Читать книгу A Sister’s Promise - Anne Bennett - Страница 10

Molly knew she would never forget the sight of her grandfather standing on the platform waving until he became a small dot in the distance. She felt a sharp pain in her heart as if it had been split asunder just as when she had heard of the death of her parents. Granddad was the last link with all that was familiar in her life, and she cried silently as she leaned her head on the window of the carriage.

Stan felt almost as bad to see his granddaughter move out of his life. He was glad he had told Biddy nothing about the money for the children from Paul Simmons. His conscience had smote him about this at first, until he had really got to know Biddy. Then he realised that had she been aware of the money, it wouldn’t have benefited Molly in the slightest – and Molly might have need of money some day. At least that was something he had done for her, he thought as, with the train out of sight, he turned sorrowfully away.

When Biddy, sitting beside Molly, realised she was crying, she was furious with her.

‘Stop this at once,’ she hissed, but as quietly as she could, mindful of the others sharing their carriage. ‘Making a holy show of yourself.’

Molly saw the woman opposite look at her with sympathetic eyes, but she knew enough about her grandmother’s character to know that it would be the worse for her if she were to engender any sort of interest from her fellow passengers. So she tried to swallow the lump of misery lodged in her throat and looked out at the landscape flashing past the windows, knowing that in any other circumstance she would probably have enjoyed the experience because she had never been further than Birmingham in the whole of her life.

She saw the buildings and houses at the city’s edge give way to fields, dappled here and there by the early morning sun peeping from the clouds. Some of the fields were cultivated, set in rows with things growing in them; others were bare, the long grass waving in the breeze, or dotted with sheep, many with their lambs gambolling beside them. In another there might be horses, the lean racy sort, or the thick heavy ones with shaggy feet, the kind of horse the milkman and the coalman used in Birmingham. Sometimes, cows would lean their heads over the five-barred gates, placidly chewing and watching the train pass.

Now and again Molly would spy isolated farmhouses, and she realised suddenly she knew nothing about the farm she was going to. She asked her grandmother about it.

‘We do a bit of everything,’ Biddy said. ‘We grow vegetables, have a few cows, a pig and chickens, of course. We used to have sheep, but after my man died and Joe high-tailed it to America, Tom couldn’t manage the sheep as well as everything else. Even as it stands now, it’s a lot for one man. He will be glad of your help.’

‘But won’t I have to go to school?’

Biddy smiled her horrible, hard smile. She said with more than a measure of satisfaction, ‘I think you have enough book-learning. Any more won’t be any sort of asset on a farm.’

Molly’s heart sank. For one thing, she had thought school would get her away from her grandmother’s brooding presence for much of the day, and anyway she was good at her lessons. When her parents were both alive they had intended keeping her at school until she was sixteen and allowing her to matriculate. She told her grandmother this and went on, ‘Dad said it would help me get a good job in the end.’

Again there was that sardonic smile. ‘You have a job,’ Biddy said. ‘Like I said before, you’ll be on the farm alongside Tom, and all the book-learning in the world won’t make you any better at that.’

Molly felt suddenly cold inside and she held out little hope that she would get on any better with this Uncle Tom she had not seen, who was probably just as nasty as his mother. Her heart plummeted to her boots.

She saw her plans for any sort of life she might have imagined for herself crumble to dust, but she knew that to say any of this would achieve nothing. So she was silent, and mighty glad later to find her grandmother had fallen asleep.

If it hadn’t been for the other people on the train, Molly would never have managed at Crewe, where they had to change trains, for they also had to change platforms and other people helped carry the bags up the huge iron staircase, along the bridge spanning the line, and down the other side. Molly was immensely grateful, especially when those same people helped her board the ferry at Liverpool.

It was called the Ulster Prince, and she thought it magnificent, towering up out of the scummy grey water of the quay, with its three large black funnels atop everything, spilling grey smoke into the spring morning. She was on deck, the sun warm on her back and sparkling on the water as she watched the boat pull away. Her knuckles were white, she was gripping the rail so tightly. She remembered the promise she had made to Kevin and she vowed, but silently, ‘I will be back. However long it takes, I will be back.’

‘Come along,’ her grandmother said, just behind her. ‘They are serving breakfasts in the dining room until noon, and it is turned eleven already.’

Molly followed Biddy eagerly. They had been travelling for many hours and she had been too nervous to eat much before they left the house.

The dining room was delightful. Its windows were round, and when she queried this, she was told they were called portholes. In the dining room they were decorated with pretty pink curtains.

