Read Online Great Meadow by Dirk Bogarde - Free Book Online

already packed on account of coming from Scotland to visit us, so she had an advantage. But she sort of hung about watching us pack our things, which was a bit irritating because she would keep on asking why we were taking this and that just for a short journey and a short holiday. So I just told her to M.Y.O.B., which she didn’t understand until I said, quite loudly so that she did, ‘It means Mind Your Own Business. That’s what it means!’ and she just shrugged and told me not to be so huffy and I nearly hit her with my box of Venus pencils, but they might have got broken so I didn’t.
    My sister was putting all her treasures, as she called them, into a little attaché case which our father had given her because the handle had broken. She was a bit silly about calling them ‘treasures’ because they weren’t at all valuable and treasure is. Her things were potty, really a set of cigarette cards of’ Famous Cricketers’ for example, and a mussel shell from the Cuckmere, and a whole set of Tiny Tots transfers which she had never even used because she said it would spoil them if you stuck them on things. Honestly! It was a bit annoying because I had used mine all up, and she had ‘Christian Names’ (and their meaning), ‘Pantomimes’ and ‘Methods of Transport’, and she kept them in a book, but what good they were to her I never could understand because they were all back-to-front. Girls are a bit soppy sometimes.
    I just had a rather decent penknife with
R.M.S. Majestic
painted on it, and my Venus pencils in a cardboard box, quite long, and smelling of cedarwood, a drawing-block I quite liked because it fitted in a jacket pocket and you could do ‘quick sketches’ in the field, our father said – he used one in his war and he was doing serious drawings of fighting in the Great War for
The Times
, so he should know what he was talking about – and then, of course, top of the list, there were Sat and Sun, my mice, in their neat wooden cage. It had a glass front you could slide out for cleaning, and a wheel, for running, and a little house in the corner where they made their nest. Flora wanted to know why they were called Sat and Sun and I said they just were, and everyone in the family knew them just as the Weekend. She looked very thoughtful. But it shut her up.
    They had to live in their cage in the morning room. I wasn’t allowed to have them in my bedroom, worse luck, on account of the smell, which I didn’t mind but Lally and our mother did. When Lally saw me putting newspaper all over the dining-table, as I had to every time I cleaned them out, she made a heavy sighing sound and dumped a big pile of folded shirts and things on the wickerwork chair by the Ideal boiler.
    â€˜For mercy’s sake! What will we do supposing the conductor on the bus says no mice allowed? What then, I would like to know? How are you going to get yourself, and the Weekend, all the way back to Hampstead from Victoria with not a penny in your pocket? Tell me that or forever hold your tongue.’
    Well, I knew she didn’t mean it because she knew theWeekend was coming with us and I was going to have to hold it on my knee all the way to Seaford, but she was just being pretend angry and she knew very well that the conductor would be jolly interested in Sat and Sun because one was black and one was white. And if he wasn’t I’d make him, by telling him that he could have one of their babies if he liked, a black or a white, and Lally said, when I told her, that she hoped the Miracle wouldn’t happen on the bus or at the rest-stop because
she
would have nothing to do with a litter of pink white mice all blind and naked. It was a bit upsetting really, and I was worried that she might be right, and then what would I do? No one to help, and it might be a terrible shock to them. So I didn’t say anything, but just found the Jeyes Fluid and a