Still Waters by Katie Flynn Read Free Book Online

the grub’s goin’ to live in the kitchen, I dessay.’
    ‘Wait’ll you see our room, Tess,’ Janet said, panting up the path behind her mother with a sack over one shoulder. ‘It’s beautiful – there’s pink curtains!’
    And presently, less saw the room for herself and agreed with her friend that it was both beautiful and pink-curtained. There were two small beds with pink-and-white-checked counterpanes, a couple of easy chairs, even a square of carpet on the floor.
    ‘We have to be awful careful, an’ keep everythin’ awful clean,’ Janet warned. ‘We scrub everythin’ before we leave, an’ Dad do the garden an’ clip the hedge an’ mow the lawn. One year Mum had to paint a door, ’cos one o’ the boys banged into it wi’ a bucket an’ took the paint off. Dear Lor’, but ain’t it just beautiful?’
    ‘It is beautiful, and it’s bigger than our house,’ Tess agreed. ‘I bet your mum loves the kitchen.’
    The kitchen was all fitted cupboards and a sink at waist height and shiny taps, and there was an oil stove to cook on and an enclosed stove which you lit for hot water. There was a dining-room, a living-room and a conservatory, as well as four wonderful bedrooms – they were wonderful to Janet and the boys, so Tess thought them wonderful too – and of course the bathroom.
    Exploring the house, however, was not a lengthy procedure, and presently Mrs Thrower called through that dinner was ready and they hurried into the kitchen – the dining-room was for the evening meal, Janet told Tess.
    Dinner was cheese sandwiches, home-made pickles and a cup of tea, with an apple to follow. As soon as the table was cleared and the plates and cutlery washed and put away, Mrs Thrower took one of the kitchen chairs out into the sunny garden and announced that she intended to have a nap.
    ‘No swimmin’ till an hour after your grub have gone down,’ she decreed. ‘And then only when your dad and I are around. Off with you!’
    It was the sort of command which everyone wanted to obey. Out into the sunshine, with the breeze wafting the seaside smells to their nostrils, sand underfoot, the blue sky arching above. They tore down to the gap and, amidst the sand dunes, scattered, the boys roaring as boys will, Janet and Tess stopping as soon as they reached the beach itself to shed shoes and socks, to tuck their skirts into their knickers . . . and then to run on. Tess ran with all her might, though as they neared the sea the wet, ridged sand hurt her bare feet and sent shock-waves up through her spine. But she didn’t care, and as they ran full-tilt into the little waves she was conscious of a joy and a sense of well-being greater than she could remember experiencing before.
    ‘In’t it good, gal Tess?’ Janet shrieked, well ahead of Tess now with the waves at knee-height, her skirt escaping from wobbly knicker elastic and dangling in the restless water. ‘Isn’t it the best thing you ever done?’
    ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah !’ Tess shouted back. She kicked spray in a dazzling, diamond arc between herself and the great yellow eye of the sun. ‘I wanna swim, I wanna swim, I wanna swim!’
    ‘We will, later, when our dinner hev gone down,’ Janet said. She came back to her friend’s side and suggested digging a castle or searching the shallows for sea-life – crabs, shrimps, anemones.
    ‘We’ll dig a castle,’ Tess said. ‘My spade’s up at the bungalow, but it doesn’t matter; I can dig with my hands, like a dog.’
    Both girls fell to their knees and began to excavate. And Tess glanced round the beach whenever she thought herself unobserved, and tried to see whether it was anything like the beach of her dream. It had the long wooden breakwaters all right, with deep pools beside them where the tide had gobbled the sand away. And there were dunes, which weren’t in her dream, but no pebble ridge, which was. A different place, then. And she remembered Yarmouth as being very different both from this