Read Online Forged with Flames by Ann Fogarty, Anne Crawford - Free Book Online

Saturday mornings on dress fittings and doing all the other things required of a good bridesmaid. Unfortunately, I became anxious on the big day and fainted twice while the photographs were being taken, which was totally mortifying.
    In second year, a hitchhiking holiday with Julia was the highlight of my time at college; it gave me a sense, for the first time, of life away from the village. Julia and I had become bosom buddies, despite the huge differences in our personalities—or maybe because of them. She eased my way through many socially difficult situations. At least socially, I was the shadow to her sun. Neither of us had much money so we decided to go to the south of England to a place near Taunton in Somerset, where young people from all over Europe earned money fruit picking.We slept in dormitories and travelled in lorries to pick the fruit each day. It was at the fruit-picking centre that I had my second encounter with a boy. I was seventeen. I liked Claudio, an amorous Italian, but he kissed so much that it was boring. After one interminably long session of kissing as we lay on the grass, I worried that I might become pregnant. Luckily, Julia was able to tell me—and the whole dormitory of guffawing girls—that I wouldn’t! I decided then that it was about time I really did find out about the facts of life.
    We spent some back-breaking days picking and eating strawberries, and digging out potatoes; and some much easier days harvesting apples and pears before hitchhiking to Scotland, where we were taken in by people we met along the way. We washed little and ate with the appetite of wolves. We slept in bus shelters and church doorways, anywhere that seemed safe and warm, wrapped in the blankets we’d ‘borrowed’ from the dormitory. I felt guilty about these blankets every time I looked at them. My conscience was only salved once I got home and dry-cleaned and posted the blanket back to the fruit-picking centre, after receiving a lecture from my angry father.
    At the end of our second year of college the worst possible assessment was to take place, a shy teenager’s ultimate nightmare. The English teacher decided that all the students in our year should sit an oral exam. Each of us had to pick a well-known novel and read a section of it in front of the other students and staff, and—if that weren’t bad enough—give a ten-minute talk on a subject of our own choosing followed by questions from our audience. An external examiner was to assess us. They couldn’t have devised a more terrifying scenario for me. I wanted to crawl up in a small ball whenever I contemplatedthis awful situation. From the time I found out that it was going to happen, until it was all over, all I could think of was ‘how will I manage?’ I was also worried about failing—no amount of preparation or even knowledge could get me through this if I became tongue-tied and paralysed by my own predicament.
    The examiner, however, was an approachable middle-aged woman with an obvious sense of humour, who took great pains to put us all at ease—not at all ‘teacherly’, as I imagined she would be. Perhaps sensing my dread, she even teased me a little at the beginning of my talk when I stumbled over my words. Although I was panicky, I read beautifully and the talk went quite well, but this in no way ameliorated the overwhelming effect the incident had on me. Every time something like this happened, I hoped the shyness might miraculously go away. It never did. It was my own private agony and I couldn’t begin to explain to anyone else the excruciating pain it was causing me.

7
    A LONDON NANNY
    T he year before I completed my training, my family had moved to another Lancashire village called Ribchester. I hadn’t been at all sad to leave Barrowford for Ribchester—my friends had already left—and departing Lancashire permanently wasn’t a wrench either. So, at