Free Clover's Child by Amanda Prowse

his lip and back onto the plate. Dee laughed at her funny dad. He wasn’t done. ‘And what do they actually eat , these people? I bet they’ve got you rustling up curried goat and Gawd knows what every day! Yuk, you wouldn’t catch me eating no foreign muck, the thought of it turns my bloody stomach!’
    Dot pushed her plate into the middle of the table. ‘Actually, I don’t feel that well after all, think I might go and get some fresh air and then I’m meeting Barb. Thanks for tea, Mum. I’ll see you later.’
    Dot couldn’t trust herself not to respond to her dad’s ignorant humour. She heard their conversation as she put on her lippy in the hall mirror.
    ‘What’sa matter with her?’
    ‘Hormones, I think, love.’ Joan knew this was the one topic guaranteed to shut him up.
    ‘Oh, Christ, a house full of women! It’s enough to drive a man round the bleeding bend!’
    As Dot and Sol strolled through Hyde Park and alongside the Serpentine the next day her dad’s words echoed in her thoughts. She wasn’t sure how she would break the news to him now, but she had the idea that once he had met Sol and been bowled over by how brilliant he was, he might come round. She shook her head slightly, laughing at how she must have been confusing her dad with someone else. He won’t come round .
    It was with confidence that Sol now reached for her hand and the two matched each other’s pace, in no hurry to arrive anywhere in particular. They stopped only for the occasional peck on the cheek and to share a bag of roasted chestnuts, bought from a vendor who had set up his brazier in a corner of the park.
    They stopped at a bench and huddled together under the pretence of warding off the chill. ‘I love seeing all these new plants,’ Sol said. ‘I’m a bit of an amateur horticulturist at home. I find it amazing how you can take a tiny seed and with a little bit of care and attention can watch it grow into something so strong and beautiful. Many of the trees on our land are hundreds of years old; I find that incredible!’
    Dot loved his enthusiasm, his interest, but she couldn’t help comparing his description with her own back yard at Ropemakers Fields. What would Sol make of the long, thin strip of bare concrete, littered with nothing more interesting than a few metal mop buckets, an ancient wheelbarrow with flat tyres and her dad’s bike?
    ‘The grass here is so fine and dense,’ Sol continued. ‘Our lawn at the Jasmine House is quite the opposite: sparse and spiky. I think the peahens would like roaming about on this all day. And your English flowers seem more fragile, and for that more beautiful. Like poppies… I bet you have some beautiful flowers in your garden, don’t you, Clover?’
    ‘Errr, not really much growing in it at the moment,’ she replied hurriedly. Dot thought about their back yard at Ropemakers Fields, a long thin strip with patched fencing on either side that denied the area sunlight for most of the day. A large slab of concrete littered with metal mop buckets, an old wheelbarrow with flat tyres and her dad’s bike. There was the old outside privy now used as a shed, full to bursting with all sorts of junk that was fit for the scrap heap. A couple of adventurous roses from the Rusalovas’ garden peeked over the back fence as though fascinated by the goings on in the Simpsons’ house. They withered and died quite quickly. Apart from the clutter, her mum pegging out the washing and her dad having the occasional fag in his vest, there wasn’t that much to see.
    True, the back two thirds of their yard had once been a lawn, in her nan’s time, but that was before the Anderson shelter had taken priority. Now the only thing that bloomed was the bindweed that snaked over its rusting corrugated panels, the beautiful white and pale pink blooms reminding Dot of tiny gramophone speakers. One small flower bed in the top left corner had been planted with bulbs a few years ago, while her dad had