A Daughter’s Dream. Cathy Sharp

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       One

      As a small child I was afraid of the man with the staring eyes. In my worst nightmares he came after me, shouting and threatening to kill me. His breath stank of strong drink and his eyes were bloodshot. In my dreams he caught me and then my father came and chased him away – but he always came back, and I knew that one day my father would not be there to save me.

      Perhaps it was because of the dream that I hated living in the lanes. In the dream I was playing in the lane near my home with other children, and it was there that the man came after me. For as long as I could remember I had wanted to escape, to live somewhere different, away from the dirt and noise of the area around the London docks, and I envied my uncle Tom, who had gone away to be a doctor. I had promised myself that when I grew up I would leave, too, and my idea of heaven was probably very like the house that Matthew’s parents lived in, at which I had been staying for the past few days.

      Living in suburbia might not be everyone’s idea of perfect bliss, but it was certainly mine. Looking back at the Corders’ house on that sunny morning in June 1923, I experienced a deep sense of loss and regret that it was time for us to leave. There was nothing remarkable about the house; it had three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, a sitting room, dining room and kitchen downstairs, and was furnished in a very ordinary way. Yet for me those few days had been ones of perfect contentment.

      ‘What was that sigh for?’ Matthew asked, looking at me with a little smile of amusement flickering about his mouth. Matthew Corder was twenty-three, four years older than me, attractive rather than wildly handsome, with reddish-brown hair and dark chocolate-brown eyes. It was his smile that had made me notice him, the laughter in his eyes that saw the fun in everything that first made me fall in love with him.

      We had met at Bournemouth, when Matthew was on holiday and I was taking the art classes that my mother thought were a waste of time. Although she had encouraged my brothers, Jon and Terry, to leave when they were my age, she had wanted to keep me at home. My father had persuaded her that it would do me good to see more of the world, to broaden my outlook on life, and so in the end she had agreed СКАЧАТЬ