Free Poor Little Rich Girl by Katie Flynn Page A

I’m late for me tea, life ain’t worth livin’.’
    ‘I’ll be fine, Mr Mimms,’ Lonnie assured him. She was very warm and her arms and legs were already beginning to tell her that this unusual work was not entirely to their taste, but she continued doggedly digging. In her imagination, her garden was already a mass of wonderful things. She would grow flowers, fruit, vegetables – oh, all sorts. But first, she knew, she must conquer the soil, enrich it with compost as Mr Mimms had advised, and find some means of earning a few pennies so that she might buy seeds. ‘Thanks ever so much for my garden, Mr Mimms, and for my gardening tools. I’ll take great care of them, the way you showed me last week, and putthem ever so carefully into your shed and remember to lock it afterwards.’
    ‘An’ give Mrs Ainsworth the key, ’cos I don’t want to find me shed burgled when I comes in tomorrer,’ Mr Mimms said. He wheeled his rusty old bicycle towards the door in the high wall. ‘Catch a hold of that cat, Miss Lonnie, or it’ll be out through the gate and off down the road before you can say knife. Cats is that contrary, I’ve never known one what didn’t want to be on the other side of any door it set eyes on.’
    ‘Curiosity killed the cat,’ Lonnie murmured, clasping Kitty to her chest and watching Mr Mimms as he wheeled his bicycle through the doorway into Haig Street. Kitty stared at the closed door, her golden eyes round with inquisitiveness, and Lonnie dropped a kiss between the little cat’s pricked ears before returning her to the ground once more. ‘Now we’ve got the garden all to ourselves,’ she told her. ‘I wish I could spare the time to play with you, Kitty, but I’ve got far too much work to do.’ She took up her fork once more. ‘I should like to get the digging finished before Hester calls us.’
    The kitten miaowed and wound round her ankles, and then the little cat’s attention was distracted by a passing butterfly. She leapt in pursuit, standing on her hind legs and batting fruitlessly at the air beneath the lovely insect. Lonnie watched her for a moment, then went back to her digging and had actually turned over a good half of her plot before she stopped for a rest and, looking round, realised with dismay that the kitten seemed to have disappeared. All thoughts of her garden forgotten, Lonnie cast down her fork and was about to begin searching Mr Mimms’s vegetable plot and herbaceous borderswhen a loud miaow caused her to look up. Precariously balanced on an upper branch of the tall lime tree sat Kitty, eyes wide with fright, tiny white claws clutching desperately as the bough upon which she perched dipped and swayed in the breeze.
    ‘Oh, Kitty, how ever did you get up there?’ Lonnie cried, horrified at her pet’s daring. ‘Come down at once, and come down carefully!’
    For a moment it seemed as though Kitty were going to obey her, but then the wind caused the bough to sway again and the kitten either lost her hold or decided to try for a safer perch, for one moment she was peering at Lonnie through the tossing leaves and the next she was sprawled on top of the brick wall.
    ‘Oh, Kitty, hang on! I’ll … I’ll fetch a ladder from Mr Mimms’s tool shed and rescue you,’ Lonnie gabbled, even more afraid for her pet, for the wall seemed to have no sheltering spot into which the kitten might scramble and the wind caused the branches to sway and even brush against the bricks every now and then. ‘Stay there! Don’t move!’
    Lonnie dashed towards the shed but before she so much as unlocked the door she glanced back towards the top of the wall upon which the kitten had been crouching. It was empty.
    Without a second thought, Lonnie ran towards the green door in the wall, opened it and shot through. She dreaded seeing Kitty flattened on the pavement, but instead her pet was dancing jauntily along the road in the direction of Everton Brow. Lonnie shouted and felt a moment’s