Winnie of the Waterfront by Rosie Harris Read Free Book Online Page A

mother watched her being brought home each evening without comment, almost without interest. She never asked how she managed, was never up in the morning to help her get ready for school or to give her a hand into the carriage.
    That first week seemed to set the pattern for the future. When Winnie told her mother that she’d had nothing to eat at midday all week, Grace looked at her blankly.
    ‘If you’re too bleeding idle to stick some grub in your tin and take it with you then that’s your lookout!’
    ‘I’d do that if there was anything here to take,’ Winnie pointed out. ‘There’s been no bread in the crock all week.’
    ‘That’s because I’ve been buying sliced bread and leaving it in the paper it comes in,’ her mother told her. ‘If you’d used your eyes and looked in the cupboard you’d have found it. Want waiting on hand and foot, don’t yer! Well, I’m not your dad so you won’t get any pandering from me, so don’t expect it!’
    It was the start of real enmity between them. It was almost as if Grace blamed Winnie for the fact that Trevor had been called up. She did less and less around the house. The place became dirtier and messier than ever. Sometimes the smell was so bad that Winnie wished she could be outside in the fresh air. She tried once or twice to get as far as the front door so that she could sit on the doorstep. The effort left her breathless and was so painful that she was afraid that if she did sit on the doorstep she’d never be able to stand up or move back indoors again.
    Getting upstairs was one of her greatest problems. In the past, her dad had simply picked her up and carried her, but Grace made it quite plain from the very first night that she had no intention of doing that.
    ‘Why should I break my bloody back carrying a lump like you up all those stairs,’ she told Winnie. ‘About time you learned to do things for yourself. It’s not as though you’re ever going to get any better, and you can’t go through life expecting people to wait on you and help you all the time.’
    Winnie didn’t expect people to put themselves out for her, but even a helping hand or an encouraging word would have been something, she thought resentfully.
    In the end, she mastered it in her own way. Coming down the stairs was easy. Her arms were strong through constantly lifting herself from one position to another so she simply grabbed the handrails that Trevor had fitted on both sides and swung her legs out into the air and then let them land on the stair below. Going upstairs was the problem. Finally, she mastered that by going up backwards, using the strength in her arms to lift herself from one step to the next and dragging her legs after her.
    Other people, Winnie found, were kinder than her mother. Several of the neighbours offered to push her out in her invalid carriage at the weekend. Mary Murphy from two doors down wheeled her to Mass on Sundays, and Sally Green once took her all the way to St John’s Market.
    That had been a wonderful day. She’d been there once or twice with her dad and she loved the colourful sight of all the fruit and vegetables. The crowds of people milling about and the hustle and bustle and the raucous shouts of all the traders brought memories of those previous visits rushing back.
    She’d been full of excitement about it when she’d got home that night, and to her surprise her mam had listened, a crafty look on her lined face.
    The next weekend there was an even greater surprise. Grace told Winnie she was going to push her to St John’s Market herself.
    ‘Do you know what you’re saying, Mam?’ she probed. She knew her mam had been drinking down at the Eagle the night before and she wondered if she was still so tanked up that she didn’t know what she was doing.
    ‘Get yourself into the sodding chair and stop arguing with me,’ Grace snapped, wrapping a black shawl around her shoulders and pushing her feet into a pair of lace-up boots that had