Patrick Parker's Progress Read Online Free PDF

say with high irony) of looking after Patrick for a couple of hours if Florence had something to do in town that could not be delayed and Patrick was not quite up to it. As usual, Mrs Glaister tucked him up on her front-room settee. Florence told him to be a good boy, and left. Patrick told Mrs Glaister that he felt tired and thought he would have a sleep. She covered him with a blanket and tiptoed out. He waited until he could hear the radio in her kitchen and then he slid off the settee, slipped out of the front door, closing it behind him, and went around to his own garden.
    No one was about - Father was at work, Mother was on her errands, and he knew where the key was hidden. He let himself in at the front door, replaced the key carefully (being methodical even at that age, as many had already remarked) and went through to the back. He also knew where the key to the shed was kept and he let himself in. He pulled the door closed, stood on an old potato box, gazed about him at the pictures on the walls, at the neat lines of tools and the mug, kettle and primus stove - thought it was just the kind of place he would like to live in when he grew up - and then, turning to the workbench, he dismantled, very carefully, the entire Meccano structure of his father's newly completed signal box.
    An hysterical Florence, with a distraught Mrs Glaister in tow, found him, nearly two hours later, with half the Meccano pieces laid out neatly on the bench and a look of complete concentration on his face. She gasped with emotion when she found him and pulled him into her pillowy chest, nearly suffocating him. He pushed her away, ran his hands through his hair, and began to holler. Mrs Glaister bent down and stuck her nose almost into his and wagged her finger and said, 'Never, never, never again, you naughty boy . . . you need a good smacking, you do ...' and flounced out when Florence told her off for it. Florence then wept, Patrick wept. He was attempting to reach the workbench. Florence barred his way. 'I want to finish it,' he yelled. 'I want to finish it. . .' He crossed his little arms beneath his chest as he had seen his mother do and he stuck out his lower lip which was a feature entirely his own. 'I won't, I shan't. . .' he said, and stamped his foot, thereby slipping off the potato box and cutting his knee.
    Florence scooped him up. He held his breath and nearly went purple before the piercing yell arrived. 'You must never, ever do such a thing again,' sobbed Florence, still holding him fast. 'Look how cold you are. You will be ill yourself and you will make me ill with the worry of it.' And she dragged him back indoors, by which time he had a temperature and was wheezing.
    That evening, when his father came home, Patrick, unusually, went into the hallway to greet him. Florence had left him tucked up on the settee with a book telling him not to move. But as soon as he heard his father's key in the latch he hopped down and ran out to the hall. Florence was in the kitchen with the door closed so that the smell of stewing onions did not invade the house. By the time George had closed the door behind him the boy was standing right in his path.
    'I was in your shed,' he said. ‘I like the pictures you have pinned up, Father. And the signal box you made.'
    And George, who knew nothing of the megaton bomb that his wife was about to drop into his life, smiled and patted his son's head and said that he had already made up the Eiffel Tower and Tower Bridge from those photos, and now the signal box was done - a present for his boy - he was going to work on the Clifton Suspension Bridge. He might take Patrick to see it. It was built by someone called Isambard Kingdom Brunel and it was a wonder.
    Patrick could not get his tongue around the name. He tried to say it, got in a muddle, and they both ended up laughing at the attempt. It was this uniquely cheery scene between father and son that Florence walked into when she came out of the kitchen.