Winnie of the Waterfront Read Online Free

Then he’d hand her a mirror and she was able to comb her hair and make herself ready for school.
    Her long black ringlets had been cut off while she had been in hospital, and now, from time to time, her father trimmed her hair so that it stayed in tight curls around her face.
    ‘It’s easier to manage that way,’ he told her when she asked him why she couldn’t grow it again. ‘You don’t want long hair that gets full of tangles, now, do you? Think of all the trouble that would be.’
    ‘No, but I’d like it to grow a bit longer,’ she pleaded.
    A few months later as they studied her reflection, her dad agreed with her. Once they had let her black curls grow so that they framed her heart-shaped face they both found it did suit her much better. In fact, when she smiled, she looked quite pretty.
    If only her legs worked, Winnie thought wistfully, she’d be the same as all the other girls at school!
    But they didn’t, and it seemed they never would so she knew she had to give up daydreaming that one day she would walk again. She sometimes wondered why she still had to wear the heavy irons that were so uncomfortable, since they weren’t doing any good. Her dad didn’t seem to have the answer to that either, but he persuaded her that she ought to go on wearing them because that was what the doctor had said she must do.
    Now that she was in a class where the other children were the same age as her, or even a little bit older, she was more conscious of her disability. Although they accepted her and very rarely commented on the fact that she couldn’t walk or run, it made her feel different from them.
    She felt so envious when she saw them running around the playground at dinnertime that it brought tears to her eyes. One day she was so sunk in her own misery that she didn’t hear anyone come into the deserted classroom and she almost jumped out of her skin when a voice asked, ‘What you snuffling about then?’
    Startled, she looked up defiantly at the tall, redheaded boy, rubbing away her tears with the heel of her hand.
    ‘I’m not snuffling. I … I got something in me eye, that’s all.’
    ‘What you doing staying in here instead of coming outside?’
    Winnie shrugged. ‘I like it here.’
    ‘No you don’t! That’s why you were crying. You wanted to be outside in the playground like the rest of us. Go on, admit it.’
    ‘Well, I can’t be there, can I?’
    ‘You could be if I pushed your chair outside.’
    They stared at each other in silence. His emerald-green gaze locked with her turquoise-blue one and a spark of mutual understanding flashed between them.
    ‘All right,’ she said cautiously.
    ‘I ain’t going to play with you, though,’ he pointed out.
    ‘I never asked you to, did I?’
    After that, Sandy Coulson, or occasionally one of the other big boys in her class, pushed her chair out into the playground at midday. Miss Phillips made no objection except to say that it caused too much disruption for Winnie to be wheeled out for their ten-minute mid-morning break.
    Winnie loved it because it meant she could take part in all sorts of games with her friends. She could catch and throw a ball, play I-Spy, and join in some of the quieter games the girls played.
    The boys would have liked her to join in their games. ‘Come on, we can use your chair as a battering ram,’ one of them urged her one lunchtime.
    When a couple of them tried to persuade Winnie to let them lift her out so that they could have a ride in her chair, Winnie refused because she was afraid that they might damage her chair and she couldn’t let that happen. Her dad had gone to such a lot of trouble to make it for her, and he would be so unhappy if it ended up broken.
    Furthermore, if anything happened to it then how would she get to school? Her dad wouldn’t be able to take her out either, because she was far too heavy for him to carry these days. Even carrying her upstairs to bed left him gasping for breath.
    Miss Phillips,