They could have creamy porridge with as much sugar and hot milk as anyone wanted, followed by toast and jam and a pot of tea, all for one and sixpence. Molly ate everything before her, and took three spoons of sugar in her tea, just because she could, and afterwards thought how much better a person felt when they had a full stomach. She kept this thought in her head just a little time. It certainly wasn’t there when she stood alongside her grandmother and a good many more and vomited all her breakfast into the churning waters.

By the time they alighted in Belfast, Molly was feeling decidedly ill. Her stomach ached and her throat burned from the constant vomiting that continued long after she had anything left, and made her feel wretched for the entire crossing, which took three and a half hours.

By the time they disembarked and were aboard the train, she was also feeling light-headed and had a throbbing pain behind her eyes. Her grandmother’s voice, berating her for something or other, seemed to be coming from a long way off and she was too tired and disorientated to distinguish what the woman was on about anyway. Her eyes closed almost by themselves, and the next thing she remembered was her grandmother shaking her roughly as the train pulled in to Derry.

She knew her uncle would be there to meet them with a horse and cart, to save them having to take the train the last step of the way. Molly was so travel worn and weary that she was immensely glad when she saw the man waiting for them, the shaggy-footed horse standing patiently between the shafts of the farm cart.

Tom knew he would never forget that meeting. It was like his sister Nuala had returned to him, but never had he seen his sister so disheartened and sad, nor her eyes with blue smudges beneath them and her face bleached white. He felt suddenly very sorry for the girl and went towards her with a smile.

‘Welcome to Ireland, Molly,’ he said, taking her limp hand and shaking it vigorously. ‘It is a pity that we are not meeting under happier circumstances. I was sorry to hear about the death of your parents and I’m sure you will miss them very much.’

Molly’s eyes filled with tears at her uncle’s words and the compassion in his face, and she knew that he was the antithesis of his mother.

Then Biddy, watching this scene, commented sarcastically, ‘Very touching. Now stop your stupid blethering, can’t you, and get this luggage into the cart.’

Molly saw the sag of her uncle’s shoulders at his mother’s words. ‘And welcome home to you too, Mammy,’ he said with a sigh, throwing up the bags and cases as he did so. He helped his mother up on to the seat beside him and then he turned to Molly with a smile. ‘Now you,’ he said, lifting her with ease. ‘And Dobbin here will have us home in a jiffy.’

It wasn’t quite a jiffy, for the horse wasn’t built for speed, but Molly took the opportunity to look around her. Once outside of the town, most of the farmhouses seemed to be white, squat, single-storey dwellings, with thick dark yellow roofs, and all the protruding chimneys had smoke curling upwards from them.

‘That’s your typical Irish cottage,’ Tom said, seeing Molly’s preoccupation.

‘Mom described them to me,’ Molly said, ‘but I’ve never see roofs like those. We had grey slate.’

Tom smiled. ‘That’s called thatch, Molly,’ he said. ‘It’s made of flax that we grow in the fields and then weave it together.’

They passed small towns and villages, and Molly noted the names of them. Springtown was the first, and then Burnfoot. It was as they neared a place called Fahan that Tom said, ‘Did your mammy tell you much about this place?’

‘Some,’ Molly said. ‘I mean, I knew she lived near Lough Swilly and that it was a saltwater lough because it fed out to the sea. In Birmingham most people have never seen the sea. It is just too far away. When we were on the boat was the first time I had seen it and then I was too sick to take in the expanse of it really.’

She stopped and then went on more hesitantly, ‘I once asked Mom if she missed the place, because she always said how beautiful it was, but she said that it was a funny thing but seldom does a person really value where they are born and reared. Anyway, she always said people were more important than places.’

Tom, noting Molly’s exhausted face and her eyes glittering with tears, said, ‘Not long now, at any rate. Buncrana is next, but I will skirt the town this evening because the farm is beyond it in a district called Cockhill, and we will pass St Mary’s, the Catholic church, this way.’

St Mary’s was quite an impressive place, though it wasn’t that large. It was made of stone and had a high and ornate belfry to the front of it. The church was approached through a wrought-iron gate and along a gravel path with graves either side.

‘Why was the church built so far out of Buncrana?’ Molly asked as they passed it. ‘It seems silly.’

‘That was because at the time when St Mary’s was built, the English said all Catholic churches had to be built at least a mile outside the town or village, and England controlled Ireland then,’ Tom told her.

