Tuppence To Spend Read Online Free Page B

places you read about or see at the pictures. America – Australia – China. I want to see them for myself.’
    Ruth had been fascinated. She listened for hours as he talked about the places he would see, wishing she could go too. But girls didn’t do that kind of thing. Girls stayed at home and looked after the family, and waited for their sailor husbands to come rolling back from overseas.
    ‘You will wait for me, won’t you, Ruthie?’ Jack had whispered the night before he went away on his first voyage. He’d got a position as sixth engineer on a cargo ship. It was going to Africa to collect bananas and he was so excited he could hardly wait. Ruth would have felt left out and abandoned if he had not already told her how much he loved her, and how he wanted to find her waiting for him when he came home.
    ‘I wish we could get engaged …’
    ‘Dad wouldn’t let us,’ Ruth said. ‘I’m only seventeen. He won’t let me get engaged for at least another two years.’
    ‘He let your Jane, didn’t he? She couldn’t have beenmuch more than nineteen when she and George got married.’
    ‘I know, but that was because …’ Ruth blushed. Jane’s first baby had been born embarrassingly soon after the wedding – a fine, lusty child for a seven-months baby. Ruth, who had been only nine at the time, hadn’t been supposed to know about it but there hadn’t been any way of concealing the family row that had shaken the little cottage, leaving Jane and her mother in tears while George Warren, not much older, looked white and shaken. The wedding had taken place less than a month later. They’d gone to live in one of the tiny farm cottages and a few months later Ruth had found herself with a niece only ten years younger than herself – the same age difference as there was between her and her sister.
    All that had been forgotten by the time Ruth and Jack were courting. Jane had had two more babies, Terry and Ben, and George was hoping to take over as farm foreman when old Simon retired. There had been sadness when Jane’s and Ruth’s mother, Florence, had died soon after young Ben’s birth, and after that Ruth and her father lived alone in the cottage. And that, she knew, was half the trouble.
    ‘Trouble with your dad’, Jack said gloomily, ‘is that he doesn’t want you to get engaged at all – much less married.’
    ‘He doesn’t want me to leave him,’ Ruth agreed. ‘You can’t blame him. He’d be so lonely, here on his own, and who’d cook his meals and look after him?’ She sighed. ‘I don’t see how I’m ever going to be able to leave him.’
    ‘Well, you don’t have to,’ Jack said. ‘You could stop here with him. I’m going to be away a lot anyway – it’d be company for you too.’
    They’d agreed to talk about it again when Jack came back from this first trip. Her father would be able to see then that they were serious. They’d get engaged and saveup to get married two years later. They wouldn’t have any children for another two years, to give them time to save for a home of their own nearby – Dad wouldn’t want kiddies under his feet and Ruth could still look after him – and then they’d have three children, like Jane, or maybe even four. It was all worked out.
    At first it seemed that everything was going their way. Joe Sellers had agreed to their engagement and was pleased that he wouldn’t be losing his daughter. He gave them a good wedding in the little village church and what privacy he could in the little cottage, after their honeymoon in Bournemouth. When Jack went back to sea he settled down again with Ruth as if nothing had happened.
    Jack came back and went to sea again. On one of his trips he acquired a parrot and brought it home for Ruth, to keep her company and remind her of him. He’d taught it to talk, copying his voice and saying the things he said to her when he was at home. ‘I love you, Ruthie. Let me be your sweetheart. I’ll be home soon, Ruthie