The Bobbin Girls Read Online Free PDF

to slide headlong down it, he thundered after her down the stairs. ‘If you don’t get a move on, you’ll be late for school - then I’ll tickle you to death as punishment.’
     
    By a miracle Alena was not late for school, but the day seemed endless. The teacher’s voice grated on her nerves, the rows of chalked sums on the blackboard seemed blurred and meaningless. And she hadn’t any interest in playing Piggy-Jack-Fly in the playground at break-time.
    She couldn’t get the overheard conversation out of her mind; it kept on going round and round in her head. Who could her mother be writing to? Why had her dad accused Ma of lying? Why had Tom lied about hearing them? Alena hated the thought of lies, particularly told by people who claimed to love one another. Tom must have heard, despite much of the quarrel being conducted in angry whispers. Fierce and furious but generally short-lived, the whole Townsen family had grown used to them, and knew that although their parents’ marriage may not be perfect, they still loved each other, in a robust sort of way.
    But what could she do? Alena knew she couldn’t ask what was going on without confessing to listening in to a private conversation. What disturbed her most of all was the pitiful sadness in her mother’s face as she’d called up the stairs.
    She was still puzzling over it later that afternoon as she walked through Low Birk Copse, looking for Rob. She had on an old pair of shorts, long since discarded by Kit, a sweater that had seen better days and, to please her mother, a soft green beret pulled down over her wild curls. But the ribbon Lizzie had tied them back with had got caught up in a hawthorn branch, where it now flew like a bright red flag.
    Rob was late, which annoyed her. She’d waited impatiently by the ancient oak, their usual meeting place, for almost an hour but he hadn’t come. The tree had stood sentinel in that clearing for a hundred years or more, surrounded by bluebells at the right time of year, its huge trunk pitted with rabbit holes and knotted with galls. She’d climbed to the top of its crooked branches so she could look out over the smaller trees as far as the mill leat that cut its way down the hillside. She’d swung from the knotted rope they’d tied from one thick branch many years before; walked fifty times one way around the circumference of the great tree, and fifty times in the other. But still he hadn’t come.
    Now she followed the narrow forest rides that wound between the tall beech, sycamore, oak and ash trees, underplanted with the quicker growing birch and hazel, and called his name. Sometimes he played games on her, jumping out from behind an old hawthorn bush. Not tonight. Just when she needed him most, he’d let her down. So lonely did she feel it was almost a relief to meet Dolly Sutton.
    The girl was sitting under a birch tree, a pile of purple-black berries cradled in her skirt which she was eating one by one, her face screwed up in agony. When Alena asked, with some curiosity, what she was doing, Dolly flew instantly into a rage, yelling about dustbins and how the blame for Alena’s Hallowe’en prank had been laid at her door. Then before Alena could reply, or even apologise, since she was indeed guilty of the offence, thinking she was doing Dolly a favour by not tipping over her dustbin, the other girl burst into noisy tears.
    Alena was shocked. ‘Heavens, it’s not that bad, surely? They’re only dustbins. And there wasn’t much rubbish in any of them anyway.’
    ‘It’s not the dustbins,’ Dolly said, in between sobs. ‘I-it’s me.’ And away she went again.
    Alena sat down beside her, putting an arm rather awkwardly about the plump shoulders. She waited patiently for the crying to abate sufficiently to risk probing further. It was quiet in the woods, and the crying seemed to swell and echo, shattering the peace in a most disturbing way. Where was Rob? Alena wished he would come and free her from