Free Downhill Chance by Donna Morrissey

oughtn’t to have been listening?
    Coming upon the post office, she ran up to the door, poking her head inside. Alma, the postmistress, was sitting with her back to her, raising her hand for silence as she rapidly jotted down the message tapping its way through the telegraph. Spotting the great big book that looked like a Bible, lying opened on top of the counter, Clair anxiously crept forward, reading from the position of the last person who had read the entry. It was today’s—about the bombing:
    The feeling and reaction of the ordinary citizen is a mixture of fortitude, valour, anger, and some fear. Casualties are heavy, but Londoners are carrying on despite the hell being thrown upon them. Children are being evacuated, and thousands are cleaning up the city, putting out fires and continuing business as usual and showing they are able to stand proud. But concerns rise as the German war machine turns its attention to the rest of Europe …
    “Here, you knows your mother don’t want you reading this stuff,” said Alma as the tapping stopped. Shoving herself heavily to her feet, she pulled the book to one side, staring disapprovingly at Clair. “And tell her there’s no mail today. Go on now,” she ordered kindly, her glasses slipping down the broad bridge of her nose as she reached for her nib pen and ink bottle.
    Clair trailed towards the door, staring back over her shoulder as Alma sat herself back down, dipping her pen into the ink and copying the message into the big book. Another warning look from Alma over the rim of her glasses, and Clair pushed out through the door, trailing the rest of the ways up the road. Just as well her mother didn’t allow for the news, she thought, for despite the anger quickening her step earlier, the closer she got to home, the heavier became a weight that had been slowly settling itself around her shoulders. There was a bitter truth to Willamena’s words. Since the day her father left, her mother had given over to a sullenness that was becoming more and more so each day she awakened and Job wasn’t lying besides her. It felt to Clair as if the sun had been sucked out of her world, leaving only the dark—a cold, miserable dark that covered her mother’s tears every night and bared her swollen face each morning upon arising. And even Missy, who’d already retrieved her step since their father’s leaving, and who was wearing once again the sun’s rays within her sheen of curls, appeared dulled to Clair, shadowed by the want of a prayer she feared God had already tallied.
    Her mother was sitting in the kitchen window as Clair neared their gate, staring out over the muddied flower bed beneath the kitchen window where Job had planted a bed of sweet williams, already in bloom, the day they had moved into the house. “It’s your morning gift, Mother,” he had said that morning as they lingered over breakfast, laughing and chatting over molassy bread and tea, and savouring the fruity sweet scent of the blooms that wafted through the window.
    “And kind you are to be always thinking of me, Father,” her mother gaily replied.
    “Aye, it’s to keep you thinking of flowers when you’re scrubbing me dirty socks and soaking the skid marks off me underwear,” replied he.
    “As if scent could do away with such a thing,” she scoffed. “Now, seal blubber might do the trick.”
    “Well, well,” sighed Job, “and here I was thinking how nice the flowers smelled, when it’s a seal’s carcass I ought to have dragged to your window.”
    “For goodness’ sake, Job, is the stink of your dirty socks worse to you than the stink of a rotting seal’s carcass?”
    “No, my love, ’tis neither stink that bothers me, because I been smelling them both all me life. It’s the other man’s stink that smells the worse, and it’s your fine little nose that got to labour over mine.”
    “Then, I thank you for the flowers, sire, but, if I’d known they were to cover the smell of your