The Lion Tamer’s Daughter Read Online Free

wringing her hands and telling everyone she couldn’t think what was going to become of us.
    What became of me was that my grandmother got a job cooking for a rich woman in a big house somewhere out in the country called Theston Manor. My grandmother went for an interview and explained about me, and this woman—Miss van Deering, her name was—said I could come too provided I kept out of her way. I think she might have had her own reasons. Because of the bombing they were sending all the kids out of London—thousands and thousands of them. Evacuees, they called them, and they were going round telling anyone out in the country who’d got a bit of spare room that they’d got to have some. There was certainly plenty of spare room at Theston Manor, but Miss van Deering didn’t want any evacuees there if she could help it. She was the sort who likes everything just so, and a pack of London kids wouldn’t have been that. Maybe she thought that having one kid there already would mean she didn’t have to have any more. If so, it worked, or something did. The people looking for places left her alone.
    2. Miss van Deering
    I was at Theston Manor for the rest of the war and a bit after, until I was sixteen, and if you’d asked me afterward I’d have told you that in all that time I’d met Miss van Deering just the once. Really met, I mean, to talk to, alone. I saw her in church on Sundays because she passed quite close on her way out. We sat at the back and she had her own pew, third on the right in front, and of course we used to wait for the gentry and the people who wanted to think they were gentry to leave first. As she passed us she used to nod and give a tight little smile to show she’d spotted we were there. She was a small woman, plump but neat, with silver hair and a soft round face. I used to think that she was like one of those cats you see, sitting in the sun with its paws drawn in under it, looking as if it’s got the world exactly the way it wants and you’d better not mess around with it.
    The time I met her happened like this. It would have been early in the summer holidays and I must have been coming up twelve. When the weather was OK I was supposed to help Mr. Frostle in the garden, if you could call it helping, because I was pretty useless at anything he gave me to do. Tuppence an hour I was paid, and I wasn’t really worth that, but it meant I finished up with three shillings at the end of the week. Then I had all the long afternoons to fill up. Theston village wasn’t that far off, where I went to school, and there were other kids amusing themselves down there, but I wasn’t the sort to make friends, so I was on my own.
    Now I’d better try and give you some idea of what the Manor was like. It was the sort of place you see in ads for Bentleys and Jaguars and such. There were twenty-eight bedrooms, not counting the attics where me and my grandmother slept. Heaven knows how many windows there must have been, and the wardens were very strict about the blackout, even right out in the country like that. And quite right too. A couple of villages away some people had been coming out of a dance one night and they’d left the door open too long and a German bomber who’d lost his way must have spotted it and dropped his bombs to get rid of them, and three houses got hit.
    A lot of the rooms at the Manor they just took the electric bulbs out of and locked the doors, but the passages and such they had to do something about, and there wasn’t anyone to go round taking the blackout down every morning and putting it up again in the evening, so it just got left up except in three or four rooms and a few other places. So there was this huge old house, all so dark that even on sunny days you had to switch the lights on to get around it. Not that the lights were that good, what there were of them. The electrics had been put in way back, before the