Read Online The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough - Free Book Online Page A

playground, howling.
    Meggie held her head up and kept her eyes dry. She was learning. It
didn’t
matter what anyone else thought, it didn’t, it didn’t! The other girls avoided her, half because they were frightened of Bob and Jack, half because the word had got around their parents and they had been instructed to keep away; being thick with the Clearys usually meant trouble of some kind. So Meggie passed the last few days of school “in Coventry,” as they called it, which meant she was totally ostracized. Even Sister Agatha respected the new policy, and took her rages out on Stuart instead.
    As were all birthdays among the little ones if they fell on a school day, Meggie’s birthday celebration was delayed until Saturday, when she received the longed-for willow pattern tea set. It was arranged on a beautifully crafted ultramarine table and chairs made in Frank’s nonexistent spare time, and Agnes was seated on one of the two tiny chairs wearing a new blue dress made in Fee’s nonexistent spare time. Meggie stared dismally at the blue-and-white designs gamboling all around each small piece; at the fantastic trees with their funny puffy blossoms, at the ornate little pagoda, at the strangely stilled pair of birds and the minute figures eternally fleeing across the kinky bridge. It had lost every bit of its enchantment. But dimly she understood why the family had beggared itself to get her the thing they thought dearest to her heart. So she dutifully made tea for Agnes in the tiny square teapot and went through the ritual as if in ecstasy. And she continued doggedly to use it for years, never breaking or so much as chipping a single piece. No one ever dreamed that she loathed the willow pattern tea set, the blue table and chairs, and Agnes’s blue dress.
     
     
    Two days before that Christmas of 1917 Paddy brought home his weekly newspaper and a new stack of books from the library. However, the paper for once took precedence over the books. Its editors had conceived a novel idea based on the fancy American magazines which very occasionally found their way to New Zealand; the entire middle section was a feature on the war. There were blurred photographs of the Anzacs storming the pitiless cliffs at Gallipoli, long articles extolling the bravery of the Antipodean soldier, features on all the Australian and New Zealand winners of the Victoria Cross since its inception, and a magnificent full-page etching of an Australian light horse cavalry-man mounted on his charger, saber at the ready and long silky feathers pluming from under the turned-up side of his slouch hat.
    At first opportunity Frank seized the paper and read the feature hungrily, drinking in its jingoistic prose, his eyes glowing eerily.
    “Daddy, I want to go!” he said as he laid the paper down reverently on the table.
    Fee’s head jerked around as she slopped stew all over the top of the stove, and Paddy stiffened in his Windsor chair, his book forgotten.
    “You’re too young, Frank,” he said.
    “No, I’m not! I’m seventeen, Daddy, I’m a man! Why should the Huns and Turks slaughter our men like pigs while I’m sitting here safe and sound? It’s more than time a Cleary did his bit.”
    “You’re under age, Frank, they won’t take you.”
    “They will if you don’t object,” Frank countered quickly, his dark eyes fixed on Paddy’s face.
    “But I do object. You’re the only one working at the moment and we need the money you bring in, you know that.”
    “But I’ll be paid in the army!”
    Paddy laughed. “The ‘soldier’s shilling’ eh? Being a blacksmith in Wahine pays a lot better than being a soldier in Europe.”
    “But I’ll be over there, maybe I’ll get the chance to be something better than a blacksmith! It’s my only way out, Daddy.”
    “Nonsense! Good God, boy, you don’t know what you’re saying. War is terrible. I come from a country that’s been at war for a thousand years, so I know what I’m saying.