‘That was what the Troubles were over that Mom spoke of?’ Molly said. ‘To get rid of English rule.’

‘Aye,’ Tom said, ‘that was it right enough. Anyway, while the English could tell the Catholic Church where to put the building, they couldn’t tell them what to put in it. In that church, above the altar is the most amazing picture of the Nativity painted by an Italian artist who was specially commissioned. You’ll see it on Sunday and be able to judge for yourself how lovely it is.’

They went on a little way past the church, past hedges bordering the fields, and then the horse determinedly turned into a narrow lane almost, Molly noticed, without her uncle needing to touch the reins at all.

‘Old Dobbin knows the way home, all right,’ Tom remarked, seeing her noticing. ‘I really think he could do it blindfold.’

Molly looked about her with more interest, noting that the narrow lane was just wide enough for the cart to pass down with thick hawthorn hedges in both sides. She could see beyond the hedges because of the height of the cart seat. Fields stretched for miles, some cultivated, others with cows in them, and some of these were milling around the five-barred gate set into the hedge.

‘Waiting to be milked,’ Tom explained with a nod. ‘Bit early yet, though.’

Molly looked at the cows’ distended udders and, though she knew that was where milk came from, because her mother had told her, she would have preferred to get it from the Co-op milkman.

The lane led to a cobbled yard that seemed full of pecking chickens. Tom drew the horse to a halt in front of a thatched whitewashed cottage with the dark red door that looked as if it opened in two halves.

‘This is it,’ he said to Molly, hauling the luggage from the cart. ‘What do you think?’

Before Molly was able to reply, two black and white dogs, which Tom greeted as Skip and Fly, came to meet them, barking a welcome. Molly was not used to animals, for she and Kevin had had no pets, and the dogs unnerved her a little.

‘They’re saying hallo just,’ Tom said reassuringly, seeing that Molly was a little edgy. ‘Let them sniff your hand and then they’ll know you are a friend.’

Molly would rather not have done any such thing, but she knew that dogs were an important part of any farm and she would have to get used to them. So she extended her hand and let the dogs sniff. When she met her grandmother’s malevolent gaze, she said in a voice she willed not to shake, ‘My mother was always saying that what can’t be cured must be endured and I suppose that is what she would think about this situation. I haven’t chosen to come here, but now I have arrived, I suppose I will like it well enough in time.’

She saw her grandmother seemed almost disappointed, but Tom clapped her on the shoulder. ‘Well said, young Molly. Come away in and see the place.’

In all her life, Molly had never seen anything quite like it. She stepped into a low room, the flagged floor covered with rugs. To her left was a door that she learned later housed the two bedrooms, hers first and then beyond that Tom’s. Next to a dresser displaying plates and bowls and cups was a large bin that she was to learn was where the oaten meal was stored. A cupboard and a sideboard stood against the back wall next to a heavily curtained area that Tom told her closed off the bed her grandmother slept in.

To her right was a stool with one bucket of water standing on it and one bucket of water beneath it. There were no taps here and all water had to be fetched from the spring well halfway up the lane, which Tom had pointed out to her as they passed. Beside that was a large scrubbed wooden table with chairs grouped around it.

‘That doesn’t look very comfy,’ Molly said, pointing to the wooden bench seat bedecked with cushions and set beneath the window.

‘That’s a settle,’ Tom said. ‘It opens to a bed that the children can sleep in when the house is full. I have used it a time or two, but you are right, it is very uncomfortable to sit on. The easy chairs before the fire are better.’

There were two, and when Tom said, ‘We’ll have to think about getting another for you,’ Biddy snapped, ‘You won’t need to bother. I aim to see to it that that girl isn’t going to have much time for sitting resting herself and for the times she is allowed to sit, a creepie will do her.’

‘A creepie is way too low for her, Mammy,’ Tom said. A creepie, Molly was to learn, was a very low seat made of bog oak. ‘And if you want Molly to work hard, then she has to have time to rest too. I have an easy chair in my room and as it is only to put my clothes on, a wooden kitchen chair will do the job well enough.’ And at this he gave Molly a wink.

‘Molly and I understand each other,’ Biddy said with a sardonic smile. ‘She knows that if she doesn’t work effectively, then she doesn’t eat – and thinking of eating, I am famished. The meal on the boat I have brought back up. What have you in?’

‘I bought ham and tomatoes in the town,’ Tom said. ‘And I have the potatoes scrubbed and in the pot, ready to be put on.’

