The Urchin's Song Read Online Free PDF Page A

Gertie’s coat out in her back yard for a bit before she sent her home. He noticed last time that she wasn’t very wet, and it was only Gertie thinking quick and saying she’d been standing under an awning most of the night on Mackie’s corner that saved us.’ Josie’s eyes met her mother’s.
    ‘Oh, lass, lass.’ Shirley knew what would happen if her husband discovered his youngest daughter was sitting in Vera’s kitchen on the nights he sent her out begging. There’d be hell to pay. From the very first night Vera and her husband had brought the two bairns home five years ago, Vera had made it plain exactly what she thought of Bart and he, in his turn, fully reciprocated the feeling. Not that it bothered Vera. By, she was a lass if ever there was one. Shirley allowed her mind to dwell on her garrulous old friend for a moment, and in spite of her anxiety, her spirits lifted fractionally. She thanked God most days that Vera had come back into her life again, and this bairn had been the means by which that had happened, along with everything else that was good.
    And as though to emphasise that thought she now became aware of a small brown-paper bag being thrust into her hands. ‘Here, Mam,’ Josie said. ‘Eat ’em now before he gets home.’
    Shirley again said, ‘Oh, lass,’ but this time with a little catch in her voice as she gazed at the quarter of marzipan tea cakes. Every week her lass bought her something, like the pot of hyacinths that had lit up the room with their beauty the last few days. She hadn’t been a good mother; God Himself knew how weak and wicked - aye, wicked she’d been in never standing up to Bart, not even when he’d made Ada and then Dora . . . She shut her eyes tight and then opened them again as Josie, now in the kitchen, called, ‘I’m just going to soak the oats and them stale crusts for a boiley tomorrow, Mam, and then I’ll get you another sup. All right?’
    ‘Aye, all reet, pet.’
    Josie was humming to herself as she mixed equal parts of milk and water with the oats and bread, ready for the currants and sugar to be added the next morning before the whole was browned off in the oven. It was lovely being able to give her mam the odd little present; no one had ever really been kind to her mam. According to Vera, her mam’s da - who had died along with his wife of the fever the year Ada was born - had been as bad as her own da for using his fists on his family. Mind, Vera had said, Josie’s grandfather had been respectable. Josie wrinkled her nose against this. Vera had said it as though it excused her mother’s da somehow, but a good hiding hurt as much either way, didn’t it?
    The sound of the living-room door opening cut off her thoughts and brought Josie’s head turning, but instead of the small figure of Gertie she’d hoped to see, her father walked in followed by Hubert, her youngest brother who was seven years old. Josie’s stomach tightened. It wasn’t unusual for the lads to return home any time up to midnight or even later, depending on what they had been about and whether they’d spent the evening in their father’s company, but Bart never got home before the pubs closed at the earliest. And the types of pub her father frequented took no account of normal hours.
    Josie found she had to swallow deeply before she could say, her glance directed at her brother, ‘Where’s Jimmy?’
    ‘What’s it to you?’ It was her father who answered.
    Bart Burns was a big man, tall and thickset with dark bushy brows over cold, strikingly blue eyes and a full head of springy brown hair. His ruddy complexion and permanently red, bulbous nose spoke of his addiction to the drink, but it was his weakness for the dogs and horses that was his main obsession. The fact that his dead cert had run like the ragman’s old nag and finished last, thereby proving Josie right, was galling. His eyes focused on the young girl; his temper all the more bitter for not having