Miss Clare Remembers and Emily Davis Read Online Free PDF Page B

Beech Green cottage which would shelter her for the rest of her long life.
    ***

    It was in Caxley, therefore, that Dolly Clare spent the first formative years of her life. The lane outside the cottage gate was dusty in summer and clogged with mud in the winter. The child watched the carts and waggons, the carriages of the gentry and the tradesmen's vans, rumble and rattle on their way, raising dust or churning mud, as they travelled to and from the town. The diversity of the horses fascinated her. Ada loved best the shiny high-stepping carriage horses that trotted proudly past, and would call excitedly to her little sister when she saw them approaching:
    'Come quick, Doll! Quick, you'll miss 'em!'
    But Dolly's favourites were the slow-moving patient great cart horses whose shaggy hooves stirred vast clouds of dust as they plodded towards the market town with the farm waggons thundering behind them. There was a humility and a nobility about these powerful monsters which tore at the young child's heart in a way which she could not express, but which was to remain with her always.

    The two little girls reacted differently to many things. To go shopping in the High Street or in the market square was a delight to the volatile Ada. To the quieter Dolly it was sheer misery.
    'Ada! Dolly!' The urgent summons from the house in their mother's voice would be the prelude to this ordeal.
    First they had to endure a brisk rubbing of hands and faces with a soapy flannel wrung out in cold water. Then came swift and painful combing of hair with a steel comb which seemed to find out every sensitive spot on little Dolly's scalp. Both children had curly hair. Ada's sprang crisply from her head, but Dolly's was softer and fell in loose curls, later to form ringlets. Ada endured the hair-tugging stoically, chattering the while about what she would see and what she wanted her mother to buy.
    'Hold still, child!' Mary would command. 'And hush your tongue! Us'll be lucky to get a good dinner from the shops, let alone sweeties and dollies and picture books!'
    Dolly's eyes filled with tears of pain during the combing, despite Mary's endeavour to handle her gently. She knew it was no pleasure for the younger child to go shopping, but there was no one to mind her and the two must perforce accompany their mother everywhere.
    At last they set out. Sometimes Dolly was pushed in the rickety perambulator, but its days were numbered, and more often than not she would struggle along beside her mother's long heavy skirt, clutching it with one desperate hand, or holding on to the stout shopping basket which her mother held.
Never for a moment did she let go. The thought of being parted from her mother was too terrifying to be borne.

    Ada, on the other side, leapt and gambolled as gaily as a young goat, greeting friends, pointing out anything which caught her eye—a lady's pink parasol, a gleaming carriage door with a crest on it, or a pig squealing in a cart, covered with a stout net, and resenting every minute of its journey to the market.
    Caxley High Street was always busy. It was a thriving town which served a large area, and the shops always had far too many hurrying people in them for little Dolly's liking. Customers pressed up to the counters to be served, assistants scurried back and forth filling baskets, weighing out sugar, fetching lumps of yellow butter on wooden pats, and slapping them feverishly into shape on the marble slab behind the counter.
    Important customers usually waited in their carriages outside the shop while their menservants bustled to and fro carrying parcels, and the proprietor of the business himself fetched and carried too, leaving his premises to pay his respects at the carriage side. Sometimes a horseman, not wishing to dismount, would shout his order to someone in the shop. Out would race the shop boy at top speed, the parcel would be stuffed into a jacket pocket, coins would jingle, and the horse would clop-clop off down