‘Well, put them on. What are you waiting for?’ Biddy snapped, and Molly wondered how the potatoes were to be cooked, because she had seen no cooker. Tom, however, went towards the open fire and pulled out a bracket with hooks on of different lengths. He hung the black pot he had ready on one of these hooks before giving the fire a poke and throwing something on it that looked like little more than lumps of dirt.

When her grandmother saw Molly staring, she shrieked, ‘Don’t just stand there, girl. I told you this was no rest cure. Away to the room and take off your coat, then lay the table at the very least.’

It was one of the most uncomfortable meals that Molly had endured. While eating it, Biddy regaled Tom with tales about Birmingham. She hadn’t a good word to say about it, and fairly ripped into the character of Molly’s parents and her grandfather. Many times, Molly was going to leap to the defence of those she loved, but the first time she opened her mouth to do this, she felt the pressure of Tom’s foot on hers and when she looked up quizzically, he made an almost imperceptible shake of his head. So she let her grandmother’s words wash over her, because really she was too tired to argue.

After the meal, Tom fetched the chair from his room as he had said he would, then said, ‘Right, that’s that, then. Now, I’ll bring the cows in for milking.’

‘Wait,’ said Biddy. ‘Molly will go with you.’

Both Molly and Tom looked at Biddy as if they couldn’t believe their ears. Molly was so weary she was having trouble functioning and she had been wondering how soon she would be allowed to go to bed, but now this. She couldn’t do this. She barely knew one end of a cow from the other and hadn’t dreamed that milking them would be part of her duties.

Tom had no idea of Molly’s rising panic, but he had noted her exhausted state and said. ‘There is no need for this, Mammy. I don’t need anyone to help me. Haven’t I been doing it alone for a fair few years anyway?’

‘Aye, but there is no need for you to do it alone now. You have help.’

‘Can’t you see the child is worn out?’ Tom said. ‘She has been travelling all the day.’

‘I have told Molly there is no place for passengers on a farm, and the sooner she is made aware of this, the better it will be for everybody,’ Biddy said with some satisfaction.

Molly wanted to say she had never had any desire to milk a cow and didn’t particularly want to learn either, but she had already decided that she would show no weakness in front of this woman. So, turning to Tom, she said, ‘You will have to show me how it is done.’

Biddy may have been disappointed with Molly’s response, but Tom was full of admiration. ‘There is nothing to it,’ he said. ‘You’ll pick it up in no time. Let’s whistle up the dogs to help bring them down.’

Tom was patient and kind, and his voice so calm that Molly could never imagine it raised in anger, or indeed anything else, and it was like balm to her bruised and battered soul. He seemed to understand her initial distaste, but he was so gentle and reassuring that Molly battled to overcome this because she knew it would please him.

She was quick to learn generally, and soon got the hang of milking. She even began to enjoy it, finding, like many more, there was something incredibly soothing about sitting astride a three-legged stool, her face pressed against the velvet flank of the cow, and gently but firmly squeezing the udders and seeing the bucket fill with the squirts of milk.

‘Molly,’ said Tom after a while, ‘let me give you a word of warning. Don’t rise to Mammy’s bait. Let her rant and rave and all, and you say nothing. Eventually, she will have to stop.’

‘Yes, but when she says thing about my family …’

‘She says that because she knows it upsets you,’ Tom said.

‘She told me that my mother killed her father,’ Molly said. ‘Was that true?’

Tom sighed. ‘When Daddy read the letter Nuala sent, telling of how she met your father and wanting to become engaged, and about his being a Protestant and all, Daddy had a heart attack.’

‘So she did then, in a way?’

‘Yes and no,’ Tom said. ‘Not long after Nuala left for England, Daddy developed pains in his chest and he was diagnosed with a bad heart. He knew he was on borrowed time – we all knew. The doctor said he could go any time, but Mammy said that Nuala wasn’t to be worried about it. If she had known maybe she would have come over in person and told him herself more gently, so I don’t think she can be blamed.’

‘She wasn’t told anything,’ Molly said. ‘Surely she should have been told her own father died?’

‘Of course she should,’ Tom said. ‘I blame myself. I should have stood against Mammy. She was just so adamant.’

Uncle Tom was soft, a fact Molly had realised within a few minutes of meeting him. She would take a bet that he hated confrontation of any kind so, much as she liked him, she doubted that she could depend on him for support.

