On a Clear Day by Anne Doughty Read Free Book Online

all when you took them out. She often thought how nice it would be if the pebbles you picked out could stay wet and keep their lovely colours for ever.
    ‘Not far now, Clare,’ said Auntie Polly brightly. ‘Look, there’s the school you’ll be going to next week. That’s where Ronnie went before he went to Inst. and he thought it was great. You’re sure to like it.’
    At that moment Clare was equally certain that she wouldn’t like it, a red-brick building set inamong the shops and houses that lined the road, with no playground that she could see and not a tree in sight. But she said nothing about her new school and just thought how nice it would be to arrive home to Auntie Polly’s house and to see Ronnie again.
    It was a long time since she had last been to Auntie Polly’s house. Last Christmas. Not Christmas itself when they always went to Granny and Granda Scott on Christmas Day and Granny and Granda Hamilton on Boxing Day. It must have been the Sunday after that because school still hadn’t started and it didn’t matter that they were so late back that both she and William were asleep in the back of the car.
    ‘Harold’s offered me the car for Sunday, Ellie. The weather’s so mild he thought we might take a day out. What d’you think?’
    It was her mother’s idea that they would visit Auntie Polly for she’d said it was ages since she’d seen her. Daddy said that was fine by him. Would she drop her a line or would he give her a ring from work?
    Auntie Polly had a telephone, a big black one that sat on a table in the hall at the foot of her stairs. She had to have it for her work. Polly had served her time to a dressmaker and she made lovely things. Once, when they visited she showed them a wedding dress all wrapped up in a sheetwith shiny decorations like silver pennies stitched to the skirt.
    ‘I copied the neckline from a dress of Princess Elizabeth’s I saw in a magazine’, she said proudly.
    ‘Well, all credit to you, Polly. It’s like something a film star would wear. You’ve hands for anything,’ said her sister warmly.
    Later that year, Auntie Polly had brought Clare a Princess Elizabeth doll. It was actually one of her own old dolls her mother had been about to throw out, but Polly had said she knew a place where you could buy faces for dolls and the body was still all in one piece. She said she’d make it a dress out of scraps.
    Clare was thrilled with her doll. It had a new face and ringlets and a long, white tulle wedding dress. And on the skirt there were three of the beautiful, shiny decorations she had so admired. They were made of tiny, tiny beads threaded on fine wire and then curved round and round and joined up till they made a gleaming circle about the size of a two shilling piece.
    ‘A shilling each, those were,’ said Mummy when the doll was unpacked and they had both said how marvellous it was and how kind it was of Auntie Polly when she was so busy. ‘The woman that had that dress made for her daughter had piles of money. Can you imagine what it cost, Clare? There were a hundred and fifty of those on the skirt?’
    ‘A hundred and forty-seven,’ Clare replied promptly.
    Mummy had laughed.
    ‘Not a word about that, Clare’, she warned. ‘I dare say Polly reckoned she’d not bother to count them, so she kept you a few.’
    Clare felt she was too old now to play with dolls but she sometimes made clothes for them with the coloured scraps of fabric Auntie Polly saved for her, the leftovers of dresses and jackets, frocks and wedding outfits. She still loved looking at her Princess Elizabeth doll.
    As the bus turned off the Ormeau Road and into Rosetta Park it suddenly struck her that she couldn’t make dresses for her dolls anymore even though she would have unlimited pieces of fabric. Her dolls were all gone. And not just her dolls. Teddy too. Tears sprang to her eyes and she had to pretend she was blowing her nose so that Auntie Polly wouldn’t notice.
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