by Dilly Court
The door slammed shut and Poppy remained motionless listening to their footsteps retreating down the staircase, and then silence closed in around her. She was unused to quietness. In the cramped living conditions of number 18 Quebec Road, the house reverberated with the sound of men’s deep voices and the clumping of Dad’s and Joe’s heavy boots on bare linoleum. Mum and Gran chattered noisily as they pounded washing on the ridged glass washboard, riddled the cinders in the boiler or beat the living daylights out of the threadbare carpets as they hung on the line in the tiny back garden. Poppy’s eyes filled with tears as she thought of her mum with her tired but still pretty face and her work-worn hands. The smell of Lifebuoy soap hung about her in an aura unless she was going to the pictures with Dad, and then she splashed on a little of the Californian Poppy perfume that Poppy had saved up for and bought from Woolworth’s to give her as a birthday present.
The day room was furnished with what looked like odd bits of furniture that were no longer needed in the reception rooms. A child’s desk and chair were placed beneath one of the tall windows and a battered doll’s house stood in one corner of the room. A tea table and two chairs occupied the centre of the room and two saggy armchairs sat on either side of the fireplace. It was not the most cheerful of places and Poppy shivered even though the room was hot and stuffy. She could imagine the white lady sitting in one of the chairs or coming to her in the middle of the night. She had read about haunted houses and they were always old and large, just like Squire’s Knapp.
She hurried into the night nursery, closing the door behind her. This room was slightly smaller and more homely. A baby’s cot stood in one corner, with a large fluffy teddy bear lying face down on the pillow. Twin beds took up the rest of the floor space, separated by a white-painted bedside cabinet that some bored child had scribbled on with wax crayons and pencil. Momentarily diverted, Poppy climbed on the bed beneath the window and dangled her legs over the side as she tried to read the scrawled writing. Apart from matchstick men with six fingers on each spiky hand, the only word legible after many applications of Vim was the name GUY, printed in thick block capitals and repeated over and over again. Poppy lay down on the pink satin eiderdown and closed her eyes, too exhausted to go into the nursery bathroom and clean her teeth or to put on the flannelette nightgown that Olive had left under her pillow.
When she awakened next morning Poppy thought for a moment that she was back in the boxroom at home, but the brightly coloured cretonne curtains that floated in the breeze from the open window were not her bedroom curtains. The Beatrix Potter prints on the walls were nothing like the pictures of film stars that she had cut from movie magazines and pinned over her bed at home. She sat up, rubbing her eyes as memories of yesterday flooded back in an overwhelming tide of misery. She strained her ears for sounds of life in the house but there was silence except for the birds singing away in the garden below. She knelt on the bed and rested her elbows on the sill as she looked out of the window. Her room was at the back of the house overlooking a wide sweep of green lawns, just like the cricket pitch in West Ham Park. She caught a glimpse of the mirrorlike sheen of the lake between a stand of silver birch trees and a dense shrubbery. A movement down below caught her eye as a disembodied hand shook a yellow duster out of a window and was withdrawn almost immediately.
She slid off the bed and made a brief foray into the white-tiled bathroom with its huge cast iron bath standing on claw feet, a washbasin big enough to bathe in and a willow pattern lavatory. The toilet at number 18 had its own little house situated just outside the back door, which the Brown family considered was quite superior to the back-to-back terraces in the poorer part of town where the lavatory was at the bottom of the yard if you were lucky, and at the end of the block if you were not. She cleaned her teeth and washed her face in what Gran would have called a cat’s-lick, deciding that she could not possibly be dirty after the scrubbing she had received at Violet’s hands. Reluctantly she dressed in Miss Pamela’s cast-offs, and after an unsuccessful attempt to get the comb through the tangles she tied her hair back with a piece of string she found in the day nursery.
She wondered what she was supposed to do now. Her stomach rumbled and she realised that she was extremely hungry, but it seemed that she had been forgotten. She might starve to death up here and her skeleton be found years later amongst the cobwebs in the disused nursery. She opened the door and made her way along the narrow corridor to the landing at the top of the stairs. Leaning over the banisters she strained her ears for sounds of life, and, hearing nothing but the tick of a slender grandmother clock on the floor below, she made her way down three flights of stairs to the kitchen. A wave of sound enveloped her as she opened the door and Violet flew past her carrying a dustpan and brush.
‘I’d clean forgotten you, Popeye,’ she said, grinning. ‘Better keep out of Mrs Toon’s way, she’s on the warpath.’ She slammed the baize door that kept the noise from below from disturbing the genteel calm of the family rooms.
