The Children's Book Read Online Free PDF

on it, and little men, and monkeys. Philip had made some wondrous drawings of it. Everyone looked at Philip, who stared into his soup. Humphry said, as though he really meant it, that he should like to see the drawings. Violet said, don’t embarrass the poor lad, which embarrassed him.
    From time to time, during the meal, Olive turned gracefully and impulsively towards Philip, and urged him to tell her all about himself. She elicited, slowly, the information that his dad was dead in a kiln accident, and that his mam worked at painting china. He had worked himself, carrying full saggars to the kilns. Yes, he had sisters, four. Brothers, asked Phyllis. Two, both dead, said Philip. And a sister, dead.
    And he had felt he had to get away? said Olive. He must have been unhappy. The work must have been hard, and maybe people weren’t kind to him.
    Philip thought of his mam, and found his eyes, to his horror, hot and wet.
    Olive said he didn’t need to tell them, they understood. Everyone stared at him with warmth and sympathy. “It weren’t,” he said. “It weren’t…” His voice was unsteady.
    “We shall see you have somewhere to live, and work to do,” said Olive, her voice full of gold.
    Dorothy asked rather abruptly if Philip could ride a bicycle.
    He said no, but he’d seen them, and thought they must be real exciting, and wished he could try one.
    Dorothy said “We’ll show you tomorrow. We’ve got new ones. There’ll be time to show you, before the party. We can ride in the woods.”
    She had a rather fierce little face, not pretty, and looked cross most of the time. He did not wonder why. Exhaustion was overcoming him. Olive asked him two or three more probing questions about the ill-treatment she was convinced he had undergone. He answered monosyllabically, spooning blancmange into his mouth. This time he was rescued by Violet, who said the boy was dead on his feet and she proposed to find him a candle and see him to his bed.
    Violet said “You mustn’t mind my sister. She’s a storyteller. She’s making up stories for you. I don’t mean lies, I mean stories. It’s her way. She’s fitting you in.” Philip said
    “She’s been—so very kind. You all have.”
    “We have our beliefs,” said Violet. “About what the world should be like. And some of us have experience—like yours—of what it
shouldn’t
be.”
    The moon was caught in the branches of the trees round the cottage. He was solaced by learning the lines of the network of twigs, which was both random and ordered. He didn’t point this out to Violet, but thanked her again, as he took his candle, and made his way into his cottage. He feared she might try to kiss him goodnight—he could not predict what these people would do—but she simply stood, and watched him take his candle up the ladder.
    “Sleep tight,” she called.
    “Thank you,” he said, yet again.
    And then he was alone, with a brave candle, in a cottage. This was what he had wanted, or part of it. There was a nightshirt, laid out on the clean sheets of the wooden bed that was temporarily his. He looked out of the window, and there were the branches, lit by the moon on a dark blue, cloudless sky, with their fish-shaped leaves overlapping, and just trembling. He translated the shapes into a glaze, and puzzled over it briefly. It was too much. He wanted to cry out, or to weep, or, he understood, to touch his body—his body washed clean—as he had only ever been able to do furtively, in dirty places. He must not leave marks, that would be shameful. He finally contrived a safety-pad of the handkerchief he had been given or lent. He could rinse it, subsequently, under the pump.
    He lay back, and took himself in hand, and worked himself into a rhythm of delight, and a soaring wet ecstasy.
    Then he lay still, listening to the sounds in the silence. An owl called. Another owl answered. A big branch creaked. Things rustled. The pump below dripped in the stone sink. How could he