Family Feeling by Judith Saxton

Author:Judith Saxton [Judith Saxton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1996-11-14T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

SPRING WAS WELL advanced, Dot thought contentedly as she waved goodbye to Mrs Blishen and mounted her rickety old bicycle. She had wondered how she would bear to see the spears of daffodils and crocus pierce the earth knowing that all this was happening at Plas Tegydd too. Without her. But she did bear it because, strange though it might seem, she was happy in her new life. To be sure she told herself that when it was over she would find herself miraculously restored to Plas Tegydd, but that was not the only reason for her enjoyment. She had been bitterly lonely and she had been denied love. She had believed herself to be undersized and ugly.

No more. How could she, when she was surrounded, at work, by girls equally slight? She had heaps of friends, too, and what was even more surprising, she had admirers! Men liked her and wanted to be with her, and that was heady stuff.

It was not only men who liked her; Mrs Blishen liked her too. Olivia had not been a motherly woman and Miss Edenthorpe had always been remote, but Mrs Blishen was a natural mother who longed for a daughter of her own. She took Dot to her bosom, fed her like a queen, knitted her a garment called a spencer to wear under her uniform when the weather was cold, and generally mothered her.

Dot blossomed. She still missed home and Hywel horribly, but she managed to put both out of her mind for long periods. She rode out into the country as soon as the weather allowed it, and was much impressed with the Norfolk countryside. Not the scenery perhaps, for she was born and bred to the hills and thought the flatness and the east wind unfortunate. It was the richness of the land, the crops one could raise on such fertile soil, which tempted her to start saving for a piece of good Norfolk earth of her own. She never lost sight of her ultimate aim – to return to Wales and buy Plas Tegydd – but she could tell that if she bought land here first, her eventual return home would be in the nature of a Triumph.

It was not easy to save, though. Her friends expected her to buy clothes as they did, and to go with them on the spree. She found that she adored the cinema and loved dancing, enjoyed listening to band concerts in the Castle Gardens on a sunny afternoon, and entered wholeheartedly into the sparking and flirting which young male customers expected a pretty young nippy to take part in.

Sometimes, dressing to go out in her room on Earlham Road, Dot would look at herself in the round mirror which Mrs Blishen had hung on her wall and wonder just who she really was. Was she Dot Evans, who lived here, or was she Dot Tegydd, who came from North Wales? It was not the name which mattered of course, though she had denied the name Tegydd because it was Tom’s name.

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