‘Oh, it’s you!’ Kneading bread dough as if she were pummelling her worst enemy, Mrs Toon glared at Poppy. ‘I can’t be doing with you under my feet today, there’s too much to do.’
Poppy stood uncertainly at the foot of the stairs, creating patterns on the floor with the toe of her brown sandal. Mrs Toon’s cheeks were bright red, the colour of the geraniums that Gran liked to grow in an old sink in the back yard. Strands of grey hair escaped from her white cap, bouncing about like watch springs as she wielded a floury rolling pin at her. ‘I suppose you’re hungry. Kids always are in my experience. There’s some porridge in the pan on the Aga. Help yourself.’
Poppy approached the monster cautiously and was about to reach up to grab the ladle when Mrs Toon happened to glance over her shoulder. ‘Not like that!’ she screeched. ‘For heaven’s sake, girl, you’ll scald yourself.’ She bustled over and, snatching the ladle, she filled a china bowl with porridge and thrust it into Poppy’s hands. ‘There’s sugar in the bowl on the table. Don’t take too much! And there’s fresh milk on the marble shelf in the larder. Don’t spill it.’
Poppy tucked herself away in the corner of the kitchen and ate her porridge, watching in awe as Mrs Toon barked orders at two women who appeared from the scullery at intervals, carrying huge bowls of peeled vegetables. With a face that Mum would have described as a wet weekend, Olive looked distinctly put out as she clattered down the stairs carrying a tray full of dirty crockery.
‘I hate bloody shooting parties,’ she said bitterly.
‘Language, Olive,’ Mrs Toon muttered as Olive disappeared into the scullery.
There was a loud clatter and she flounced back into the kitchen wiping her hands on the tea towel. She stopped and her eyes narrowed as she spotted Poppy, who was trying her best to appear inconspicuous. ‘You’d best keep out of my way today. I don’t want madam making me look after you as well as doing all my other work.’ She snatched an apple from a bowl on a side table and bit into it. ‘By the way, Mrs Toon, best keep some breakfast hot for Mr Guy. He went out for his morning ride and hasn’t come back yet.’
This piece of information did not seem to go down too well with Mrs Toon, and Poppy finished her food quickly. Taking her empty bowl into the scullery she made her escape through an outside door and found herself in a cobbled yard surrounded by outbuildings. The familiar smell of coarse soap and soda billowed out in clouds of steam from the wash-house, bringing a lump to her throat and a wave of homesickness as she listened to the washerwomen laughing and talking while they worked. She hesitated in the doorway, longing to go inside and find a motherly soul who would give her a cuddle and tell her that everything would be all right, but it seemed as if she was suddenly invisible. They were all too busy to notice her.
She was just wondering what to do when she spotted a gateway in the stone wall, and on closer examination she discovered that it led into the stable yard. The smell of horse dung, damp straw and leather was unfamiliar but not as unpleasant as
she might have imagined. A horse stuck its great head out of its stall whinnying at her and stamping its hooves and she backed away. Those teeth looked as if they could bite a girl’s head off with one great snap of the mighty jaws. She had been chased once by a carthorse that had seemed intent on trampling her underfoot, and she had been scared of the brutes ever since. She glanced round as a stable lad shouted something unintelligible at her and she panicked, thinking she must have done something wrong. She ran through the yard, past the carriage house and into the safety of a large clump of rhododendrons. The leaves slapped her cheeks and twigs scratched her bare legs as she forced her way through the tangle of branches. A large pigeon flew out of the bush close to her head and she screamed in fright as its wing feathers made a loud flapping noise.
Suddenly, she was out in the sunlight again and her heart was beating a tattoo inside her chest. Her feet crunched on the gravel as she ran headlong down the drive. Close by she could hear a dog barking. Too late she was aware of horse’s hooves pounding on the hard-baked grass, and the shouted warning to get out of the way. She turned her head and was paralysed with fright at the sight of flailing hooves. The horse reared on its hind legs as its rider swerved to avoid her. She raised her arm to protect her face and plunged once again into a sea of blackness.
About the Author
LILY BAXTER lives in Dorset. She is the author of The Shopkeeper’s Daughter, Poppy’sWar, We’ll Meet Again, Spitfire Girl, and The Girls in Blue. She also writes under the name of Dilly Court.
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By Lily Baxter
THE SHOPKEEPER’S DAUGHTER
Coming Soon
POPPY’S WAR
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Century, a division of Random House.
Excerpt from Poppy’s War copyright © 2010 by Lily Baxter.
THE SHOPKEEPER’S DAUGHTER. Copyright © 2013 by Lily Baxter. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition MARCH 2015 ISBN: 9780062412102
Version 11022015
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062412119
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