Read Ellie for Free Online Page B

of them looked happy enough. She wondered where the rest of the children from Bancroft Road had been billeted and whether any of them felt as desperate as she did.
    Miss Gilbert had made her stay in the house all day yesterday helping with the cleaning, so Ellie knew nothing more of the town than she did on her arrival on Friday. But glancing around here at the congregation, she thought they looked like the people on the posters in stations advertising ‘Bracing Skegness’ or ‘Wonderful Weston-super-Mare’, with rosy scrubbed faces, no missing teeth and straight backs.
    Seeing all these healthy, happy families dressed in their Sunday best, Ellie could appreciate why her mother had sent her away. Had she been billeted with the motherly lady in a blue polka-dotted dress with artificial daisies on her straw hat, surrounded by her five children, she’d be more than content. But Miss Gilbert wasn’t motherly in any way.
    Mr Gilbert had barely spoken to her yesterday, but Ellie felt this was more because he was unused to children than from real nastiness. She had heard him speaking to the stonemason out in the yard and his tone was that of a reserved, private man, not another tyrant. As she had seen so little of him, it was hard to make a real judgement, but she had the distinct impression he didn’t like his sister any more than Ellie did.
    In Ellie’s view Miss Gilbert was not right in the head. Aside from her inability to speak unless she was squawking out an order, she was obsessed by cleaning. She never stopped, scrubbing the table, polishing, dusting as if possessed. She’d given Ellie the cutlery to polish, and even though they were soon gleaming, Miss Gilbert inspected each fork and rejected them all, saying she’d missed parts of the prongs. When that task was done to Miss Gilbert’s satisfaction, Ellie was sent to scrub the outside lavatory. Compared to the lavatory in Alder Street, and considering it was used only by the stonemason and Mr Gilbert’s apprentice, it was clean enough for almost anyone. But Ellie was ordered to scrub the pan, walls, floor and even the wooden rafters above the cistern with disinfectant. Then she had to cut newspaper into sheets exactly four by six inches and thread them on a string to hang from the door. Unfortunately the newspaper was full of interesting snippets and Ellie had her ears boxed for lingering over the task.
    Much of the house was still a mystery. She’d helped change the sheets on Miss Gilbert’s bed. This was a large but austere room at the back of the house, with old, heavily polished furniture protected by crocheted cloths. Mr Gilbert slept in one of the front rooms, though she hadn’t had as much as a glimpse in there. Aside from the bathroom, there were two more unused rooms on this floor and attics above that, reached by a tiny staircase.
    Downstairs there was a living-room, parlour and the shop, but it was those closed doors behind the shop which daunted her most. A surreptitious peep over the yard gates had shown a door leading from the side road into one of these rooms, and as she’d heard muted voices coming from it, this had to be the Chapel of Rest. It made her flesh crawl to think a body was lying in there. Each time she looked at Mr Gilbert she wondered how a man could earn a living dealing with such things.
    Worse still than the cleaning and the creepiness of the house, was the hunger. Breakfast at seven was a slice of bread and margarine; at twelve she was given a fish paste sandwich, and the dinner served at five in the evening consisted only of a thin slice of ham, half a tomato and a dollop of mashed potato. She watched hungrily as Mr Gilbert ate four thick slices of ham, a fried egg, mushrooms and a mountain of potatoe, plus almost half a loaf of bread spread with thick butter. When she tentatively asked if she could have a slice of bread, Miss Gilbert raised her eyebrows in horror and said she’d ‘had quite sufficient’.
    Last night,