My Real Children Read Online Free PDF Page A

the war he means to get on.”
    “Your son?” she asked.
    “My nephew,” he replied, and was silent a moment, then changed the subject. “Now, where are you going tonight? Are you going to school?”
    “Yes, back to my school. It’s been evacuated to Carlisle.”
    “Carlisle! You won’t get there tonight!” As if to emphasize his words the train slowed to a stop.
    “The guard on the platform in Lancaster said this train went around the coast to Carlisle,” Patty said.
    “Well, so it does, but not until tomorrow. I don’t know if we’ll be in Barrow before midnight, but whenever we get there the train will stop there until the morning and go on to Carlisle then. Tom, what time does the train go out to Carlisle in the morning?”
    The man addressed had a little rabbitty moustache. He pulled a booklet out of his pocket. “Ten oh eight,” he said after a moment’s perusal. “Why’s that, Stan, what do you want with going to Carlisle?”
    “It’s not me, it’s the young lady here. They told her in Lancaster she could get to Carlisle by this train, but it’s not so is it?”
    All the men looked at Patty, who blushed under their attention.
    “Well, whatever they told her she won’t get further than Barrow until ten oh eight tomorrow morning. You’d have done better to have stopped in Lancaster, lass,” Tom said.
    “Don’t worry, you can stay with my Flo and me,” Stan said reassuringly. “Flo will make you up a bed in no time and find something for your supper too, as I expect you’re hungry.”
    “I’m always hungry,” Patty said, sincerely, but all the men laughed.
    She slept that night in a worker’s cottage in Barrow-in-Furness. She woke early to the sound of seagulls calling. She had not known Barrow was by the sea. She opened the blackout cautiously and saw gray waves by the gray daylight. It was just before seven in the morning. She dressed quickly. The room was a boy’s room with a carefully made hanging model of a Spitfire and framed amateur perspective drawings of birds. She wondered where that boy was, dead or away at the war? She remembered Stan’s face when he had said that Col was his nephew. She went downstairs. Flo was in the kitchen already, making up the fire. “You’re an early bird, Patty,” she said. “Would you like a cup of tea?”
    “You’ve been so kind, and I would like a cup of tea, but I just saw from my window that we’re by the sea. I haven’t seen the sea properly since before the war, and I thought I might just slip out quickly for a walk now, first, before I do anything.” As she said it Patty thought she was being silly, but she remembered the clean-swept sand and the sound of the sea.
    Flo looked skeptical. “It isn’t the proper sea, just the bay, like. You need to go around to Morecambe for the proper sea with a bit of a beach and things to do.”
    “There wouldn’t be anything to do at this time of the morning anyway. I just want to run down and see it.”
    “Well it’s right there at the bottom of the street, for what it’s worth,” Flo said.
    Patty pulled on her coat and went out. The wind was gusting and the sky was brightening a little. The cords of an empty flagpole were clapping repetitively, a solitary empty sound.
    As Flo had said, there was no proper beach. The waterfront was just a narrow shelf of stones and broken shells where the waves were breaking. Out across the bay she could see the shadow of the other shore. It couldn’t be more different from the blue sky and limitless horizon of Weymouth before the war. Yet still the waves ran in endlessly and comfortingly on the strand. In and back, each a little closer, breaking in a rush of spray, and then the sound of the shingle being sucked back, drowned as the next wave came forward, each wave different and each the same. The sea was as new as the morning, and yet the same sea as when she had been a child and Oswald and her father still alive, and the waves ran in and back as they