Poppy Day Read Online Free PDF Page A

fist.
    Huh! Jess thought.
    For most of the day, in rapt silence, the little Brummie girl gathered clumps of blossoms from the orchard, the lane, the hayfield. Buttercups, moon daisies, poppies, bunches which she presented to Olive and Louisa, flecked with blue viper’s bugloss, shaggy with tough shreds of ragwort.
    ‘Why don’t yer play with Polly?’ Louisa said to Jess now and then.
    ‘She don’t want to play,’ Jess said sulkily.
    The sisters agreed that the girls were both ‘daft little nibs’ and went back to their chatter, sitting out on the grass at the edge of the orchard. Louisa sat with her legs stretched out, arms behind her taking the weight, a gold seam through the orchard green in her buttery frock. Her hair was gathered up at the back, soft tendrils of it round her face. She liked to decorate it with flowers, or bright hips and haws, lustrous jewels, in season. Today she took three of the big field daisies from one of Polly’s bunches and threaded them in so they rested over one ear. Olive was so much more sober, her bent knees pulled up to one side, skirt covering her feet, lank hair fastened in a bun with a straight fringe.
    For some reason – Jess always connected it with the flowers, although that couldn’t really have been it – Olive became suddenly furious, face screwing up with anger.
    Their heads had been close together, faces long, talking in secret, grown-up whispers. Earlier on Jess had seen tears on Louisa’s face. Olive reached over and clasped Louisa’s hand, talking, talking, words a half-whispered jumble to Jess, but Jess thought it must be babbies they were talking about because her mom had lost two and that always made her cry. Then Polly sidled up and presented her aunt with a bunch of flowers from which she dressed her hair, and after, for no reason Jess could see, Olive’s face was red and puffed up with anger as if she was going to burst, and they were arguing, straining to keep their voices lowered.
    Snatches reached her like torn up notes – ‘That’s not how it was . . . I was the one always kept in the dark . . .’ and, ‘. . . you should’ve put it behind yer . . .’ from Louisa.
    ‘Yes – you were always the one who . . .’ and Olive’s voice sank too low for Jess to hear, then rose, finishing, ‘. . . to be together. That’s what I always wanted.’
    But later, again, as if some solemn business was over, they relaxed, joking and giggling. Jess couldn’t remember seeing her mother laugh like that before, and never saw her do so again, her head back, having to wipe tears from her eyes.
    Nothing else they said stayed with Jess, and she was too young to understand how deeply troubled the two sisters were by their past. What she did keep, though, as a memory from the midst of that green orchard, along with Polly’s dumb quest for flowers and Bert having to be retrieved sweaty and truculent from the hayfield, was a sense of rightness. That blood ties counted, no matter what. She had no memory of her father being there that day. He must have greeted Olive, shyly stroking his beard the way he did. Perhaps he ate with them too. But what she remembered was seeing Louisa as enlarged, strung as she had been in Jess’s mind until then, between the cottage, forge and village, between her father and herself. There was more to her mom: a past, relatives, Birmingham, which as she grew up she heard spoken of as a huge manufacturing town, way over there, further than she could ever see, beyond the soft curves of Warwickshire.
    It was winter the next time, 1900, icicles hanging from the eaves, tongues of ice between the furrows. That morning, which cruelly sliced one part of Jess’s life away from the other, had begun full of excitement. The Shires were coming from the farm to be shod!
    ‘If yer can walk without fidgeting about, you can help lead ’em down,’ her father said. He was gentle then, although unsure how to talk to her even in those days, as if she was not