Strawberry Fields Read Online Free PDF

ears. If Mrs Rushton was referring to her mother, she would have liked to hear a bit more! She glanced enquiringly at Nanny, but the older woman was inserting her key in the front door, turning it . . .
    ‘That’s nice. I’ll tell her,’ Mrs Prescott said vaguely, and then she had unlocked the door and they were inside the chilly little room once more, and Mrs Prescott sat at a chair in the window to watch for the chauffeur whilst Sara ran upstairs to take a look at the front bedroom.
    It was lovely, running up the narrow, creaking stairs, turning on the tiny landing and going into the slip of a front room. Sara felt a warm glow envelope her, she had been so happy here! She had sometimes felt that the only times she was really alive were when she was with Mrs Prescott, sleeping in the little front room, kneeling on the floor on a summer’s evening with her nose pressed to the glass, staring out at the railway, the docks, the river.
    She had stared out at life, too, passing constantly in the street below. Kids at play, adults on their way to and from the public houses on Stanley Street, the occasional drunk lurching along, taking a short-cut from Commercial Road through into Stanley, a dog, sauntering along behind its owner, sniffing at walls and lamp posts, lifting a leg, breaking into a trot.
    There wasn’t a lot of life on Aigburth Road, or if there was she was unaware of it, because the grounds of her home protected her from such doses of reality. And the nursery with its barred window was high up, and lonely, too, very different from the little bedroom on Snowdrop Street. So now Sara knelt on the floor and pressed her nose to the glass as, outside, the flakes of snow continued to fall.
    It wasn’t easy, on such a day, to see her favourite view, but it was just possible. There it was, outside the window, her own particular, beloved slice of life. But today there was little or no movement from the railway – presumably no trains, or very few, ran on Christmas Day – and even the Mersey, steel-grey against the downward-swirling flakes, was quiet.
    Still. Despite it being Christmas Day there was some movement in the street. The sliding boys had scattered and gone as the snowstorm increased but someone was even now making her way along the pavement, head shrugged down into shoulders, bundles firmly grasped in skinny arms. It was a girl, skinny and underfed, with something wrapped in a blanket on one arm and a soggy paper bag from which large objects – they looked like loaves – protruded. Sara had been breathing on the glass and fogging it up; now she rubbed frantically, trying to make herself a proper peephole. Yes, there was the figure, passing closer now, almost directly beneath the window . . . frantically, Sara tried to get the window open, she leapt to her feet and wrestled with the little round latch that locked the top half of the sash in place, got it back, shoved and pushed at the bottom half . . . it was opening, icy air – and a great deal of snow – was rushing into the room, Sara was leaning out, head and shoulders into the storm, her voice rising.
    ‘Jess! Jess, it’s me, Sara . . . oh, Jess, do look up!’
    But Jess, if it was Jess, continued to slog along through the snow, head down, her shopping clutched fiercely to her skinny breast. And the child, if it was the child, was now completely immersed in the thin blanket.
    Reluctantly, Sara withdrew into the room once more. It couldn’t have been Jess, it would have been too much of a coincidence and anyway, if it had been, she would surely have recognised her own name and looked up?
    Struggling to pull the window down again, rather conscience-stricken by the great wet patches of melting snow on the linoleum, Sara glanced once more at the fast disappearing figure – and promptly tried to push the window up once more. But by the time she had got it a couple of inches from the sill, it was too late. Girl and burden had disappeared.
    ‘But it was