Daughter of the Regiment Read Online Free Page A

maybe… yes, Harry realised, that was it. He’d seen the hole because it was bright in the dimness of the chookhouse—but on Cissie’s side it’d just be another patch of daylight with daylight all around. You’d have to be right up against it to see that it was different. You didn’t hear anything from the hole unless you were right up close as well.
    Maybe there were lots of holes like that, thought Harry drowsily, as though time rubbed thin just there and you never noticed. You just walked on straight past …
    He must have slept. The next thing he knew Arnold Schwarzenfeather was yelling from the chookyard and Dad was singing in the shower.
    Breakfast was always late on Saturdays. Dad had to go into work till lunchtime, and Mum usually went with him, but they didn’t open till eight-thirty or even nine, so there was no point eating early.
    Dad fried bacon and eggs. He always cooked Saturday breakfast—Australorp eggs for him because he liked them best, and Isabrowns for Harry, and a white Leghorn egg for Mum.
    Harry squeezed the oranges that came from the giant tree on the flat. The juice was yellow. It looked more like lemon cordial than the orange juice in bottles.
    The tree had been planted over a hundred years ago, when orange trees grew into huge things, almost as tall as gums, not like the small neat modern trees at all. The oranges were hard and tiny, and always freckled (sometimes if you rubbed them off onto your skin the freckles stayed there till you washed them away), but the juice tasted better than the stuff from the supermarket. Or maybe you just liked what you were used to, thought Harry. He’d always drunk the juice from the fruit of the trees on the flat.
    ‘What do you plan for today?’ asked Dad. His hand hovered between the honey and the plum jam. ‘Coming into town with us? We could pick up a video if you like.’ He unscrewed the lid of the plum jam and began to spread it thickly on his toast.
    Harry shook his head. ‘I’ve got a lot of homework,’ he said. ‘I’ll just get it over with this morning if that’s okay.’
    ‘Sure,’ said Dad, surprised. Harry usually left his homework till just before bedtime on Sundays, then panicked because he couldn’t get it all done. ‘Do you want us to pick up a video for you?’
    ‘Oh thanks,’ said Harry. ‘Any one … Hey Mum, can I take the scrap bucket down to the chooks.’
    Mum blinked. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
    ‘No worries,’ said Harry. ‘I’ll take it down every morning if you like. It can be one of my jobs, like collecting the eggs.’
    Mum smiled. ‘I’ll still have it to do it myself next year, if you’re off to school.’
    Harry shrugged.

chapter five
The Hole in Time
    The chooks strutted and clucked inside the netting, impatient to get out for the day’s pecking around the flat, scratching under the blackberries for beetles and fallen caterpillars, wriggling ecstatically into the dust under the lavender bushes. It must be hard to be a chook where they made you stay inside all day, thought Harry.
    He unlatched the wire gate and propped it open. If you didn’t prop the gate open it might swing shut and then the chooks couldn’t get back in at night, and flew up to the trees instead. Once chooks got used to roosting somewhere it was hard to get them to change their minds. Chooks weren’t very bright, Harry guessed. The chooks clustered round him, unwilling to leave till they’d feasted on the contents of the scrap bucket.
    Harry tipped it out at the far end of the run—two banana peels, half a piece of toast and plum jam, congealed gravy, a mouldy end of cheese, a quarter of a loaf of stale bread, his lunchtime apple that Kevin Briggs had trodden on yesterday, potato peelings, silver beet stalks and outer lettuce leaves, pumpkin peel and seeds, six bacon rinds, half a piece of fruit cake (where had that come from, wondered Harry—he hadn’t known they had a fruit cake), tea leaves and three crushed eggshells