A Valentine for Daisy. Betty Neels

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      CHAPTER ONE

      THE hazy sunshine of a late July afternoon highlighted the steady stream of small children issuing from one of the solid Victorian houses in the quiet road. It was an orderly exit; Mrs Gower-Jones, who owned the nursery school and prided herself upon its genteel reputation, frowned upon noisy children. As their mothers and nannies, driving smart little Fiats, larger Mercedes and Rovers, arrived, the children gathered in the hall, and were released under the eye of whoever was seeing them off the premises.

       Today this was a small, rather plump girl whose pale brown hair was pinned back into a plaited knot, a style which did nothing for her looks: too wide a mouth, a small pert nose and a determined chin, the whole redeemed from plainness by a pair of grey eyes fringed with curling mousy lashes. As Mrs Gower-Jones so often complained to the senior of her assistants, the girl had no style although there was no gainsaying the fact that the children liked her; moreover even the most tiresome child could be coaxed by her to obedience.

       The last child seen safely into maternal care, the girl closed the door and crossed the wide hall to the first of the rooms on either side of it. There were two girls there, clearing away the results of the children’s activities. They were too young for lessons but they spent their day modelling clay, painting, playing simple games and being read to, and the mess at the end of the afternoon was considerable.

       They both looked up as the girl joined them. ‘Thank heaven for Saturday tomorrow!’ exclaimed the older of the girls. ‘Pay day too. Ron’s driving me to Dover this evening; we’re going over to Boulogne to do some shopping.’ She swept an armful of coloured bricks into a plastic bucket. ‘What about you, Mandy?’

       The other girl was wiping a small table clean. ‘I’m going down to Bournemouth—six of us—it’ll be a bit of a squeeze in the car but who cares? There’s dancing at the Winter Gardens.’

       They both looked at the girl who had just joined them. ‘What about you, Daisy?’

       They asked her every Friday, she thought, not really wanting to know, but not wanting to be unfriendly. She said now, as she almost always did, ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ and smiled at them, aware that though they liked her they thought her rather dull and pitied her for the lack of excitement in her life. Well, it wasn’t exciting but, as she told herself shortly from time to time, she was perfectly content with it.

       It took an hour or more to restore the several play-rooms to the state of perfection required by Mrs Gower-Jones; only then, after she had inspected them, did she hand over their pay packets, reminding them, quite unnecessarily, to be at their posts by half-past eight on Monday morning.

       Mandy and the older girl, Joyce, hurried away to catch the minibus which would take them to Old Sarum where they both lived, and Daisy went round the back of the house to the shed where she parked her bike. It was three miles to Wilton from Salisbury and main road all the way; she didn’t much like СКАЧАТЬ