Whisper on the Wind Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the gable-end wall. Stark, it was, like the orphanage; bare like her room had been in service.
    ‘Your cupboard is outside on the landing, I’m afraid.’
    ‘It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t.’ A chest of drawers stood beneath the sloping ceiling, a chair beside the bed. ‘It’s fine, truly.’
    Kath didn’t mind being in the attic. She had slept in an attic the whole of her years in domestic service and shared it, what was more, with a maid who snored. A room to herself was an unknown luxury, far removed from the long, green dormitory she once slept in with nineteen others. Even married to Barney she had shared, not only with him which was to be expected, but with his mother next door, for she’d been sure the old lady lay awake nights, ears strained for every whisper and every creak of their marital bedsprings. Yes, an attic – a
room
to herself would be bliss and she wouldn’t care if they left her there until it was all over, and Barney came home.
    Barney? Oh, lordy! If only he could see her now.
    ‘I don’t suppose you know where I’ll be going to work?’ Kath hung her coat and gas mask on the door peg.
    ‘I do. You’re going to Ramsden’s farm, at the far end of Alderby village. You’re urgently needed, it seems. They want you there in the morning. Now, lassie, do you want to unpack first, or would you rather eat?’
    ‘Eat –
please
!’ Kath followed her amiable Forewoman to the warmth of the kitchen, sighing as the plate was set before her.
    She would remember this day for ever, she really would. Thursday, 18th December 1941; the day on which her new life began. It had taken a long, long time, but now she was here in the country and it was near-unbelievable and undeniably wonderful.
    ‘Thanks,’ she whispered huskily. ‘Thanks a lot …’

2
    There was no denying that bicycles figured importantly in Kathleen Allen’s life. They always had, as far back as she could remember, starting with the orphanage and the little tricycles that were the only memory worth keeping from those days of grudging charity. The bright red three-wheeler with the noisy bell was her favourite and she had pedalled around and around the asphalted yard on this gaudy friend who shared her secret dreams; dreams in which she was not an orphan but a real little girl whose mother dressed her in a buttercup-sprigged cotton dress with knickers to match and whose father gave her rides on the crossbar of his bicycle and boasted, ‘Our Kathleen’s doing well at school.’
Our.
That lovely, belonging little word.
    When her in-service days began, there had been her first proud possession, something entirely her own, paid for at three shillings and sixpence a month, for a whole year. A second-hand bicycle, black-painted, with a bag on the back and a basket at the front.
    ‘Lizzie,’ she whispered, remembering. ‘Old Tin Lizzie.’
    She had ridden Tin Lizzie on her afternoons off and on summer evenings when she finished work. She was cycling in the country the day she and Barney met. Had it not been for a flat tyre, the lorry driver would never have jumped from his cab and offered his help.
    ‘Oh dear, chucks. Know how to mend it?’
    She shook her head, knowing only that the cost of repair would take a large bite from the one pound ten shillings she received on the last day of each month.
    So the driver put the bicycle on the back of his lorry and drove to the Birmingham town house in which she worked, offering to remove the wheel and repair the puncture in his own backyard. To her shame she had refused, for where was the guarantee she would ever see her wheel again?
    But she saw Barnaby Allen again that very next evening when he knocked loudly on the front door – the
front
door, mind you – saying he was the bicycle repair man. The parlourmaid pointed in the direction of the area steps, reminding him tartly that the kitchen door was the one upon which to knock when doing business with a housemaid.
    Barney. His