Read The Wolf in the Attic for Free Online Page B

not since I got chased down Walton Street by a crowd of the local children who threw stones at me and shouted names and I got home crying and with a lump on my head. I think I still spoke English with an accent back then, and they called me a dirty Jew and other things, but I’m not Jewish, and what if I were anyway?
    Now I speak the same as everyone else, my Greekness quite gone, and I am glad and sad equally. And father hired Miss Hawcross to educate me in how to be an English girl, though I would still quite like to go to school like normal children, and perhaps once they got to know me they would not think I was just some dirty foreigner anymore. But they don’t frighten me as they once did, as I am quite tall now, and I stand my ground and clench my fists and tell them to go to the Devil, and I am very good at throwing stones and hitting what I aim at. But father does not know that of course. He says only guttersnipes call names and throw stones.
    But at least the house is mine to explore. The upper rooms were closed off when we let Elsie and Mrs Bramley go, and I was told to keep out of the top floor, because of the dust and so on, and now up there the rooms are full only of a dim silence, with white sheets draped on all the tatty old furniture, and the air is always damp. It is a ghostly place, in a way, but I am not afraid. I have seen worse things than ghosts, and if one were to appear to me, I should have so many questions to ask of it that it would have no time to groan and moan and shake its chains.
     
     
    T HERE IS ONE place in the house where I have never been, because father has expressly forbidden me to go there. And also because it is difficult to get to. But I have thought on it a lot lately, ever since the meetings of the Committee started to become more frequent. The house has become busier, but not in the good way that it was when Elsie was lighting fires in every room of a morning, and all the drapes were pulled back to let the light in, and the lamps were lit all over the place. This is different, the cold busyness of a bus station or a waiting room, with strange faces and loud voices.
     
     
    L AST WEEK, I was creeping about the lower landing, and I found a man using father’s chamber-pot, while still talking loudly to the people downstairs. He was not ashamed or taken aback when he saw me and Pie, but grinned a little sheepishly, and went about his business before replacing the sloshing pot by father’s bed.
    ‘All full up down below,’ he said, and he rubbed my head as he passed me on the landing, so close I could smell the whisky on his breath.
    It was at that moment that I knew I had to find a place all of my own in the house, or I think I would go mad.
     
     
    A BOVE THE SILENT rooms on the third floor there is an attic. I know this because I have stood outside and studied the house, the way you study a person’s face to tell if they are telling the truth or a lie. There are no proper windows, but there is a skylight on the street side and another on the garden side of the roof, and why put in skylights if there is nothing to light? So there is a space up there where I have never been, and it would be so remote and private from the rest of the house that as soon as I have guessed at its existence, I know I must go there. I will make an expedition of it, or a secret mission. I will be Odysseos, creeping about the hut of the Cyclops.
     
     
    I PICK MY moment carefully, and set my plan in motion. It would not do to get caught. I am deep enough in father’s bad books already. I wait until there is a dull blue day when he is off to London, and after Miss Hawcross’s lessons are done.
     
     
    S HE STAYS ON a while on afternoons like these, to keep an eye on me while father is away, but I can tell that she doesn’t like to be sitting silent with me in the dank old house, with no noise but the occasional crackle of the fire in the front room and the ticking of the clocks. Outside, the