A Valentine for Daisy. Betty Neels

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       ‘I’m here,’ Daisy reminded her in a matter-of-fact voice, and, since her employer sounded rather more bad-tempered than usual, she added mendaciously, ‘and I passed Mandy and Joyce as I came along the road.’

       ‘It is a fortunate thing for you girls that I’m a tolerant employer,’ observed Mrs Gower-Jones peevishly. ‘I see that you’ll have to make the place fit to be seen before the children get here.’

       She swept away to the nicely appointed room where she interviewed parents and spent a good deal of the day ‘doing the paperwork’, as she called it, but Daisy, going in hurriedly one day over some minor emergency, had been in time to see the Tatler lying open on the desk, and she was of the opinion that the paperwork didn’t amount to much.

       The children started to arrive, a thin trickle at first with time to bid a leisurely goodbye to mothers or nannies and later, almost late, barely stopping to bid farewell to their guardians, running into the cloakroom, tossing their small garments and satchels all over the place and bickering with each other. Mondays were never good days, thought Daisy, coaxing a furious small boy to hand over an even smaller girl’s satchel.

       The morning began badly and the day got worse. The cook, a local girl who saw to the dinners for the children, didn’t turn up. Instead her mother telephoned to say that she had appendicitis and was to go into hospital at once.

       Daisy, patiently superintending the messy pleasures of Play-Doh, was surprised when Mrs Gower-Jones came unexpectedly through the door and demanded her attention.

       ‘Can you cook, Miss Pelham?’ she wanted to know urgently.

       ‘Well, yes—nothing fancy, though, Mrs Gower-Jones.’ Daisy removed a lump of dough from a small girl’s hair and returned it to the bowl.

       ‘Mandy and Joyce say they can’t,’ observed Mrs Gower-Jones, crossly, ‘so it will have to be you. The cook’s had to go to hospital—I must say it’s most inconsiderate of her. The children must have their dinners.’

       ‘You want me to cook it?’ asked Daisy calmly. ‘But who is to look after the children? I can’t be in two places at once.’

       ‘I’ll stay with them. For heaven’s sake go along to the kitchen and get started; the daily girl’s there, and she can do the potatoes and so on…’

       Daisy reflected that if she were her employer she would very much prefer to cook the dinner than oversee a bunch of rather naughty children, but she didn’t voice her thought, merely handed Mrs Gower-Jones her apron, advised her that the children would need to be cleaned up before their dinners and took herself off to the kitchen.

       Marlene, the daily help, was standing by the kitchen table, doing nothing. Daisy wished her good morning, suggested that she might put the kettle on and make a cup of tea and said that she had come to cook the dinner. Marlene, roused from daydreaming, did as she was asked, volunteered to peel the potatoes and the carrots and then observed that the minced meat had just been delivered.

       ‘Beefburgers,’ said Daisy; mince, offered as such, never went down well—perhaps the beefburgers would. Marlene, brought to life by a mug of tea, saw to the potatoes and carrots and began to collect cutlery ready to lay the tables. Daisy, her small nose in and out of store cupboards, added this and that to the mince, thumped it into shape, rolled it out and cut it into circles with one of Mrs Gower-Jones’s best wine glasses, since there was nothing else handy. She would have liked to do chips but there wasn’t time, so she puréed the potatoes with a generous dollop of butter and glazed the carrots. By half-past twelve she was ready to dish up.

       Mrs Gower-Jones took over then, drawing hissing breaths at the nicely browned beefburgers and the mounds of buttery potatoes. ‘And really,’ she protested crossly, ‘there is no need to put parsley on the carrots, Miss Pelham.’

       Which was all the thanks Daisy got.

       There was a temporary cook the next day, an older woman who spoke little English, and who, in Daisy’s opinion, didn’t look quite clean. She served up fish fingers and chips with tinned peas. Daisy thought that she wasn’t a cook at all but probably all Mrs Gower-Jones could get at a moment’s notice.

       When she went into the kitchen the next morning to fetch the children’s mid-morning milk the sight of the woman preparing dinner in a muddle of dirty saucepans, potato peelings and unwashed dishes made her glad that Mrs Gower-Jones’s meanness stipulated that her assistants should bring their own lunches. Unwilling to disparage a fellow worker, all the same she went in search of her employer.

       ‘The new cook seems to be in a bit of a muddle,’ she ventured. ‘The kitchen…’

       ‘Attend to your own work,’ commanded Mrs Gower-Jones. ‘She is perfectly capable of attending to hers.’

       The children ate their dinner—what Mrs Gower-Jones described as a wholesome stew made from the best ingredients, followed by ice-cream—and Daisy, Mandy and Joyce took it in turns to eat their own sandwiches before arranging the children on their little camp beds for their afternoon nap, a peaceful hour during which they prepared for the hour or so still left before the children were collected. Only it wasn’t peaceful; before the hour was up every child—and there were forty of them—was screaming his or her head off, clasping their small stomachs in pain and being sick into the bargain.

       Daisy, rousing Mrs Gower-Jones from the little nap she took after lunch while the children were quiet, didn’t mince her words. ‘All the children are vomiting and worse—something they’ve eaten. They’ll have to go to hospital. I’ll phone…’

       She sped away to dial 999 and then to join the hard-pressed Mandy and Joyce. The place was a shambles by now and some of the children looked very ill. They wiped hands and faces and comforted their wailing charges and had no time for Mrs Gower-Jones, who had taken a look and fled with her hands over her mouth, but she appeared again when the first of the ambulances arrived, asserting her authority in a shrinking fashion.

       ‘I shall have to notify the parents,’ she uttered to no one in particular. ‘Miss Pelham, go to the hospital and let me know immediately how the children are. Mandy, Joyce, you can stay here and clear up.’

       It took some time to get all the children away; Daisy, squashed in with the last of them, looked down at herself. She smelt nasty for a start and the state of her overall bore witness to that fact; she felt hot and dirty and very worried. Food poisoning—she had no doubt that was what it was—was no light matter with small children; she remembered the new cook and shuddered.

       Casualty was full of screaming children although some of them were too quiet. Daisy, making herself known without fuss, was led away to wash herself and remove the overall and then she was given a plastic apron to take its place. Feeling cleaner, she was handed over to a brisk young woman with an armful of admission slips and asked to name the children. It took quite a while for she stopped to comfort those who weren’t feeling too bad and bawled to her to be taken home. The brisk young woman got a little impatient but Daisy, her kind heart torn by the miserable little white faces, wasn’t to be hurried. The last two children were the twins, no longer difficult but greenish-white and lackadaisical, staring up at her in a manner so unlike their boisterous selves that she had a pang of fear. Disregarding her brisk companion’s demand for their names, she bent over the trolley where they lay one at each end.

       ‘You’ll be all right very soon,’ she assured them, and took limp little hands in hers. ‘The doctor will come and make you well again…’

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