The Secret Hen House Theatre Read Online Free PDF Page A

with you.”
    Jack ambled out of the classroom.
    Just before he closed the door, he turned and winked at Hannah.
    Hannah couldn’t stop smiling for the rest of the morning.

Chapter Five
Dad
    Clayhill Farm was shaped like a shallow bowl, with the farmstead at its centre and the fields rising gently all around it to the woods on the north side and the Downs in the south. As Hannah and Lottie walked down the track after school, the silvery winter sun was setting in streaks of pink and orange cloud.
    Hannah nudged Lottie. “Look! Aren’t they beautiful?”
    A charm of jewel-bright goldfinches, flashing scarlet and gold, pecked the seeds from the winter-blackened teazels by the woodpile.
    But Lottie was absorbed in what looked like a complicated game of hopscotch.
    “I don’t know why you bother,” said Hannah. “You’re going to get covered in mud anyway.”
    “It’s not so much the mud. I just don’t want to get covered in cowpats and sheep droppings and chicken dung.”
    “Well, it’s all mixed up together so you haven’t got much chance of avoiding them. You should keep a pair of wellies here.”
    “Where will he be?” asked Lottie.
    Hannah glanced at the tractor shed. “The Field Marshall’s there, so he’s back from the steam fair. We might catch him in his office before he does the milking.”
    They ran up the back stairs and squeezed past the clutter of filing cabinets in the corridor. Then they froze as they heard Hannah’s dad’s raised voice.
    “So that’s it then? You’re saying he has every right to double the rent and there’s nothing we can do about it?” There was silence for a moment. Then a grunt and, “Goodbye.”
    The phone slammed down on its receiver. Hannah looked at Lottie in alarm. She had heard that tone in his voice more often lately. Angry phone calls, letters from the land agent…
    “Go on,” whispered Lottie.
    Hannah pushed the anxiety from her mind. She braced herself, placed both palms flat on the office door and shoved. The hinges squeaked and the bottom of the door scraped along the floorboards. It opened halfway and ground to a halt against some obstruction on the other side. Hannah squeezed into the room, stepping over a heap of cardboard files, and pulled Lottie in after her.
    The farm office looked like the long-lost treasure hoard of a tribe that worshipped paper. There were files of papers, folders of papers, boxes of papers, and thousands and thousands of loose sheets of paper, all covered in dust and all heaped around the room in gigantic tottering piles. The table under the ivy-covered window was completely obliterated bystacks of paper. The wallpaper hung off in strips, bowing down to the paper on the floor. A cupboard door had burst open several years ago from the pressure of the boxes of papers stacked up inside it. No one had tried to close it since, so it still gaped open, with the papers tumbled crazily across the floor. One heap was suspended in mid-fall: a Leaning Tower of Paper.
    The only thing in the room that wasn’t filled with paper was the waste-paper basket.
    It was empty.
    In the middle of the room, like an island in a foaming paper sea, was an old oak desk. And at this desk, banging out a letter on an ancient black typewriter, sat Hannah’s father. He wore torn blue dungarees with a frayed leather belt. He looked older than usual, his face stern, his forehead deeply furrowed. He looked thinner too, Hannah noticed.
    “Dad?”
    She couldn’t tell if he had heard her. He stopped typing and frowned at a letter lying beside the typewriter. Hannah read the letterhead at the top. Goldman and Co., Solicitors.
    “Dad?” she said again, a little louder this time.
    “What’s that, Joanne, er, Martha, er, Hannah?” He didn’t look up.
    Hannah looked at Lottie. “Go on,” Lottie mouthed.
    Her stomach clenched, Hannah navigated her way between a tower of box files and a pile of brown envelopes to reach his desk.
    “Dad, me and Lottie were