Free Strawberry Fields by Katie Flynn

and sisters could go to the park together, skate on the lake, make snowmen, have snow fights . . . we could do lots and lots of things. None of us would have to depend on a servant, because we’d have each other for company, and for taking care.
    But it was not to be. I’m sure there are advantages in being an only child, Sara thought, picking up her spoon as Jane left the room. She eyed the egg broodingly for a moment, and then decapitated it with unnecessary violence. Off with your head, off with your head! But it was no use railing against fate; she was an only child, and a terribly lucky one, who ate three good meals a day, wore warm clothing and never had to dread the snow and frost.
    Because Sara knew she would never forget Jess and the baby and the way Jess’s hand had stretched out and then tucked itself back into her jacket again. Mother said the poor begged for money instead of working for it. Sara knew, now, that in many cases that simply was not true. The poor would, for the most part, far rather work, but they didn’t have the chance. And dimly, somewhere in her mind, she knew that there was another unfairness; that many of the women living in Snowdrop Street, even those who loved their families, did not actually want fourteen or fifteen children. It was yet another of the strange penalties of being poor, she supposed.
    But it was not something she could ask about, of course. Jane would blush and giggle and say she didn’t know she was sure, Nanny would tell her she’d understand when she was older, and Mother . . . well, she had no idea what Mother would say because Sara could never question her mother. Mother has no patience with children and precious little with grownups, Sara found herself thinking, and blushed. What a bad girl she was, to feel like that about her mother! I love her, of course I do, she told herself, sipping milk from her blue china mug. Only . . . she doesn’t like me very much at all, she’s never hugged me or given me a kiss and a cuddle in her life, which is why I’m more at home with Nanny than with her.
    But being discontented with one’s lot was a sin, so being discontented with one’s mother must be even worse. When she comes up presently and tells me to put my nice coat and my best hat on, and my shiny black boots, so that she can take me off to Lewises and Blacklers and all the other big stores, I’ll try to look pleasant, Sara planned. And once we’re there we’ll go round and round the millinery departments and the fashion departments and look at dresses and hats and hats and dresses . . . and she’ll be horrified if I suggest that it might be fun to play in the snow for a little.
    Sara finished her egg and had some marmalade on the bread and butter. Then she piled her dishes on the tray and set off for the kitchens, three floors below. Normally, Jane would have taken the tray down but since she was away, Sara reasoned, there would be a good deal of disorganisation downstairs. The Cordwainers did not believe in employing more servants than were absolutely necessary, which meant that when a maid was sick or absent or even on a day off, everyone else in the servants’ quarters had to work twice as hard.
    She was on the ground floor and heading for the green baize door which led to the kitchens when her mother came out of the breakfast parlour, looking abstracted. ‘Ah, Sara,’ she said, peering at her daughter. ‘What on earth are you doing?’
    She rarely wore her spectacles but was extremely shortsighted, Sara knew.
    ‘I’m taking my dishes down to the kitchen, Mother,’ Sara said dutifully, however. ‘Jane’s mother is ill – didn’t she tell you?’
    ‘Oh . . . yes, of course, I was forgetting. And what are you going to do with yourself this morning?’
    Sara’s heart lifted. So it wasn’t to be a dreaded shopping expedition, then!
    ‘Well, Father said I was to go out, so I could go to the park with one of the maids, if one can be spared,’ she