The Pinhoe Egg Read Online Free PDF Page B

Cecily,” Dad said peaceably. “Don’t start again.”
    â€œI wasn’t the only one,” said Mum.
    â€œNo, there was Joy and Helen and Prue and Polly all screeching that they’d got enough to do, and even your Great-Aunt Clarice, Marianne, saying that Lester couldn’t have his proper respectable lifestyle if they had to harbor a mad-woman. It put me out of patience,” Dad said. “Then Dinah and Isaac offered. They said as they don’t have children, they had the room and the time, and Gammer could be happy watching the goats and the ducks down in the Dell. Besides, Dinah can manage Gammer—”
    â€œGammer didn’t think so,” said Mum.
    Gammer had somehow gotten wind of what was being decided. She appeared in the front room wrapped in a tablecloth and declared thatthe only way she would leave Woods House was feet first in her coffin. Or that was what most Pinhoes thought she meant when she kept saying, “Root first in a forcing bucket!”
    â€œDinah got her back to bed,” Uncle Richard said. “We’re moving Gammer out tomorrow. We put a general call out for all Pinhoes to help and—”
    â€œWait. There was Edgar’s bit before that,” Mum said. “Edgar was all set to move into Woods House as soon as Gammer was out of it. Your Great-Aunt Sue didn’t disagree with him on that , surprise, surprise. The ancestral family home, they said, the big house of the village. As the oldest surviving Pinhoe, Edgar said, it was his right to live there. He’d rename it Pinhoe Manor, he thought.”
    Dad chuckled. “Pompous idiot, Edgar is. I told him to his face he couldn’t. The house is mine. It came to me when Old Gaffer went, but Gammer set store by living there, so I let her.”
    Marianne had had no idea of this. She stared. “Are we going to live there, then?” And after all the trouble I’ve been to, training Nutcase to stay here ! she thought.
    â€œNo, no,” Dad said. “We’d rattle about in thereas badly as Gammer did. No, my idea is to sell the place, make a bit of money to give to Isaac to support Gammer at the Dell. He and Dinah could use the cash.”
    â€œFurther flaming row,” said Uncle Richard. “You should have seen Edgar’s face! And Lester saying that it should only be sold to a Pinhoe or not at all—and Joy screeching for a share of the money. Arthur and Charles shut her up by saying, ‘Sell it to a Pinhoe, then.’ Edgar looked fit to burst, thinking he was going to have to pay for the place, when he thought it was his own anyway.”
    Dad smiled. “I wouldn’t sell to Edgar. His side of the family are Hopton born. He’s going to sell it for me . I told him to get someone rich from London interested, get a really good price for it. Now let’s have a bit of a rest, shall we? Something tells me it may be hard work moving Gammer out tomorrow.”
    Dad was always given to understating things. By the following night, Marianne was inclined to think this was Dad’s understatement of the century.

Chapter Three
    E veryone gathered soon after dawn in the yard of the Pinhoe Arms: Pinhoes, Callows, half-Pinhoes, and Pinhoes by marriage, old, young and middle-aged, they came from miles around. Uncle Richard was there, with Dolly the donkey harnessed to Dad’s furniture delivery cart. Great-Uncle Edgar was drawn up outside in his carriage, alongside Great-Uncle Lester’s big shiny motor car. There was not room for them in the yard, what with all the people and the mass of bicycles stacked up among the piles of broomsticks outside the beer shed, with Uncle Cedric’s farm cart in front of those. Joe was there, looking sulky, beside Joss Callow from That Castle, alongside nearly ahundred distant relatives that Marianne had scarcely ever met. About the only people who were not there were Aunt Joy, who had to sort the post, and Aunt