Read Started Early, Took My Dog for Free Online Page B

problem, started off in rep when she was eighteen. The ingénue. (Rote learning at school, of course, out of fashion now.) Different play every week, knew all her lines and everyone else’s as well. She had once, long ago, just to prove she could, learned the whole of The Three Sisters by heart, and she was only playing Natasha!
    ‘Senile old bat,’ she heard someone say yesterday. It was true everything was dimming. The lights are going out all over Europe. Suffer the little children . Should she find a policeman? Or phone 999? It seemed an awfully dramatic thing to do.
    The last thing she’d done for the telly was a Casualty where she’d played an old dear who had manned an ack-ack gun in the war and who’d died of hypothermia in a high-rise flat, which led to a lot of hand-wringing from the characters ( How can this happen in this day and age? This woman defended her country in the war . Et cetera). Of course she wasn’t really old enough to play the role. She was still a child during the war, could only remember certain awful things about it, Mother harrying her into the shelter in the middle of the night, the smell of damp earth inside. Hull took a terrible beating.
    Flat-footed Father was given a desk job in the Army Catering Corps. Not much fish to sell during the war anyway, trawlers requisitioned by the navy. The ones that kept on fishing were blown out of the water, fishermen’s bodies coiling down into the cold, icy depths. Those are pearls that were his eyes . She had played Miranda at school. Have you thought about the stage, Matilda? Her headmistress didn’t think she was much good for anything else. Not exactly academically inclined, are you, Matilda?
    Tilly wished she had been old enough to fight in the war, to be a bold girl on an ack-ack gun.
    The producers of Collier had seduced her in the Club at the Ivy over a cocktail called the Twinkle, rather disturbing nomenclature for Tilly as that was the name her prudish mother assigned to female genitalia. Tilly had always rather liked the word ‘vagina’, it sounded like a swotty girl or a new found land.
    When she had first spotted her, the little girl was skipping along, singing, ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’. The anthem of children everywhere. Made Tilly think of her mother again. The little girl made fists of her hands (so tiny!) and every time she sang the word ‘twinkle’ she opened them out, like little starfish. The girl was in tune, perfect pitch, someone should have told her mother that the little thing had a gift. Someone should have said something.
    When Tilly saw them again, ten minutes later, the poor child was no longer singing. The mother – a brutal woman with crude tattoos and a mobile phone clamped to her ear – was yelling at her, ‘Would you just shut the fuck up, Courtney, you’re getting on my tits!’ She was furious, pulling her along and shouting at her. You knew what happened to children like that when they got home. Behind closed doors. Child cruelty. Snipping off all the little buds so that they could never blossom.
    A little black thing among the snow . That was Blake, wasn’t it? Not that the ‘Twinkle,Twinkle’ little girl was black. Quite the opposite, as if she never saw the sun. Crying ‘weep! weep!’ in notes of woe . It was surprising more children didn’t have rickets. Perhaps they did. Tilly’s grandmother had had rickets, there was a photograph of her as a child, the only photograph of her, taken in a studio in some bleak, flat part of the East Riding. I by the tide of Humber would complain . Her grandmother, three years old if she was a day, had little bowed legs in boots, your heart wept for the past. You can’t change the past, only the future, and the only place you could change the future was in the present. That’s what they said. Tilly didn’t think she’d ever changed anything. Except her mind. Ha, ha. Very droll, Matilda .
    Collier had turned out not to be so ‘amusing’, after