The Lost Child Read Online Free PDF Page A

warm enough, goose-pimpling your arms. Children are shouting. Sam and John doing something with sticks. Baby Ellen crouching for a moment then plopping backwards to sit. And you pushing yourself off the wall with your hands, kicking your legs out to jump down, apple finished, pushing the core between the hard cracks of the wall, pushing your hair out of your eyes.
    Pushing your hair out of your eyes.
    I go back to the British Library. Stomp up to the main counter in Humanities r and ask if it's possible to get Florence Suckling's book about you photocopied so I can take it home.
    No, they say, it isn't. I take it to a desk and carry on reading.
    It's 1816. You are born. The ninth child. But your mother Sarah Yelloly - a comely, dark-haired matron - is busy. She runs both nursery and schoolroom herself Writing and drawing and painting with her older children. Teaching sums, grammar, geography.
    Just like me with my kids, just like so many mothers for years and years, she keeps almost every little thing you children do. Every little scrap you write or draw, every letter, every bit of needlework. She keeps it. I keep it. I have Manila boxes marked Kids and Baby Stuff. Inthem, Mother's Day cards, yellow, poster-painted daffodils made from egg boxes. Tiny notebook stories, folded and stapled. All the little love notes they ever wrote me. Puppies and kittens, kisses and stars. The polythene hospital bracelets with their surnames on them, snipped off with scissors when we brought them home.
    We keep these things because we have to. Because we want to. Because it would be impossible not to. Florence Suckling knew that your mother kept these things because, in 1898 when she wrote her family history, she clearly had access to them. She held them in her hands.
    Your mother's system of education is strict - passionately felt and well organised, but strict. Each day's work is clearly written out, every single hour timetabled and accounted for. And when she can't be there with you, notebooks are given out and your older brothers and sisters are expected to keep daily journals which are then forwarded to her. This way she keeps an eye on your progress.
    Around this time, you all get sick with whooping cough and Nick and Anna also have measles. Your parents, anxious about your health, decide to move you all from London to a place called Carrow Abbey in Norwich.
    Sarah is fourteen, Jane thirteen, John twelve, Harriet eleven, Sophy ten, Sam nine, Nicholas eight, Anna six, you are five, Ellen not quite born. It is your first real taste of outdoors, of fresh sharp country air. But even in the country, education continues:
    Monday, Tuesday etc.
    To walk for an hour and a half after breakfast, at the expiration of that time, the school bell to be rung, everyone to come in and go to lessons in the following manner:
    Sarah to teach Sophy to read. In the meantime Sam to write and sum, Sophy to do the same whilst Sam reads.
    During this time Harriet to teach the little ones, and Jane to do two long division sums.
    After this Harriet to do her French, writing and sums and hear Sam and Sophy parsing and geography. Sarah and Jane to do exercises and translation and a French verb.
    On Friday and Saturday, if Miss Davidson is here, Sarah will only hear Sam and Sophy read; and on those days, Jane will translate Prince Chesi into English and French.
    If the weather is not fine, then business is to commence immediately after breakfast; and if, in an hour's time, the weather becomes fine, they may then walk for one hour, but all at the same time, and resume lessons immediately after coming in again, which they are to do upon nurse's ringing the school bell. If the weather does not permit of going out, then business is to be gone on with immediately after breakfast, and the children may run and play for an hour and a half before tea, in the dining parlour. John to be allowed one hour and a half and two hours from the time he comes in before reading begins.
    Four