Free Alone Beneath The Heaven by Rita Bradshaw Page A

and so she padded out into the blackness on shaking legs.
     
    When she reached the ground floor the chill of concrete on Sarah’s bare feet made her increase her pace to the laundry room, situated at the far end of the corridor. She found this part of the building even more scary than the upstairs, it being almost totally devoid of light and having only two narrow windows, one on either side of the front door.
     
    Her heart was beating a tattoo by the time she twisted the knob on the door and slipped inside the large square room - the familiar smell of damp clothes and disinfectant causing her nose to wrinkle briefly - but it was her physical condition, rather than Mother Shawe’s bogeyman, that caused her heart to pound. Lying in bed she hadn’t realized how weak she was, but now she was feeling dizzy and somewhat sick, and every little bit of her ached.
     
    She sank to the floor with her back to the door for a few minutes, the cold seeping upwards through her bare bottom and causing her teeth to chatter, then found the strength to stand up and walk over to the far end of the room by the window, where the dry clothes and bedding were stored. She found a pair of the regulation red flannel bloomers along with a calico petticoat and pulled them on quickly over her flannel shift, before slipping into one of the institution’s blue smocks which was a trifle too big for her. But it didn’t matter, nothing mattered, except getting away as soon as she could. She didn’t bother with a pinafore, instead she opened the door to the boiler room which led off the first room and peered inside, having to wait for a full minute for her eyes to adjust to the lack of light.
     
    There were no boots. She could have cried with disappointment. What was she going to do? Should she risk going back upstairs and finding the dormitory, and hope no one saw her take a pair from the end of a bed where each child placed their footwear at night? She didn’t dare. But she couldn’t go without any boots. She shut the door, panic high, and then she saw them - a pair of old, and obviously adult boots, tucked in one corner close to the big airers. Her feet slid into them, lost in the cavernous depths, but she found that if she laced them tightly and moved slowly they would just about stay on her feet. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’ One of Mother McLevy’s pet sayings came back to her and she nodded to it. They’d do.
     
    The last thing she did was to select one of the thin blankets and tuck it under her arm. She might have to sleep under a hedgerow or in a barn for a night or two. That’s what the heroine in Sunshine Review had done, and she’d eaten berries and wild mushrooms and things, and a farm boy had shared his lunch with her . . .
     
    Getting through the window proved more difficult than she’d thought, mainly due to the fact that every time she heaved herself up the boots slipped off, so after two tries she took the boots off and dropped them out first, hearing them thud onto the ground below with a sense of inevitability. She had to go now, she couldn’t leave them out there, and she knew once she was outside she would never get back in, the window being six foot up from the concrete path. She stabilized herself on the chair she had pulled across to the window again, and pulled herself up with her thin little arms, her legs waving madly for a few seconds as she steadied herself on the flaking window frame. It took some manoeuvring to get through the gap, mainly because she was frightened of shooting out on to her head, but eventually she was hanging by her arms outside and with a little plop she landed on the ground.
     
    She was immediately conscious of the chill of the night, the blackness, the whispering of the tall looming trees surrounding the building and the other two buildings in the distance taking on the appearance of forbidding sentinels with a thousand eyes. She shrank back against the wall for a moment, the dizziness