Free Cross My Heart and Hope to Die by Sheila Radley Page B

spoke. I admit that there are occasions when I do hear and don’t bother to answer, but that night I was well away. Mrs Bloomfield had lent me a paperback of seventeenth-century poems and I sat with the book on the table and my head in my hands, absorbing open-mouthed. Before, I’d read only the censored poems in school anthologies, and this was a revelation. It sent my temperature soaring.
TO HIS MISTRIS GOING TO BED
Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defie,
Until I labour I in labour lie …
Licence my roaving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below –
    No wonder I didn’t notice Mum until she thumped the table so hard with a rolled-up copy of Woman’s Weekly that I jumped and knocked over my cup and the cold tea dregs drooled over the tablecloth.
    You’d never guess from the way she carried on that the tablecloth wasn’t purest linen. Just because she happens to have a genuine old-fashioned best tablecloth tucked away upstairs, she has an obsession about spillages. I don’t think we’d had the linen cloth out more than once. It’s too big for our table and I can remember sitting under it as though it was a tent when we had a houseful of people to tea after Gran Bowden’s funeral. We weren’t even allowed to dirty the cloth out after this ceremonial airing; Mum had it whipped off the table and into the wash and back upstairs before you could say Bottom Drawer.
    But even though the tablecloth we actually use is guaranteed wipe-down-fresh-as-a-daisy plastic, Mum still behaves as though it’s linen. I just lifted my book out of the way – fortunately it wasn’t touched – and carried on reading while she ranted away as usual. ‘I can never keep a clean cloth in this house …’
O my America! my new found lande,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d,
    â€˜Work all day but I can never keep anything nice.’
My mine of precious stones, my Emperie,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
    â€˜And what thanks do I get? Never a civil word from either of you, always got your silly heads stuck in a book. I’ve a good mind to pack up and clear off, then you’ll both be sorry.’
To enter in these bonds is to be free,
Then where my hand is set my seal shall be.
    It takes something drastic to interrupt me when I’m reading but Mum eventually remembered the solution. She reached over and switched off the telly, and the sudden silence shocked us both into attention.
    â€˜Hey,’ Dad protested. He usually read while the telly was on but that didn’t mean he wasn’t following the programme.
    â€˜It’s ten o’clock and that’s your lot,’ snapped Mum. ‘You’re to go to bed, our Janet, I won’t have you up half the night reading. The trouble I have getting you up in the mornings, and no wonder.’
    â€˜In a minute,’ I said, as a matter of principle. But the spell of the poem had been broken and I was ready to leave it.
    â€˜Ah well,’ said Dad. He got up, sighed and stretched, and went outside. I carried the cups to the kitchen while Mum lifted the kettle of hot water from the living-room fire. She obviously felt better for having a good grumble. She doesn’t mean any of it but she enjoys getting it off her chest every now and then. She was quite cheerful as she gave her face a bedtime wipe at the sink, and I apologized silently by sponging her plastic tablecloth.
    â€˜You go on up,’ I said. ‘I want a wash.’
    â€œNight, Janet,’ said Dad, padding across the living-room to the stairs door in his mauve socks. He made a fuss when Mum first knitted them, but she said her piece about beggars and I persuaded him that they looked positively trendy. I was glad enough to borrow a pair in winter to wear as bedsocks.
    Mum finished pottering and said, ‘Get on with it, then. I want you in bed by half-past. And don’t forget