Read Great Meadow for Free Online Page A

me wanted to and another part didn’t. Do you know what I mean?’
    â€˜Yes,’ I said. I did but I didn’t . . . and I felt a bit sad myself, but after all it was all falling down anyway, and terribly smelly, and she was dead and had no kith or kin to claim it. So I just wandered down the hill to the ruins and poked in them with a stick, and underneath a long bit of stripy rag stuff I found a curious round thing. And the really funny point was that it was the big spotted shell with open lips and Bombay written on it which she had showed us years ago when we helped her with some wood. So I took it. Because perhaps she would have liked me to take it and not leave it lying all alone up on the Downs, because she had taken care of it and showed it to us as a special treat. Her son had sent it to her. But he was dead. No kith or kin.
    We walked slowly down the track just as the sheep came spilling over the ridge above us, all baaing and skittering with skinny legs. They started nibbling away at the place where the caravan had stood, and the big sheep dog lifted his leg on the rusty milk churn which was lying onits side in the grass . . . and Mr Dick, the shepherd, waved to us and went on with his flock. It was as if no one ever had seen the witch, or known that her caravan had stood there. It was a rather sad feeling. So I just held the shell to my chest and we went on home.

Chapter 3
    The very first sign of all that it was about to be Christmas was when Lally took down the big mixing-bowl and she and our mother started to make the pudding. It took a long time because all the fruit had to be cut up into little bits, and my sister and I had to de-seed the sultanas that had been steeping in warm rum, which was fearfully boring even though we were allowed to eat a few, without making pigs of ourselves, as they said.
    Then it all got lumped together, somehow, by our mother, who was very particular about that part, and everybody had to have a stir with the wooden spoon for luck. The best moment of all was when we scattered the lucky charms into the mixture. They were made of silver, because otherwise you had to wrap them in a titchy bit of paper and you could quite easily swallow them unknowing and they’d pass right through you, Lally said, and then you wouldn’t have any luck in the New Year – which was what it was all about.
    There was a thimble, and if you got that it meant you’d be a spinster, and a button, which if you found it meant that you’d be a bachelor, and a pig for greed, and a horse-shoe for extra luck and so on. And best of all two three-penny pieces which were real silver and boiled and polished so there weren’t any germs or anything. And then we all stirred each once more.
    It took ages and smelled lovely and we didn’t see it again until Christmas Day, which was years away. Well, along time, because our mother always made the pudding in October, and it was kept in a dark place to get ripe.
    That was the first sign. But it was so early that sometimes we forgot all about Christmas until the next sign, which was The Photograph.
    Every year our father had a special half-page photograph taken somewhere very beautiful in the snow for the Christmas edition of
The Times
. Quite near the time he would be fussing about like anything about where there was a good fall of snow that year. Or even a really heavy hoar-frost would do, because the picture had to have snow, or anyway a very wintry feeling about it for Christmas. But the trouble was, it didn’t always snow at that time, and he got into a terrible fuss and kept on telephoning people all over the British Isles asking them how their snow was. And quite often there wasn’t. And that made him very jumpy indeed so he kept on sending his photographers everywhere just to sit and wait until something happened. And they got jolly fed up, they said, sitting about in the Pennines or up in the Shetlands or down in Land’s