He did try objecting when, on their return to the house, Biddy told Molly to wash the pots and to be quick about it, because she had to be up early in the morning for milking.

‘Mammy, for God’s sake, let the girl lie in tomorrow at least.’

Biddy continued to Molly as if Tom hadn’t spoken, ‘And first you will kindle up the fire from the rakings, clean out the ashes and fill the kettle, and put it on before joining Tom in the cowshed. Oh, and you can leave your lah-d-dah city clothes in the wardrobe. They will do for Mass, but are not suitable for work on the farm. While you were at the milking I fashioned you a couple of working shirts and a pair of dungarees from things I had in the house. Put them on in the morning.’

‘You’ll kill the girl before you’re done,’ Tom commented morosely, and Biddy smiled as if that would be a quite acceptable outcome.

The next morning Molly rose before five o’clock, put on the clothes her grandmother had given her and surveyed herself in the mirror. She supposed the shirts and dungarees were more serviceable, but she didn’t like them much, and they were rather big for her – so big that she had to roll up the sleeves of the shirts and the legs of the trousers over and over. Tom had already left to collect up the cows, and so the first time he saw the clothes was when Molly appeared in the cowshed a little later.

He laughed his head off. ‘God Almighty,’ he said. ‘You’d fit in them twice over. They were probably Finn’s once, or Joe’s even, and both were a sight bigger than you.’

Molly knew who Finn and Joe were for she had asked many questions about her mother’s family though Nuala had known nothing about them from the day she had left. Molly had known about Finn’s death, of course, but nothing of Joe.

She said now, ‘What happened to Joe? Mom always thought he would be here on the farm with you, but my grandmother told me that he had gone to America.’

‘Aye,’ Tom said, ‘and, God’s truth, I couldn’t blame him. With Finn gone and Nuala too and Daddy dying, the place was not the same at all. In the end he could take no more. Anyway, as he said, what was he doing working his fingers to the bone on a farm that would never be his?’

‘Is he still there now?’

‘Aye, and he didn’t do badly at first,’ Tom said. ‘Well, he ended up marrying the boss’s daughter, a girl called Gloria, and probably thought he was set for life, but then there was something called the Wall Street Crash and …’

‘What was that?’

‘Oh, it’s to do with stocks and shares,’ Tom said. ‘And I have never had any truck with them. But it meant the boss, Joe’s father-in-law, lost a heap of money and ended up killing himself.’

‘Golly!’

‘Joe was left with the debts the man had rung up,’ Tom said. ‘The house and fine way of living had to go, and he had a wife and mother-in-law to support and no means of doing so. I asked him to come here, but he can’t because the mother-in-law refuses to leave the land where her husband is buried and so they live in a downtown tenement, surviving on handouts or the odd day’s work Joe gets in a factory or down at the docks. It was worsened by the birth of their son, Ben, last year.’

‘Sad, isn’t it?’ Molly said wistfully. ‘You think your life will just go on the way it always has been and then something happens and the whole thing goes up in the air. Your brother is stuck just like I am.’

‘That’s about it,’ Tom said. ‘You won’t be stuck here for ever, though, young Molly, don’t fret. But if you don’t want Mammy giving out to us both for wasting time, we’d best be away back to the house, now we have finished the milking.’

Molly soon found that there is an art to filling a kettle from a full bucket of water and that it took time to acquire it. The first time she tried she swamped the floor and she knew if she hadn’t been able to clear away the evidence of this before Biddy got up, then she would probably have joined Tom in the cowshed with a thick ear.

She was always more than ready for her breakfast after milking, which was a boiled egg or porridge, and she ate her fill. She was aware almost from the first day that once she rose from that table it would be a long time before she had the opportunity to rest her legs again. Her grandmother saw to that.

Once she had put the water on to boil for the washing-up, Tom would fill up the buckets again. A large pan of water would be needed to scald the drinks for the two calves in the byre and to boil up the potatoes and turnips to feed the indolent, smelly pig and her litter of squealing piglets. Then Molly would feed the dogs and the hens, and collect and wipe the eggs.

After the Angelus bell had rung at twelve o’clock, they would stop for dinner. Sometimes this would just consist of potatoes and shallots, though Tom told her there was fish most Saturdays after they had been to the market, and other days in the week if there was ever the occasion to go into the town again and the fishing fleet was in.

‘I bag the odd rabbit as well,’ he said. ‘And of course when a pig is killed we might enjoy a bit of pork, and if there is an old hen not laying at all well, then she might just find herself with her neck wrung.’

