Read Online Helpless by Marianne Marsh - Free Book Online Page A

dark it was going to become.

Chapter Fourteen
     
     
    W ith a family that did not encourage reading or in fact have any books in the house, I found the written word difficult to decipher. But when, in my seventh year, our teacher showed the class the illustrations in Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit before reading us extracts of his adventures, I was captivated. Those illustrations, which showed the magical world of furry, feathered and smooth creatures dressed in Victorian clothes, who inhabited a fantasy animal kingdom, cast a spell over me. For the first time I hung on to every word of a story and listened open mouthed to the escapades of Peter’s family. For once the words did not just float meaninglessly in the air above my head.
    When more of those books were read to the class I saw pictures of dancing frogs, talking ducks, squirrels and birds; in fact every animal that I sought out in the fields was in the pages of Beatrix Potter’s books. Reading might have been difficult for me to master, but in the moments of peace that I got to myself I let my imagination run riot.

    I made up my own tales of another furry family, the mice that, instead of living at the root of a very big fir tree as Peter’s had done, wintered behind our skirting boards and spent their summers in the golden cornfields.
    I gave them names: as opposed to Mopsy, Flopsy, Cottontail and Peter they were Millie, Maisy, Squeaker and Jim. I painted pictures of them in my head and dressed them in modern clothes. I made up stories of their lives, sending the little ones to mice school, the father to work, and had the mother always baking cakes.
    I tried to share my stories with my mother, only to hear words like ‘vermin’ and ‘traps’ so I decided to confide in my dolls instead.
    I would sit my two rag dolls and Belinda down, pour their pretend tea into buttercup heads and give them imaginary cakes on tiny stones. My fingers would move in time with my mouth as, using a cotton reel and strands of wool, I knitted them rope scarves.
    Until I grew to know the man next door I only had them to confide in, but it was not long before he was listening to my stories too, as we sat by the pond.
    He heard them with seeming interest and praised them. He told me that when I was older I should write them down and, encouraged, I looked for more to interest my admiring audience of one.
    At the farm where my father worked there was a dilapidated old single-storey cottage where farm equipment was stored and birds built nests in the rafters. Once, when the farm was just a smallholding, it had housed the family that had worked the land. I first asked questions of the farmer, my father and the man next door, and then started weaving stories about how life had been many years before I was born.
    I volunteered to collect the eggs, and once I arrived at the farm I would first slip into the cottage’s dark interior and search there for clues to how the people had once lived.
    There was a dark yellow stain streaked with grey and black, which started in the middle of the wall and rose all the way up to the rafters. I knew that was where the old log-fuelled cooking range had once stood. I liked to imagine the family cooking their meals on it and, once they had finished, opening the top to warm the room.
    Each time I entered the house I wove more and more stories about them all, then placed them between the covers of the book in my imagination.
    In my mind’s eye there was a dark-haired woman, two sons about my age and a man who was at home every night. I visualized them sitting happily together eating their evening meal while the warm glow of an oil lamp radiated through the room.
    The man next door had told me that life was hard then and that working people only had the Sabbath and Christmas Day set aside for rest.
    So knowing that, I made my make-believe family work hard six days a week but on Sundays they donned their best clothes and went to church in a horse-drawn