Avalanche of Daisies by Beryl Kingston

Author:Beryl Kingston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

Aunt Sis – or to give her her full and proper title, Mrs Cecily Tamworth – had lived in her cramped flat above the newsagent’s ever since Dunkirk, maintaining that now she was on her own, two rooms and an outside WC were more than enough for her to keep clean. ‘Just so long as I’ve got room fer me books an’ papers,’ she would say, whenever her brother suggested something better. ‘That’ll do me fine.’ As the years passed and her loss became more bearable, she gradually acquired the few creature comforts that were now indispensable to her, a sagging armchair, eased to accommodate her bulk, a padded stool for her aching feet, the bottle of three star brandy on the dresser to cheer and sustain her, the box of Havana cigars beside it to mellow off the day. It was a solitary life but it was what she wanted.

Nevertheless when her brother Bob came round to see her, anxious because Steve’s wife had nowhere to live and explaining that Heather had ‘been a bit tricky’, she agreed almost without hesitation that the kid could muck in with her ‘for the time being’.

‘Won’t be partic’ly comfortable,’ she pointed out, ‘but we can’t have her wandering the streets.’

It was a warning she felt she had to repeat when she and Barbara reached the front door.

‘It ain’t exactly a palace,’ she explained, as they climbed the stairs towards it. ‘Just the two rooms. Enough fer me books an’ papers. But it’ll do you a turn till you can find something better. We got the camp bed for you. Remember? The one you had round Mabel’s.’

Barbara remembered only too well. Lying in that crowded bedroom, feeling unwanted. But she went where she was led and didn’t say anything. They reached the landing, which was as dark as the stairs, and Sis opened a door and led her into the light of an extraordinarily cluttered room.

At first sight it looked like a cross between an untidy library and an even more untidy newsagent’s. There seemed to be shelves above every item of furniture, all crammed with books, leaning into one another, piled on top of one another, heaped upon heaps, and every item of furniture was covered too, in files and newspapers and untidy piles of letters. There was a bureau beside the fireplace, sagging under the weight of the paper it contained, a dresser that was doing duty as a bookcase, an ancient chaise longue and a battered armchair with newspapers where other people would have had cushions. And hemming everything in, a vast quantity of dark heavy cloth, brown velvet curtains looped at the window, bronze chenille on the table, a faded draft excluder across the door, once red baize but now blotched and faded, even a wine-red mantel cover above the fireplace, trailing brown tassels and supporting a collection of china knick-knacks, a clock, a brandy bottle, a stone jam-jar full of spills and yet another letter rack. It was overwhelming.

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