Read Online Birrung the Secret Friend by Jackie French - Free Book Online

it was because she had decided to stay and if she saw her family it might be too hard to leave them again.
    Mr Johnson decided that this year the carrots and beetroot could stay in the ground over winter. Root vegetables didn’t rot in the cold like he said they did in English winter gardens. It didn’t even snow here in winter: there were just the cold winds from the south. I was glad. I’d been colder in England than I ever wanted to be again, and digging up carrots and beetroot to store was a lot of work.
    Work had always been something you were supposed to try to get out of before. Work was Ma leaning over, bashing the oysters off the rocks, day after day till she said her back was crying in agony, and her hands were raw and bleeding from the shell cuts. Though Ma never shirked a day in her life, far as I knew. But working up here, with Birrung and Elsie, or Mr Johnson, or just by myself, watching the harbour and the green and red birds, thinking of all the good food in the ground and in the shed, the food I’d helped grow, I was the happiest I’d ever been. I learned that work can be one of the best things in the world. I’ll never forget it was Mr Johnson who taught me that.
    They were good days. Mrs Johnson held Milbah like she was a precious jewel from Araby. I felt like I did when a carrot seed and dirt turned into a crisp fat root. It was like our colony; nothing but trees yet now we had a village and gardens, though the colony stank more than Milbah did when she made a mess in her napkin. And the way Mrs Johnson smiled at Milbah and Birrung seemed to light up the house. We all laughed a lot in those days.
    I was penning up the goats one afternoon after dinner, giving them each a carrot — goats need a bribe if you’re to get them to go where you want them. There was one with a black foot who wouldn’t go in even so. ‘Get in, you b—’ I said, using a word I wasn’t supposed to. I heard a laugh above me. It was Birrung, sitting right up on a branch of a gum tree.
    She threw down a carrot. It landed whump in the pen. Old Black Foot scrambled in after it. I shut the pen quickly.
    â€˜Thank you!’ I called, careful not to look up again in case I saw her bare legs.
    I heard a swishing sound. Birrung slid down the tree next to me. She pushed her skirts back into place and grinned at me. ‘Walk?’
    Go for a walk with her? Just the two of us, when Sally expected me to bring her a bucket of fresh water for the morning, when Mrs Johnson would be waiting to say evening prayers, which she did on the nights when Mr Johnson was away in Rose Hill as he was this evening?
    I grinned back and nodded. I was glad Birrung was happy enough to go for a walk again. I was even gladder it was with me.
    I thought we’d go down to the harbour. Maybe she’d even teach me to swim. But instead she scrambled up the hill, past the brick pits. At last we came to a big smooth boulder, sitting near the top. She sat down on it. I sat next to her, feeling the warm stone, smelling strange trees, hot and cold breezes weaving around us.
    I looked at the harbour. You could see the flagpole from here. As soon as the lookout saw sails from England, they’d run a flag up the pole.
    The flagpole was empty. Day after day, no matter how much everyone stared at it.
    Would a ship ever come?
    It’d be winter soon. We’d landed here with food for three years, but rats and humans had stolen a lot. Eventhe officers didn’t dig their own gardens, but sat back while their convicts did it for them. Would some folk starve? The lazy ones, the ones who’d rather steal than work?
    I glanced at Birrung. We wouldn’t starve. Governor Phillip’s garden was raided night after night. But the convicts were too grateful to Mr Johnson for helping those who were sick or in trouble, like me and Elsie, to steal from the Johnsons.
    Or at least they were so far.
    Birrung gestured to me