The Lion Tamer’s Daughter Read Online Free Page A

First War, and they ran off their own generator, which the fuel was rationed for and the ration wasn’t enough, nothing like. So they’d taken out a lot of the bulbs in the passages too, and the rest were about ten-watt, and you had to remember to turn them off as soon as you’d gone by or you were in dead trouble.
    And, my, was it cold in winter! But that’s not part of the story, which I’d better get on with.
    One of the rooms which was kept locked because it hadn’t got any blackout was the servants’ hall. This was where the maids and footmen and such used to have their meals and sit around when they weren’t wanted. There’d been nine of them living in the house in peacetime, Kitty told me, just to look after Miss van Deering, not counting the ones who came in by the day from the cottages and the village. They’d all gone off to war work now. The servants’ hall was along a corridor from the kitchen, at the back of the house and down from the main ground floor. I’d gone in there once to help my grandmother carry something she needed, and while she was rooting around looking for what she wanted she opened a cupboard and I saw it was full of books. I didn’t dare ask, for fear of being told no (that was the sort of kid I was), but I spotted where she put the key after she’d locked up, and as soon as she was into her after-dinner nap (that’s what people call lunch now) I sneaked back for a look. They were just what I wanted, the same as I used to read at the orphanage, romances about gentry pretending to be servants and such, as well as a lot of old thrillers. So after that as soon as dinner was over I used to tell my grandmother I was going for a walk, which she was all in favor of as she couldn’t bear to have me hanging around in the kitchen lounging and scratching, as she put it, and she had the idea that fresh air was good for me. “Never did your father any harm, out on the ocean briny,” she used to say, knowing quite well he’d spent most of his time in a hot little galley frying stuff up for the crew. I’d put on my boots and my waterproofs if it was wet and start off on my walk, but as soon as I was out of sight I’d slip into one of the sheds and read. There were acres and acres of garden, mostly gone wild, with apple stores and an icehouse and log sheds and a coach house and potting sheds and stables and kennels and tool rooms and so on. I found a place up some stone stairs above the stables where there was a pile of musty hay and a window and nobody ever came. Winter I’d read till it got too dark to see. Summer I’d work out how many pages I’d get through before I’d got to go in and do my homework and mark the place and stop when I got there.
    â€œWell, you ought to have a bit of an appetite,” my grandmother used to say when I got in. Luckily, reading gave me just as much of an appetite as walking would have done, for my grandmother’s food, at any rate. She was a really good cook. She couldn’t bear to cook food which wasn’t interesting to eat. Day after day we’d have meals better than any I’ve tasted since, and all out of the scraps of stuff she could get hold of in wartime. Apart from that I don’t know that I can give you much idea of her. Like I’ve said, she was short and fat and had this bad hip. I don’t know that she was fond of me, but she looked after me and did her best for me because that was right, but I don’t remember that I ever had a hug from her or anything like that. She liked things to be very definite, so she knew where she was. Later on, when I took to reading to her, she used to bother about why anybody should go to the trouble of making stories up, and whether there wasn’t something not really right about listening to what amounted to a pack of lies.
    I must have found the books in the servants’ hall the autumn before the time