Free The Fourth Pig by Naomi Mitchison Marina Warner

Mary’s old macintosh on the door-peg, and when they’d gone they’d leave a kind of a dancy, crazy feeling behind them, that’d go on into Mary’s dreams. But she never told Mrs. Smith, though she was fond enough of her in a way, and she never told her teachers, nor any of the girls at school, not even Betty Wothers, who was a council scholar and ever so good at languages and history, and she never told any of the boys who came round after her and took her to the movies, evenings, or a shilling tram-ride out on to the Lickeys of a Sunday.
    For she had the boys all round her, had Mary, from the time she was fifteen, and some of them steady chaps with a good job, the marrying kind, working full time at Cadbury’s, as it might be, or the Birmingham Small Arms. Any other girl would have got silly, I know I would have, but Mary didn’t. She knew what was what, maybe she got that from her mother, and she didn’t ever let them get messing around with her, no, not even coming backfrom the Lickeys of a summer night, when it’s been sweet and cool up there among the trees, but then you get down near the tram-stop, and it’s warmer, and you get out the Gold-flakes and light up, and there’s a smell from the public houses that are opening now and your boy says Let’s have one, and you hear the girls and young fellows larking and giggling about, and there’s the Bristol Road ahead of you all dipping and lifting and shining with lights and traffic—well, you know. But Mary didn’t care, she just nipped up on a tram, and if the boys wanted to stay with her—and you bet they did—they had to nip up too.
    There was only one boy she liked at all, and when you got down to it all she really liked about Bert Hobbis was that he was a mathematician too. Believe it or not, those two used to go off of a Sunday, talking nineteen to the dozen, and when you listened it was nothing but a pack of nonsense about coefficients and absolutes and I don’t know what-all. Bert was a nice-looking young fellow, too, and sometimes he’d want a kiss at the end of all that mathematics, but he didn’t get it, or at least, not the way a young fellow likes to get a kiss from a pretty girl. Mary wanted the talk well enough to give him just what would keep him quiet, but that was all.
    And so things went on till she was near seventeen, and it seemed like she was sure to get a scholarship at the University. Everyone was talking about it down Aston way. But then a fellow came along. He was a traveller from Manchester, in cotton goods, and the last time he’d been along he’d been walking out with Mary’s friend, Betty Wothers, and they were as good as fixed up. He’d got a lot of connections, and he was a big, red-faced chap with curly black hair, sort of foreign type, not Lancashire at all,and as strong as a horse; why he could lift a fifty pound box of samples as easy as wink. Well, this time, when he was waiting about at the corner by the Feathers for Betty, who should come along but Mary Snow, as pretty as a picture and all by herself.
    Well, there are some who said it was her fault, there always are when it’s a girl. But I say, she wasn’t that sort, it wasn’t in her then, not if she’d wanted to. But whether or no, this young fellow—his name was George Higginson—he just up and followed her, and when she’d got a bit past the turning, he stepped up to her and said Good evening, Miss, and the next minute he’d got both arms round her and was squeezing her up like the bad men on the movies. Mary let out one screech, and do you know what happened then? Why, a crowd of birds flew into his face, sparrows they must have been for there’s nothing else in Aston, and he said afterwards he felt like as if he was being slashed about with branches and prickles. Anyway, he let Mary go, and she went tearing off home, and she never told anyone, least