Read Online Guardian Nurse by Joyce Dingwell - Free Book Online Page B

place, Uplands? I mean like West is?’
    ‘Oh no. Never was. The older Trents were town people, they inherited Uplands and did their best with it, but it wasn’t a first thing with them as with the Wests. Trev likewise. He never had the feel for land as Burn did. I’d say he’s about given up now. He runs a prosperous travel agency in at Wagga Wagga and only commutes to the homestead when he feels like a spin. Tourism suits Trev, he was always one for fields afar. He’s away now.’
    No, he’s back, Frances knew, but she didn’t get round to saying it. Jim was building a fence of potato, a field of peas, and he was showing her the vulnerable parts of a boundary. The jackeroos came in with their knowledge, but made more a lark of it. Someone flicked a piece of sausage and someone flicked the same back, and the fun was on.
    Frances agreed to listen to recordings tonight as tomorrow, she said sternly, she was really determined to start serious instruction with Jason.
    ‘Wish you’d been my teacher,’ Toby said feelingly.
    The next morning was spent on more poster filling, but in the afternoon Frances took the paints firmly away, much to Jason’s grievance.
    ‘I was going to paint the hills,’ he protested.
    ‘Pink?’
    ‘Yellow!’
    ‘Why, Jason?’ It was the time now for this.
    ‘Because it looks good.’
    ‘But you wouldn’t really like your hills bright pink, would you?’ She ruffled his hair. ‘Nor yellow?’
    Jason said stubbornly that he would. He had stuck out his little lip because of the forbidden paints.
    Frances brought out her equipment. It had been highly recommended and carefully chosen; mostly Montessori-inspired, it leaned heavily on the principle of freedom and self-discipline. Most of the occupations could have been handled by five-year-olds, but Jason though now half past seven seemed to have missed the years arriving there.
    At first he glowered down on the thousand-bead chain, which comprised of hooking ten strips of ten beads each together until they numbered a thousand. But when Frances broke in at the first hundred and gave him an identifying numeral, he began to work eagerly for his second hundred, his third.
    That afternoon they pondered over the inlaid wooden puzzles together; later an assortment of bells to make an octave—all kindergarten stuff, and this boy should be beyond that, but right from the beginning it was obvious that Jason, once he had conquered each step, would look further ahead. He might be three or four years behind in instruction, but in one day he had caught up with the pre-school he had missed.
    He enjoyed it, too, he even abided the messier practical life activity t hat most splurge-minded four-year-olds delight in but which only wrinkled Jason’s nose, although he still performed it. This was the production of a plastic jug of water and a sponge. The jug was marked in large writing Nice Clean Water. Jason was to dean the table top, then pour the water into another container marked Old Dirty Water.
    ‘That was silly, France,’ he protested when he had finished.
    She smiled at a little boy leaving the status of small time derisively behind.
    ‘You made a good job of the table, though. How about these numbered rods? You set them out like this.’
    That absorbed him for the rest of the afternoon.
    It was almost time, Frances thought quite excitedly that night, to tell Burn West to send for the correspondence lessons that she was to supervise. She planned to try the Reading game tomorrow, she felt sure Jason would lap it up thirstily.
    Jason did. Adopting her college methods of H. for the out-of-breath sounds, W. for the windy ones, S. for the snaky fellows, she found Jason barely one step behind her all the way. Yes, the child was definitely bright.
    ‘When do I read a book?’ asked Jason. He already not only looked at CAT as the symbol of a small, furry animal, he actually understood it. And DOG. Tomorrow Frances planned the more difficult ‘ch’,