The Girl from Station X Read Online Free Page A

grew cold. I loved my
grandmother’s green wooden swing by the monkey puzzle tree, on which a couple of adults could sit facing each other, her sloping lawn with its low box hedges leading to the swimming pool and
her old magnolia tree which bloomed there in spring, its petals like huge blobs of cream.
    I specially loved the woods where my grandmother and I walked. In spring they were full of primroses, bluebells, azaleas and rhododendrons. I made Gran play a game called ‘The
Trehernes’, about a married couple I had invented who lived in Cornwall, had eight children and ran a riding school. My grandmother was Mrs Treherne on a grey mare, except of course we were
on foot. As Mrs Treherne, my grandmother made occasional remarks, while I took charge of the story. I was Jane, the Trehernes’ third daughter. I had a bay pony, Tinker, and a seven-year-old
twin, Jack. My grandmother was always in a good temper, always relaxed.
    By the stream in the heart of the woods was a shed with a pump inside that beat like a tom-tom. When I heard it, I changed our game to ‘Deerfoot in the Forest’, based on a book about
Red Indians that my mother had had as a child in America. My grandmother and I slipped and slithered in the mud down to the stream where the wild garlic grew. Her West Highland dog Kenny went off
hunting rabbits. His white coat became filthy. Back at Knowle, he was dried with an old towel on the veranda. Just inside the veranda door was a bowl made of thick china – cream, blue and
brown – with words going round it in capitals:
LOVE ME LOVE MY DOG.
    How I adored being with my grandmother! I loved the way she would stand still in the middle of a room, or in a field, or in a bit of her garden, humming, as though there was never any hurry. I
loved her smell of sweet talcum powder, the same carnation smell as her little soaps. But later I overheard my father telling a friend: ‘Anne doesn’t like her mother’s house
because of what happened there.’
    Sometimes I felt guilty that I loved Knowle, and my grandmother, so much.
    On the afternoon of my seventh birthday, 24 November 1956, my three brothers and I are at Knowle while our parents are still a few hours away, packing – we have left
North Heath forever and will stay with my grandmother till our new house, nearer hers in Sussex, is ready. Deeny has hurt her back, and we have a temporary nanny.
    Leaving my two little brothers – the new one is a baby of six months – in the care of Nanny B, whom we like, and who has looked after us before, my grandmother takes Raymond and me
for a walk to see her pigs. She knows that Raymond is able to climb the low fence she’s had put round the swimming pool to protect our two-year-old brother Nicky, because Raymond, who’s
five, boasts about it.
    ‘You’re too big to fall into swimming pools,’ I hear her reply.
    We see the baby pigs, protected from their mother – who otherwise might lie on them and kill them – by a manger with a warm, rosy light, then set off back through the wood, and
across the big field home. After our walk, my grandmother helps me take off my wellingtons, then I join my brother Nicky in the schoolroom, where my mother as a girl had had lessons with a
governess. I make him play horses, using a piece of string I found by the pigs, and we gallop up and down the corridor, each time passing two pictures of a child being stolen by gypsies. The second
shows it being reunited with its family, but I don’t believe it. The first picture, of the stolen child in white garments, surrounded by gypsies with cruel faces, two pulling at its clothes,
sticks in my mind.
    Where is Raymond? It’s so dark outside. I open the door to my grandmother’s dining room, just across from the schoolroom. There is my birthday tea; my cake with white icing, a pink
sugar rose and seven candles. But there is no one to eat it. A row of portraits, of women with waxy yellow faces, stare down at me. All the