Read Online Lottie Project by Jacqueline Wilson - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jacqueline Wilson
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dolls?’ said Jo.
She used to buy me lots of Barbies with all their different outfits and we’d dress them up and drive them round in their Cadillac and take them to the disco and make them bop up and down on their tiny high heels. I think Jo liked playing Barbie games just as much as I did. If not more. I wanted to chuck all mine out ages ago but she wouldn’t let me.
‘Store them in a drawer and keep them for
your
daughter,’ she said.
So they’re stored. I took off all their glitzy little outfits and laid them on their backs in my underwear drawer and covered them with bits of old pillow case, playing one last ritual game with them. Mortuaries.
Jo got totally unnerved when she opened the drawer looking for spare socks.
‘Have you come to view the corpses?’ I said.
‘You are a seriously weird child.’
‘It’s coming from a single-parent family,’ I said. ‘I’m seriously deprived. It’s no wonder I’m weird.’
I was only joking of course. I
like
being a select family of two. Jo and me. And that’s the way it’s always going to be.
TOYS AND BOOKS
I CANNOT BELIEVE the toys the children have here! Victor has a dappled rocking horse as big as the old pony in the field behind our cottage at home. It’s such a splendid creature, with a curly mane and a long tail of real horse’s hair, a red saddle and reins and great green rockers. Louisa begs and begs Victor to let her take a turn but he will rarely agree. Once when the children were downstairs with the Mistress I stood staring at the rocking horse. Before I knew what I was doing I had hitched my skirts above my knees and clambered into the saddle. I fingered the curly mane and stroked the smooth shining wood, and then I dared lean forward and rock once, twice, three times. The rockers creaked and I did not dare persist in case they could hear me down below.
Louisa’s china doll seemed to watch with her blue glass eyes. Her painted red lips were open as if she might tell. But I must not be fanciful. She is only a doll. But a beautiful doll all the same, with golden ringlets and three sets of fine clothes. She even has little lace mittens for her tiny china fingers, imagine! I have had to help Louisa on and off with those clothes, stripping the doll right down to her white silk drawers. She has three petticoats, two silk and one flannel, and white cotton stockings and little soft kid shoes, three pairs, in black and grey and pink for parties. Three pairs of shoes for a doll that cannot walk. Rose and Jessie and I have never had soft shoes. We’d run around barefoot in the summer and plod in our old boots throughout the winter. How Rose and Jessie would love Louisa’s dolls, and the dolls’ house with all the furniture – little chairs and tables, a four-poster bed no less, and even a miniature mop and mangle in the scullery!
We had our own halfpenny dolls at home, one each in our Christmas stockings, and we’d sew them little dresses and make them a home in an old wooden crate, the same crate that was once our Frank’s boat and carriage. Sometimes I gave baby Ada-May a ride in that old crate and she crowed with delight . . .
Oh, how I miss her. How I miss Rose and Jessie. I even miss Frank. I miss dear Mother most of all. I write to her once a week, unburdening my heart. I hope Rose reads my letters properly to Mother. She can read well enough when she wants, but she hurries so over the words. Mother was kept at home as a child to mind her own young brothers and sisters so she never learnt to read. She used to marvel after I went to the village school and learnt to spell out words.
Miss Worthbeck let me read aloud to the children on Friday afternoons from wonderful story books,
Alice
and
The Water Babies
and some of Mr Dickens’s books. I do not wish to boast but she once said I had Shining Intelligence.
My Shining Intelligence is tarnishing rapidly now I am a nursery maid.
FAMILY
IT WAS GRANDMA and Grandpa’s Pearl Wedding
She used to buy me lots of Barbies with all their different outfits and we’d dress them up and drive them round in their Cadillac and take them to the disco and make them bop up and down on their tiny high heels. I think Jo liked playing Barbie games just as much as I did. If not more. I wanted to chuck all mine out ages ago but she wouldn’t let me.
‘Store them in a drawer and keep them for
your
daughter,’ she said.
So they’re stored. I took off all their glitzy little outfits and laid them on their backs in my underwear drawer and covered them with bits of old pillow case, playing one last ritual game with them. Mortuaries.
Jo got totally unnerved when she opened the drawer looking for spare socks.
‘Have you come to view the corpses?’ I said.
‘You are a seriously weird child.’
‘It’s coming from a single-parent family,’ I said. ‘I’m seriously deprived. It’s no wonder I’m weird.’
I was only joking of course. I
like
being a select family of two. Jo and me. And that’s the way it’s always going to be.
TOYS AND BOOKS
I CANNOT BELIEVE the toys the children have here! Victor has a dappled rocking horse as big as the old pony in the field behind our cottage at home. It’s such a splendid creature, with a curly mane and a long tail of real horse’s hair, a red saddle and reins and great green rockers. Louisa begs and begs Victor to let her take a turn but he will rarely agree. Once when the children were downstairs with the Mistress I stood staring at the rocking horse. Before I knew what I was doing I had hitched my skirts above my knees and clambered into the saddle. I fingered the curly mane and stroked the smooth shining wood, and then I dared lean forward and rock once, twice, three times. The rockers creaked and I did not dare persist in case they could hear me down below.
Louisa’s china doll seemed to watch with her blue glass eyes. Her painted red lips were open as if she might tell. But I must not be fanciful. She is only a doll. But a beautiful doll all the same, with golden ringlets and three sets of fine clothes. She even has little lace mittens for her tiny china fingers, imagine! I have had to help Louisa on and off with those clothes, stripping the doll right down to her white silk drawers. She has three petticoats, two silk and one flannel, and white cotton stockings and little soft kid shoes, three pairs, in black and grey and pink for parties. Three pairs of shoes for a doll that cannot walk. Rose and Jessie and I have never had soft shoes. We’d run around barefoot in the summer and plod in our old boots throughout the winter. How Rose and Jessie would love Louisa’s dolls, and the dolls’ house with all the furniture – little chairs and tables, a four-poster bed no less, and even a miniature mop and mangle in the scullery!
We had our own halfpenny dolls at home, one each in our Christmas stockings, and we’d sew them little dresses and make them a home in an old wooden crate, the same crate that was once our Frank’s boat and carriage. Sometimes I gave baby Ada-May a ride in that old crate and she crowed with delight . . .
Oh, how I miss her. How I miss Rose and Jessie. I even miss Frank. I miss dear Mother most of all. I write to her once a week, unburdening my heart. I hope Rose reads my letters properly to Mother. She can read well enough when she wants, but she hurries so over the words. Mother was kept at home as a child to mind her own young brothers and sisters so she never learnt to read. She used to marvel after I went to the village school and learnt to spell out words.
Miss Worthbeck let me read aloud to the children on Friday afternoons from wonderful story books,
Alice
and
The Water Babies
and some of Mr Dickens’s books. I do not wish to boast but she once said I had Shining Intelligence.
My Shining Intelligence is tarnishing rapidly now I am a nursery maid.
FAMILY
IT WAS GRANDMA and Grandpa’s Pearl Wedding
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