At the Break of Day by Margaret Graham Read Free Book Online Page A

ever again.
    She leaned forward, smelling the dark red cottage rose which was growing well in the raised bed which Grandpa had built years ago. There was a trailing pink clambering up the privy.
    Rosie walked round the plants now, looking closely. There was no greenfly. She drew near the shed which still smelt of creosote but only faintly.
    ‘I guess we need to do this again,’ she called to her grandfather.
    ‘If you can find any, go on and do it. Don’t forget we’re rationed even if you haven’t been,’ Norah shouted. Rosie didn’t bother to tell her that America had in fact been rationed. She knew it couldn’t compare with British measures.
    In the shed the trunk was laid down flat and behind it was an old upended pram turned into a cart. Rosie edged past the trunk. She had forgotten all about the cart. Ollie and Grandpa had made it and she and Jack had raced it against First Street. Norah wouldn’t race with them. She might get hurt, she might get dirty. Rosie leaned down and smelt the old leather, spun the wheels.
    ‘I told him to get rid of it but he wouldn’t.’ Norah was there behind her now. She was waiting for her present. Well, she’d have to wait a little longer.
    Later, when it was quite dark and the curtain had been drawn round Grandpa’s bed, Rosie called good night.
    ‘I couldn’t let the pram go,’ he replied softly. ‘It reminded me of you, see.’
    Rosie did see and she called, ‘I love you, Grandpa. I’ve missed you so much.’ And to begin with she had.
    That night Rosie didn’t shut the door of her bedroom. She hadn’t shut the door on her first night at Nancy and Frank’s either. She had felt too lonely, too homesick and had cried silently. She cried now, silently too, thinking of Frank and Nancy, of Sandra, of Joe, of the lake. Crying more as she thought of this house where she’d been born and which wasn’t home any more, of this country which was strange to her, of the anger, the pain, the confusion which swept over her in waves. And the despair.
    She clenched the woollen knitted blanket she had made before she left and sleep would not come as she tried to cling to Frank’s words. ‘The future is yours. Make something positive out of the rest of your life.’
    Downstairs, Albert lay back on his bed. He could see the table, the cooker, the sink in the dull moonlight. She was back, his Rosie was back. She had looked like her mother when she came in, her hair short, her plaits gone, but the same love in her face that Martha had always had for him.
    He coughed, his chest was bad. He was old. The rubber square beneath his sheet made him sweat and it smelt, but then, he smelt too. He turned from the room, lying with his face to the wall. Perhaps he shouldn’t have brought her back.
    He turned again, back into the room. It was hot now and he was tired but he didn’t want to sleep. He sometimes had accidents when he slept.
    Perhaps it had been too long, he thought, for he had seen that behind the love there was despair. But he had to believe he had done the right thing as he had had to when he waved her off from Liverpool. It had broken his heart to see the ship becoming smaller and then the loneliness of the war had broken him somehow.
    He struggled now, pushing himself up, looking at his books. Maybe Norah had been wrong to think that Rosie would feel deserted if they left her there. And there again she was right, it wouldn’t have been fair if one sister had advantages denied to the other. It was all so confusing. He just didn’t know. Norah was wrong too, about Nellie not wanting to come to London.
    Nailing was dying in Bromsgrove, there was nothing to be made from it any more. His wife had wanted to come south and he remembered with bitterness her face that day when she had insisted they move. But then he pushed the memory from him and thought instead of the land of his roots and Herefordshire too; the sweeping hills, the lush green of the fields, the hops strung so high