On a Clear Day by Anne Doughty Read Free Book Online Page B

Uncle Jimmy, ‘But its not often we see you. To be honest it’s a put up job, Sam. Ronnie has a favour to ask you and we thought if we gave you a good tea you’d have to say yes.’
    Poor Ronnie was embarrassed but everybody else laughed for what Ronnie wanted was for Daddy to fix his radio. He’d taken it to pieces because he couldn’t get the foreign stations and now he couldn’t get anything at all.
    ‘Aye, surely Ronnie,’ said Daddy. ‘It’s just a pity I haven’t one of Clare’s feathers with me.’
    But that worked out all right, for Ronnie had a wee brush from an old paint box he’d had when he first went to school and Jimmy had plenty of oil in his toolbox. After tea, Daddy took the radio to pieces and sorted it out. Clare had watched and held some of the tiny gold screws in her hand in case they dropped them and when it was all finished and switched on it went beautifully.
    Ronnie was delighted and showed her how to tune to the different wavebands and they took it in turns to pick a station and see what it was doing. They found all sorts of different music and foreign stations broadcasting in different languages. Ronnie could pick out French and German but there were others he couldn’t make out at all even when they got the call signal and he looked it up in a special magazine he had.
     
    ‘Here we are, Clare, down you go. Mind you don’t fall now.’
    The bus drove off leaving them on the pavement near where two roads went off at an angle to each other. Between them was a white building with black paintwork that called itself The Tudor Stores. Clare looked around wearily.
    ‘You know where you are now, don’t you?’ said Auntie Polly encouragingly.
    But Clare didn’t know where she was. There were just houses everywhere, semi-detached anddetached and a road leading on through yet more houses. As they began to walk, she saw a street sign saying ‘Mount Merrion Park’. She knew that was where Auntie Polly lived because she had written the addresses on the Christmas cards while Mummy wrote the message inside, but she still didn’t see anything she remembered or recognised.
    All the houses looked the same except that half of them had the front door on the left and the other half had the front door on the right. Only when they came to a bend in the road and she saw a gate, unlike any of the other gates she had passed as they tramped up the park, did she recognise something that she knew.
    The gate was one of Granda Scott’s. She’d seen gates like this one lying in bits on the ground outside the forge while he cut the pieces of metal to size, she’d seen them propped up on billets of wood while he coated them with red lead and then, a couple of days later, with silver paint. She’d seen him hammer the twists and curlicues on the anvil before they were welded onto the topmost member. Never before had she seen a finished gate anywhere except in the fields and farms near Salter’s Grange where most of Granda Scott’s customers lived.
    She felt a sudden overwhelming longing to go straight back to the station they had left over an hour earlier.
    Tired and weary and wanting only to go to bedshe stood on the doorstep waiting for Uncle Jimmy to come and let them in.
    ‘Ach, hello Polly, hello Clare. Sure we weren’t expectin’ you till tomorrow,’ he said, taking Clare’s shopping bag as he stepped back awkwardly into the hall and edged his way round a brand new bicycle which was parked against the banisters.
    ‘Sure I rang you las’ night from the box at Woodview,’ said Polly, an edge of irritation in her voice. ‘An’ whose, might I ask, is this?’
    ‘It was an awful bad line, Polly. Ah coulden make out the haf o’ what ye were sayin’,’ he said sheepishly. ‘An’ that’s Davy’s,’ he went on hurriedly. ‘He says he’ll put it in the shed when he gets a chain an’ lock for it. He doesen want it pinched. It cost a fortune.’
    There was a funny smell at the bottom of the