Read Great Meadow for Free Online Page B

End, because nothing much ever happened, and if it did it wasn’t enough.
    But sometimes, if we were down at the cottage for a weekend, and it suddenly got very frosty, he’d rush down to the village and telephone The Office to get someone down quick sharp before it all went away and the weather changed.
    We were sometimes allowed to go out with him when this happened, which wasn’t very often because Sussex was too mild, he said, and we usually went with a very nice photographer we called Uncle Bill. Of course, he wasn’treally an uncle, not kith and kin or anything, but we had known him for ever and ever – anyway, long before my sister was born even – and we liked him very much and he was called Mr Warhurst. Well, such a fussing. We went off in the O.M. with cameras and tripods and maps and things, and climbed hills, stamped through woods and went to quite far places like Herstmonceux, where there was a beautiful castle, or Ashdown Forest, or Rye. Wherever we found ‘somewhere suitable’ we’d stop and have a terrific picnic with Thermos flasks of hot tea or soup, sausage rolls, meat pies, or cold chicken and hard boiled eggs, and wait for the light to be right. We always had to do this. It never seemed to be just right when we got there. And all the time we were eating or drinking they were looking at the sky through little glass things and shouting numbers at each other and looking for the cloud to be just exactly right – there had to be clouds too, that was very important, because you just had to have them with the sun slanting through. The readers liked that, my father said, especially if they were miles away in places like Africa or India or Ceylon or somewhere very far, and in all the heat, and among all the black men, the photograph would remind them of England.
    When the light was exactly right there was a terrific rushing about and sometimes my sister and I had to go and actually be in the picture to give it ‘interest’. Only, never our faces or fronts, just our backs, and we’d have to drag a big log about, or perhaps carry a heavy bundle of twigs, through the frost or the snow. It was really quite exciting in a way. Anyway, it was for them. My sister gota bit fed up dragging bits of wood about and got cold, and started moaning. I got a bit tired with it all too, but remembered the poor people being terribly hot in Africa or India and in a way that cheered me up. And it cheered us both up to remember that The Photograph was the second sign, which was rather good because it reminded us, you see, of the first sign, the pudding. And that meant Christmas was on its way. Which was even better.
    Of course, about the pudding time we started to save up for presents, which was a bit boring to begin with, but quite nice when you got to the shopping part. I mean, it was boring to have to put half your pocket money – and we only got fourpence each a week – into an empty Vim tin to buy other people things. But it had to be done, so we did it. It was quite a good feeling when the tin got heavier and you began to think what you’d buy everyone. The trouble was that you couldn’t buy people what
you
wanted. You had to buy them what
they
wanted. And Lally, or our mother, was very particular about that when we came to the shopping part. I didn’t know
why
our father wouldn’t have liked a very pretty glass goldfish in a little bowl, with waterlilies painted round it, but our mother said he’d detest it, and much prefer a pair of dull old socks. So I just let them choose in the end. You really couldn’t fight them. My sister wanted to buy a rather nice little clockwork bird for Lally, which wound up and went rushing about pecking things, but she had to get her a stupid bottle of bath salts in the end. It wasn’t worth fighting, you see. Nothing we really liked was ‘suitable’, they said.
    Of course the main thing about Christmas was