The Lost Garden Read Online Free PDF Page A

extra couple of shillings Aileen could earn for the family could replace both.
    Aileen loved stories and would read any kind of fiction she could find. Besides the novels she read, Aileen had been made to read the Holy Bible and The Home of Today , a modern English tome that had been gifted to her by her mother. As well as being an education in household management and cooking, The Home of Today also contained thrilling photographs of houses in England and America where everything ran on electricity and they even had machines that would suck dust up off the floor. In England, they needed them because there were carpets everywhere. Aileen wondered if there would be carpets on all the floors in Scotland. If there were, she would be happy to sleep on the floor.
    ‘I doubt any of them can even read,’ Anne had said haughtily of the other women in the group. ‘An educated woman is a rare thing – you remember that.’
    So on the one hand, Anne wanted her to make friends with the women, and on the other, she was to look down her nose at them. Aileen knew this was why her mother did not have any friends. While the other women and their daughters stood around talking after Mass on a Sunday morning, she and her mother never joined them. Aileen knew that her mother courted her own loneliness and she worried that if she did not find a way of getting along with these girls, she might do the same. Although, in all honesty, she did not know where to begin.
    For the entire walk to the station Michael Kelly, the big hefty lug, had plodded alongside her, creating a wall between Aileen and the other girls, who were chatting and laughing away with each other. She could not get past him as he gabbled nervously about this and that: farming and milking and mastitis. He was trying to impress her with talk of a motorized tractor belonging to his cousin who had a ‘fine big farm in Louth’. The stupid eejit. On the one occasion Aileen managed to look beyond his bulk, she saw Carmel and the other girls talking behind their hands and pointing. She clearly heard Noreen say, ‘The dowdy cut of that jacket!’ and although she dearly hoped they weren’t talking about her long, brown coat, she knew that they probably were.
    The train was already waiting for them in the station, steam firing out from its underbelly. The station house was packed with families saying goodbye and others tripping over each other to get onto the platform. This was the start of the season and it seemed that everyone on the island was leaving for the farms of Yorkshire and Scotland.
    Aileen pushed herself away from Michael and searched for her brother Martin, who had been just in front of her a moment ago. She had lost sight of him when a rich-looking town woman in a smart coat had walked between them. Panic began to wellup in her at the thought of becoming separated from her father and brothers. The woman bent to pick up her case and at that moment Aileen saw her brother’s face turn as he called out her name. How could she have thought they would leave her behind? She almost knocked the woman down in her hurry to get to him, but as she grabbed her brother’s arm, he pulled it sharply away. He was still mad at her for not walking alongside them.
    ‘You’ll bring bad luck on us,’ he said. ‘I bet you didn’t even think of that, and you flirting with Michael Kelly like a prostitute – I’ve half a mind to throw you to the big amadaun.’
    ‘Don’t talk like that, Martin – can I sit with you on the train?’ She looked up at him and deliberately softened her eyes. She could always get round Martin: he was sensitive and he hated to see her cry. ‘I’ve never been on a train before.’ She squeezed both her hands into his folded elbows, which lay firmly across his chest, and coaxed her own slim arms into the gap. ‘I’m afraid. Please, Martin . . .’
    They both knew she was playing him, but Martin was excited for his sister to be on a train for the first