Read Online Far From My Father's House by Elizabeth Gill - Free Book Online

off to concerts and practices and sometimes he went to the pub in the village – unbeknown, she hoped, to her parents.
    ‘You ought not to go and sit in his room with him, Annie.’
    ‘I’d like to know why.’
    Her mother looked at her like she was being particularly stupid.
    ‘Because you’re both growing up,’ she said.
    Annie was instantly cross.
    ‘It’s not like that,’ she said. ‘How could it be? Blake’s like Tommy.’
    ‘No, he isn’t,’ her mother said and when she thought about it afterwards she knew that her mother was right. She wouldn’t have spent five minutes sitting on Tommy’s bed talking to him and Tommy wouldn’t have wanted her to. So after that she didn’t go to his room any more but it was getting so cold up there that Blake retreated to the back room to do his reading and since the others sat in the big kitchen during the evening her mother apparently had no objection to her sitting with Blake in the little back room by the range, drinking tea and watching the flames lick green and blue around the wood and being glad of the comfort of being inside while the wind howled its way in and out of the buildings which made up the farm.
    It was the hardest winter that Annie had ever known. Getting up in the icy darkness and going to the Vanes and working there in the cold and then helping her father outside much of the time made Annie miserable. The ice rarely gave way and when it did there was deep snow. Her father and Blake spent much of their time looking for sheep and even when the spring came and the lambs were born the weather was unrelenting. Her father brought the sheep as near the farm as he could and those he was concerned about inside, but when the weather should have softened and there should have been nothing more than the odd lambing storm it was bitterly cold and her father and Blake rarely went to bed for days at a time because the work was so hard and she had to do extra because they had so much more to do.
    When Alistair came home from school for Easter she resented the fact that he had so little to do. His father employed sufficient help so that his only son could be a gentleman, Annie had heard him say often enough, and when Alistair complained about school and exams, Annie turned on him.
    ‘You’ve never done a decent day’s work in your life,’ she declared and went off home to begin again. She expected that he would follow her there and apologise but he didn’t and he didn’t come the next day either. She didn’t see him when she went there to work and to her dismay, the following Saturday night, when it looked as though there would be nothing to do because the lambing was finished and the weather had finally warmed, he did not invite her to the small dance which was being held at the village hall. She had waited all week for him to ask her and when Madge came home on the Friday and announced that she was going with Frank and that Alistair was taking Clara, Annie ran up to her room and threw herself on the bed, crying.
    Blake found her there.
    ‘You’re not meant to come in here,’ Annie said, cross that he had walked in when she had no control over herself.
    ‘What’s the matter?’
    ‘Nothing. Nothing you can do anything about anyway.’
    ‘Don’t be so prickly,’ Blake said, sitting down beside her on the big bed which Madge and Elsie shared.
    ‘I wanted to go to the dance.’
    ‘What dance?’
    ‘Do you ever think about anything except the farm? The one at the village hall. I was nasty to Alistair last week and he’s taking Clara.’
    ‘Alistair?’
    ‘Yes. And Frank’s taking Madge.’
    ‘Does your father know?’
    ‘She lied and said she was going with some of the other girls. Is Tommy going?’
    ‘He never mentioned it.’
    ‘And you’re not going, of course, are you? The barn roof might fall in if you leave the place for half an hour and you can’t dance anyway.’
    ‘Why were you nasty to Alistair?’
    ‘I didn’t mean to be, it