Read Online A Time for Courage by Margaret Graham - Free Book Online Page B

addition it had unlocked a passion to teach which neither had known was there until then. Miss Fletcher had been pleased.
    Hannah felt Joe’s hand on her arm. ‘Round here then.’ She followed him round the corner of the house, past a conservatory with a half-open door. There was a vine curling up the windows and out through two broken panes on the roof. Beyond was a narrow-shaped pile covered by an old carpet. At the bottom, dark earth, egg shells and cabbage stalks spilled on to the ground. Joe lifted a corner of the carpet and a heavy smell wafted out into the air. Hannah stepped back.
    ‘Why do you put them here?’ she asked, breathing at first through her mouth but then again through her nose because disease could rush in past the teeth, Mrs Brennan had told her, and surely smell was better than illness.
    Joe finished with the bucket and clanged it down on the hard earth. It was rusted round the rim. ‘Well, we haven’t a pig at the moment so the peelings can go on the compost with the rest. It feeds the ground when we come to spring planting. Senseless to waste anything, isn’t it?’ He looked up at her, squinting in the sun. ‘Don’t you do the same in London then?’
    She shook her head. ‘Men come and take it, I suppose. The maids see to it.’
    He put his head to one side and there was a faint smile on his face.
    Hannah felt a rush of anger. ‘Well, don’t you have a maid?’
    ‘Only one and she’s on holiday. Her sister helps if necessary in term time, when Mother runs the school.’
    Hannah’s interest was immediate. ‘Oh, a school. I didn’t know your mother was a teacher. How wonderful. How many boys do you have? Does she teach them Classics? What about German? I’d like to learn German.’
    ‘Steady,’ he interrupted her, leaning over to pick up the bucket. ‘Yes, she does teach Classics, no, she doesn’t teach German. And we have six boys and five girls.’ He was walking ahead of her now back to the kitchen, the bucket swinging from his hand, the string basket still over his shoulder.
    ‘Girls and boys,’ she called, shocked.
    ‘Of course,’ he called back. ‘It’s crazy otherwise, isn’t it? What’s different about girls and boys. They’ve got arms, legs and a brain, haven’t they? And they’ve got to learn to live together, haven’t they? That’s what Mother and Father say anyway.’ His voice faded as he entered the kitchen.
    Hannah stood. A school with boys and girls, and Joe had said that his mother and father thought girls had a brain. His mother taught them together, in the same room, which was sinful in London, in her world. A world that seemed increasingly dark, set against the one which surrounded her here. Her confusion, her thoughts were returning. Her questions about life were stirring again. She explored her shock as though she were a tongue probing a sore tooth but found no answer.
    She walked down the red-brick path leading to the dried stone wall which surrounded the garden. On either side of the path were marigolds mingling with lettuce. Lavender and rosemary were set further back and were already busy with bees. Geraniums were in pots, some tilted as they had settled half on the path, half on the earth. Lemon verbena grew amongst some red full-blown roses. Sin was difficult, she thought, as she knelt by the strawberry beds beyond the flowers. They came right up to the path which was warm beneath her knees. Who decided what sin was? God, she supposed, but men were the ones who passed it on. Surely, though, it was a sin to waste goodness as they did in London when here it was put back into the ground and new things grown? Why didn’t the Vicar concern himself with that instead of shouting about damnation each Sunday? And why was it a sin to teach boys and girls together? Joe was right. That could not be wrong, surely? She sighed, grateful for the hardness of the brick through her skirt. That at least was something definite and so were the plants before