Things a Bright Girl Can Do by Sally Nicholls

Author:Sally Nicholls
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448188826
Publisher: Andersen Press Ltd

A Storm in a Hobnailed Boot

IT WAS A rainy Saturday, the worst sort of day. All of the Swancotts hated rain. The children, cooped up with nothing to do and nowhere to go, fought and made trouble and got under everyone’s feet. Nell’s mother was in a foul temper because the floor needed mopping and the windows washing, and the blacks leaded, and how could she do any of that with all the children here? Dot and Bernie, catching her bad temper, quarrelled noisily in the corner over nothing at all, and Dot pinched Bernie on the arm and Bernie pulled her hair, and Dot screeched and knocked the cotton-reel Johnnie was playing with off the little table on his high chair, and Johnnie began to cry and woke Siddy, who started to howl.

‘Bleeding hell!’ cried their mother. ‘Can’t I get a moment’s peace in here? Shut your gobs, the lot of you, before I shut them for you!’ And she handed Siddy to Dot, lifted Johnnie out of the high chair, and shooed the younger children into the bedroom.

‘And don’t come out till you can behave yourselves!’ she yelled.

That left Nell and Bill, Nell cutting the mould out of a bucket of potatoes her mother had bought cheap at the market, and Bill toiling over a pair of Bernie’s boots. The sole had come away at the toe, and flapped about when you shook the boot. Obviously Bernie couldn’t wear them out in the rain, so equally obviously someone had to mend them.

Boots were Nell’s father’s job. He had a tin box full of scraps of leather, and a shoemaker’s needle, and hobnails, and a little tin of dubbin for waterproofing the leather. As the man of the family, this job now fell to Bill, but Bill, it seemed, didn’t have the first idea how to mend a pair of boots. He was sitting by the range staring glumly at them. At last, he pulled out the leather needle and, rather doubtfully, began to unwind the thread.

Nell, also in a foul mood, had been waiting for this. Why should she be stuck chopping potatoes when Bill, who didn’t have a clue what he was doing, was allowed to do her father’s work?

‘You don’t want to sew it,’ she said scornfully. ‘The hobnails’ve come out – see there. You got to nail it back on. Fancy you not knowing that!’

Bill flushed. He was sixteen and three-quarters, which wasn’t at all an easy thing to be in November 1914. Several of his older friends had already joined up, and had come back from the Recruiting Office to swank about it to the girls and the younger boys. They had made it very clear to Bill that men joined the army, and little boys stayed at home with their mothers and sisters. Bill’s father, indirectly, had rather exacerbated this view of things. Bill adored his soldier father, and from early childhood had loved to hear his stories of army life, and the Boers, and the ‘natives’ in Africa.

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