Running to Paradise Read Online Free PDF Page B

littered with potted palms, lemon verbena, basket chairs, dogs’ hairs and newspapers. She peered angrily through the glass at the tiny figure in the garden: it was raining quite heavily now. No good, she’d have to fetch the minx, but she’d be bothered if she wouldn’t go and fetch a mac first from the cloakroom to put round her shoulders. She hurried huffily through the drawing room, the little watch she wore pinned to her chest bouncing angrily up and down on her bosom. The room was empty this afternoon: Mrs O was sitting on some committee somewhere. Crossing the hall, its parquet floor alive with growling tiger skins, she eventually reached the cloakroom at the end of a long passage that smelt slightly of cat. A few minutes later, arriving back at the garden door, now suitably enveloped in one of Mr O’s voluminous mackintosh capes, she became aware of two things, both of them infuriating. One, it had stopped raining, and two, Miss Char had totally disappeared.
    It was the summer of 1907. I was five years old and had just made the enchanting discovery that I could run really fast, and the faster I ran the more fun it was. I didn ’t care a hoot about the rain trickling down my neck through my liberty bodice or even that my knickers felt damp. I was, in fact, quite scantily clad in comparison with most Edwardian children; another of my mother’s fads was that she strongly disapproved of flannel petticoats, button boots and the like, believing them to be restrictive to young children. I had seen with delight the angry Nurse Jump gesticulating from the verandah steps. I must have been a quite awful child, I adored enraging people.
    ‘ I’m Char Osborn, I’m Queen of the May,’ I sang, jumping up and down, and stuck out my tongue at the luckless nurse. I’d been taken by Nanny to watch the May Day revels in the village and to be crowned Queen of the May, surrounded by suitably adoring attendants, was my current ambition. ‘Naughty little girls are never asked to be Queen,’ Nanny had said dampingly, ‘and it’s only for the village children. You’re a little lady, dear, and don’t you forget it.’ But I didn’t care. I should be Queen of the May if I wanted to and that was all there was to it.
    Suddenly, ahead of me on the path, I noticed something that looked like a tiny pile of autumn leaves, only excitingly, it was gently pulsating. I knew at once what it was. It was one of my friends. ‘Hullo, old Toad, and how are you?’ I stroked him gently with one finger. He pulsated even more, glugged and tantalisingly hopped away, his long legs flying out behind him. By this time, need I say, my black stockinged knees were damp and muddy and there was green slime down the front of my pinafore. I looked back at the house to find that Nurse Jump had disappeared. Had she gone to fetch Ma? I felt a shiver of apprehension: Ma was someone to be reckoned with. Then I remembered the latter had driven away in the dog cart after nursery lunch, her red leather despatch case on the seat beside her. She wouldn’t be home for ages. And Pa? He never got home until bedtime: he went away in a train each day to somewhere called the City, where people made money, so Nanny said. ‘Look, Miss Char,’ she would call, ‘there’s your Pa’s train. He won’t be long now.’ And I would run to the nursery window and watch the smoke from the engine trail along the valley below and hear it whistle as it passed the signal box.
    I licked the sweet raindrops trickling down from my nose and surveyed the empty rose garden: I was safe! It was then I decided to have an adventure. I started to run: through the wisteria arch, past the potting shed that stood the other side of the high, red brick wall enclosing the rose garden. A magic place the potting shed, and normally one I would love to spend a little time in: dipping my fingers in the sacks of compost, peat and fine sand, pulling at the seed heads hanging up to dry from the roof,