Read A Mother's Gift for Free Online

basin lined with suet pastry and covered it with a pastry lid. Deftly she tied the whole in a pudding cloth and lowered it into the pan of water already boiling on the fire. Sighing with satisfaction she stood back and watched it before drawing it slightly away from the heat on to the bar. By, it was lovely being able to cook proper meals again, she thought, it had been such a long time since she had had the chance.
    ‘Tell Billy to fill a couple of buckets for old Mrs Scott,’ she said as Katie came out of the pantry where the only tap in the house was. ‘And tell our Betty to get Willie to come and get a couple of buckets the night.’ Betty was one of Katie’s younger sisters who lived with her own parents. The way they were giving away their concessionary coal would leave them short before the next load was due, thought Katie but she nodded. It was the way of the rows.
    ‘Righto.’
    Katie ran off down the row to the school. Only a year and a bit before she could leave school altogether and get a job. She couldn’t wait for the day. It was the only way she was going to get on now that there was no chance of getting a secondary education.
    Behind her, Billy Wright leaned on the shovel and watched her disappear around the corner. She was a bonny lass, he thought, a real bonny lass. If she was a bit older; if they were both a bit older and he had a job he might ask her to go out with him. Aye well, time would remedy that, wouldn’t it? He walked up the alley carrying the two buckets of coal for Mrs Scott before taking Kitty’s yard broom and sweeping up the dust left on the pavement.
    He was due at the Technical Institute in an hour for his class in mining surveying. He intended to be ready when the pits went back to work. He wasn’t going to work filling coal for long though. Nor even as a hewer on the coal face. No, he was going to be a surveyor and then maybe even go into management.
    He climbed on to the bus for Bishop Auckland an hour later, washed and spruced up but with his dark hair uncovered for he had decided not to wear his cap. A cap was the mark of a miner or another lowly occupation and he meant to start as he intended to go on. And in good time he would marry Katie Benfield, he promised himself. After all, there was no hurry, they had all the time in the world.
    ‘Gran says for you to tell our Willie to come round for a couple of buckets of coal tonight,’ Katie said to her sister when she found her in the schoolyard during the break. Betty looked at her as she would at a stranger or at least someone she didn’t know very well. She always did, all Katie’s sisters did and it made her feel uncomfortable.
    ‘We heard Grandda had got taken on with the safety men ,’ said Betty. ‘Me mam says he’s got hair on his toenails, he’s that lucky.’
    For a brief moment Katie pictured Noah’s toenails with hair sprouting from them and her lips twitched. She looked at her sister, noting her limp, straight hair, how thin and pale she was. She didn’t look like a Benfield, she took after Mam’s family. And they were mostly sickly.
    Betty sniffed. ‘We don’t want any favours, like,’ she said. ‘That’s what me mam says.’
    ‘What do you mean, no favours? We’re the same family, aren’t we?’
    Betty stared at her and sniffed once again. ‘Oh aye, I suppose so,’ she said as the bell rang. She went off, calling to a friend to wait for her, not even saying goodbye to Katie who was left feeling sad.
    As she sat through the afternoon of needlework class at which she was hopelessly inept, followed by history, which she liked well enough, the thought kept coming back to her. Why did her sisters not count her as real family? That was what she wanted really, to be counted as one of them.
    She had asked her grandma once why things were like they were but the old woman had only shaken her head. The truth was Kitty didn’t get on too well with her daughter-in-law and when she had taken Katie, Hannah