. What if your natural self was painfully shy? I skipped over that bit and started on the chapter that talked about being
optimistic and staying positive. How could I
stay
positive when I wasn’t feeling positive in the first place?
    It was hopeless. All the girls at the new school would already have friends that they’d made years ago and they wouldn’t want some newbie barging in. Perhaps the whole idea had been
a mistake. But then what were the alternatives? I really didn’t want to go back to my old school and have people treat me differently, which they would. I wondered if I should persuade Mum to
let me be home educated. But the thought of being stuck in the basement all day and never getting out was even worse. I’d just have to do it. There was no other choice. But, whatever, the
library book wasn’t much help so I stuffed it back in the doll’s house. There was a knock on the door.
    ‘Milly?’ It was Mum. She didn’t open the door and come in, which annoyed me.
    ‘We’ve been invited upstairs for a meal with Jeanie and David. I think there’s something they want to tell us. Five minutes, okay?’
    ‘Okay.’
    As I was brushing my hair I began to worry about what it was they could want to tell us. Were they planning on selling the house? They couldn’t sell the basement flat, obviously, because
that was ours, but there was no reason why they couldn’t sell the rest of the house. It would certainly explain all the work they’d done on it recently. Oh God, I hoped it wasn’t
that. Or perhaps they were going to have a baby. That would be a good thing.
    It turned out to be neither of those things.
    Jeanie had cooked a lovely vegetarian curry and there was naan bread, poppadoms and chutney
and
yoghurt which kept us all busy, but I noticed that the atmosphere was a bit strained.
    You know when something isn’t being talked about and it’s referred to as ‘the elephant in the room’? Well, there was a whole herd of them in that room. You couldn’t
move for elephants.
    David was obviously waiting until we’d eaten before telling us the news. Jeanie tried to start a conversation with Mum about her latest book, but Mum gave her a dark look and Jeanie backed
off.
    And then there was the biggest elephant of all, the daddy elephant: The Incident and all it entailed. So, all in all, it was an uncomfortable meal and a far cry from the meals that we used to
have in this same kitchen in the good old days.
    When we’d finished eating, David finally dropped the bombshell.
    He explained that the university, where he lectures