The Secret Hen House Theatre Read Online Free PDF Page B

pushed past Lottie, stumbled to the stairs and slumped on the top step, her hands shielding her face.
    Lottie came and sat beside her. “Are you all right?”
    Hannah bit her cheeks to stop herself from crying.
    Why had Dad just lost it with her like that?
    Click, clack, click, clack.
    “Martha!” hissed Hannah. She jumped to her feet and wiped her cheeks with her sleeves. “Quick!”
    But it was too late.
    “Ha ha ha-ha haa!”
    Martha tottered down the corridor. She was wearing the red stilettos again, this time with black tights, denim hotpants and a tiny red vest top.
    “Dad wouldn’t let you have a theatre, ha ha ha-ha haa! Dad’s angry with Hannah, ha ha ha-ha haa!”
    “Have you been spying again?”
    “Spying? It wasn’t exactly hard to hear. Ooh, Daddy, can we have a theatre? Ooh, please , Daddy?”
    “Oh, shut up, Martha. Come on,” said Hannah to Lottie. “Let’s go to my room.”
    They walked past Martha and back through thejungle of filing cabinets. Martha clacked off down the stairs.
    As Hannah passed the office door, she couldn’t help glancing in.
    Her father sat with his head in his hands, staring at a picture on the desk in front of him.
    Hannah knew that picture. It usually hung on the wall behind the desk.
    It was a photograph of her grandfather, taken in the 1940s. He was perched on the seat of a brand-new, bright-green tractor. He was grinning broadly. It was his first ever tractor, Dad had said. His beloved Field Marshall.
    Why had Dad taken the photograph off the wall? And why was he sitting staring at it, looking so miserable?
    Had something happened at the steam fair?
    But what could have happened to upset him like that?
    Hannah pushed the questions aside. She opened her bedroom door and then, without going in, slammed it very loudly.
    “Follow me!” she hissed to Lottie. “Tiptoes!”
    “Where are we going?” mouthed Lottie as they crept down the carpeted front stairs.
    “Sitting room.”
    “But you’re not allowed in there.”
    “Have to get away from Martha. She’ll think we’re in my room. She’ll go and try to listen at the door.”
    “Oh. Clever.”
    The sitting room hadn’t been used since Christmas.A scattering of soot rattled down the chimney as Hannah opened the door. The ancestors on the wall did not look amused.
    Hannah’s great-grandparents had been wealthy Londoners. They’d wanted their only child, Hannah’s grandfather, to be a lawyer. But on family holidays in Sussex he fell in love with the land and made up his mind to become a farmer. While in the army during the Second World War he took an agricultural correspondence course. And when he came back from the war he rented Clayhill Farm. It was badly neglected. There was no electricity or mains water, the fields were full of weeds and there wasn’t even a farmyard, just a sea of mud right up to the back door.
    Over the years, all the family money was spent on the farm. All the silver and the good furniture was sold to pay the bills, but Hannah’s mother had tried to keep the sitting room nice and now Dad wouldn’t allow anything in there to be touched. The rich ancestors sat haughtily in their chipped gilt frames, and their stern painted eyes seemed to say: “We’re not supposed to be in a farmhouse, you know. We deserve better than this.”
    The children had been banned from the sitting room after Hannah smashed into the china cabinet during a game of Tag in the Dark. Their mother’s collection of china pigs lived in the cabinet. Three of them had been broken. That was probably the last time Hannah had seen her father as angry as he was today.
    Lottie stared nervously at the portraits. She shivered and pulled her coat more tightly around her.
    “That’s a lovely picture.” She pointed at the only painting that wasn’t a portrait. It was of a beautiful bay horse, all saddled up but riderless, with a spaniel standing beside it.
    Hannah glanced at it. “That was my mum’s favourite.” She