Free The Newspaper of Claremont Street by Elizabeth Jolley Page A

morning, when she opened the door, to her amazement Crazy was standing with a night-long patience, holding a kitten in her mouth waiting and waiting to come back into the room. All night long it must have seemed only a matter of waiting to take the kittens back where she wanted them. No one could wait like Crazy. Gently, Weekly, with one foot, had lifted the cat to one side. She also understood patience.
    The advertisements she read every night describing land for sale made her so excited she could hardly read them. As soon as she had read one she became so restless she wanted to go off at once to have a look, but she had to contain herself in patience till she had time to go. No one could wait like Crazy except Weekly. No one could wait for what they wanted as Weekly could and did. She was as patient as the earth when it came to waiting for the earth.
    But even though Crazy had waited and waited she never was able to settle her family back into Weekly’s room, but Nastasya, who had never waited for anything longer than it took a nurse to warm a cup of milk when she was a little girl, had a place in Weekly’s room, and furthermore, to Weekly’s dismay, filled it up with all her things, making it almost impossible to clean thoroughly every morning, as was Weekly’s way.
    â€˜What time is it Weekly?’
    â€˜Diana Lacey, I thought I learned yo’ how to tell the time last week. Shout me where’s the ‘ands are on the clock.’ Diana Lacey was home with chicken pox. Mrs Lacey, frightened of illness, made Weekly wash and iron all the curtains in case they were infected.
    â€˜Chicken pox ain’t in curtings,’ Weekly said, ‘it’s where there’s children only and even then it goes orf in time.’
    â€˜Little hand’s on the one, big hand’s on the six.’
    â€˜Well an’ wot time is that then?’ Weekly rubbed the iron over the curtains, she had let them get too dry. She spread a dampened cloth over the material and steam hissed up on all sides of her.
    â€˜One o’clock,’ the little girl’s thin, bored voice came through the bedroom.
    â€˜Now y’oum guessin’, try again!’ Weekly spat on the iron. ‘It’s half past one,’ she relented. She too was watching the time. She wanted to get off and go look atthe valley. She wondered which would be the shortest way to get to this place hidden behind the pastures and foothills along the South-west Highway. It was a strain thinking about the valley and talking gossip about the Chathams to Mrs Lacey and then playing at ‘I spy’ with Diana. It was a strain too thinking about the valley when she felt she had no right to go looking at land. Perhaps this was because she had spent her childhood in a slatey backyard where nothing would grow except thin carrots and a few sunflowers. And all round the place where they lived the slagheaps smoked and smouldered and hot cinders often fell on the paths. The children gathered to play in a little thicket of stunted thorn bushes and elderberry trees. There were patches of coltsfoot and they picked the yellow flowers eagerly till none were left.
    All land is somebody’s land. For Weekly the thought of possessing land seemed more of an impertinence than a possibility.
    Back home in the Black Country where it was all coalmines, brick kilns and iron foundries, her family had never owned a house or a garden. Weekly had nothing behind her, not even the place where she was born. It no longer existed.
    The steam rose from her ironing.
    â€˜Iron bands on knickers,’ Miss Jessop at the Remand home told the girls to write in their laundry notes.
    â€˜Please Miss Jessop my knickers haven’t got iron bands on ’em.’
    â€˜Margarite Morris leave the room and stand outside the door!’ No one could tell Weekly to stand outside a door now. Again she thought about the valley and how she would drive there straight