‘Ugh!’

Tom laughed. ‘I suppose you got all your meat from the butchers all nicely packed and packaged,’ he said. ‘Well, this is where it all starts, and I’ll tell you, we are glad enough to see a bit of meat or fish when we have had potatoes and just potatoes for time and enough.’

After dinner that first day, Biddy took Molly on one side to teach her how to make soda bread and bread with oaten meal. ‘This needs to be done three times a week,’ she said. ‘On Saturdays, of course, you will also make scones, barnbrack and potato cakes for Sunday, and in addition to this on Thursday, you will do the churning and Monday is, of course, wash day and that will take some time. And remember whatever other duties you have, you will go with Tom to do the milking twice a day.’

Molly knew the workload would be a heavy one, but after only a day or so she found that she valued those peaceful times with her uncle in the cowshed. Biddy never went near it and so it was sort of a special place, where she could get away from her grandmother’s whining, complaining voice and the clouts that she seemed to find necessary to administer for the most minor things. But Molly was no fool, and she never, ever showed how much she enjoyed, even sometimes looked forward to, the milking. She knew that it was her grandmother’s intention to make her life as miserable as possible.

On Thursday afternoon, Biddy prepared the churn, while Molly washed up the dinner dishes and then showed her what to do.

‘Up and down for twenty minutes,’ she said, handing her the paddle. ‘And without stopping.’

Molly tried valiantly, but after a few minutes her arms felt like lead weights and she laid down the paddle with a sigh.

Biddy cuffed her on the side of the head, sending her senses reeling. ‘Twenty minutes, I said.’

‘I can’t.’

‘You can if you want to eat tonight.’

Molly knew that was no idle threat, but even then she could only manage a few minutes at a time, and every time she stopped, Biddy would clout her. But she hardly cared, for the pain in her arms and her back was worse than anything Biddy could do. When eventually Biddy called a halt and began to scoop the butter out and shape it, Molly’s arms continued to shake.

They still ached when she joined Tom in the cowshed later, and when Tom saw the stiff way that she was working, he asked her if she was all right. He was angry when he learned that she had done the churning all on her own. She was so slight, for one thing, and she hadn’t been brought up to it, but he knew that there was no point in him saying anything about it.

‘There was so much butter too,’ Molly said. ‘What do you do with it all?’

‘What nearly everyone does,’ Tom said. ‘We have a stall in the Market Hall in Buncrana on Saturdays and we sell the surplus there.’

‘Oh,’ Molly said, delighted at the prospect of leaving the farm. ‘Do you go every Saturday?’

‘Aye,’ Tom said. ‘But I doubt that you would be let go.’

‘Why not?’

Tom shook his head. ‘I have given up trying to understand my mother, but she said you are to be left here.’

There was a flash of disappointment, but Molly knew there was no point worrying about a situation she couldn’t change. At least this way she was going to be free of her grandmother for a few hours.

‘What I was going to suggest,’ Tom said, breaking in on her thoughts, ‘was that if you wanted to write to your grandfather and all, I could post the letters for you in Buncrana.’

‘Oh, Uncle Tom that would be great,’ Molly cried. ‘Granddad packed everything that he thought I might need – paper, envelopes, he even managed to get hold of some Irish stamps – but I couldn’t imagine how I would post any letters and so I haven’t used anything yet.’

‘Well, that is one problem solved,’ Tom said. ‘You just get the letters written and I will do the rest. Now, sit you up on that milking stool and rub your arms to get the feeling back and leave the rest of the milking to me tonight.’

Molly was grateful to her uncle and sat back with a sigh of relief. For once, she didn’t mind that Biddy roared at her as soon as she was in the door, to get on the porridge for supper and not take all night over it, because her head was full of the letters that she intended writing that night.

Feeling sure that Biddy would object and make disparaging remarks, Molly left the writing of the letters until she was in her room. Normally, she was so tired when she went to bed that she fell into a deep sleep as soon as her head touched the pillow, but that night excitement drove sleep from her and she sat in her bed and wrote feverishly by the light of a candle.

Knowing that neither Hilda or her grandfather could do anything to change the situation she was in, she didn’t tell them that she didn’t attend school any more, and very little about her grandmother at all. She did tell them of Tom and how welcoming he had been, how kind and patient he was teaching her things about farming life, and how she enjoyed helping him out on the farm. She knew that they would be pleased by that and she urged them to write back soon for she was desperate for news of them all.