Free A Tree on Fire by Alan Sillitoe

time never won a picture (no one did) she was careful not to go there too often.
    Pulling into second gear, her car shot from the bus-stop. ‘Why on a day like this? It’s pouring mackerel. Boyfriend, I suppose. I’m off to see my brother Joe – not well again.’
    Miss Bigwell was said to have a private income, in order to explain how she lived well and did no work. The reason people called it private was that few of them knew where it came from, though Handley said she was the only daughter of the Coningsby Bigwells. There was little he didn’t know about the rich families of the county, for he had tapped them all at one time or another. She and her brother Joe had sold all the land when the old man finally croaked and invested the money in the holiday-making industry of Skegness. She was a big shrewd woman of about sixty, with a moon-face and glasses, whom you might have thought rather common if she didn’t have money and a few of the ways that go with it. Like every local person she couldn’t resist pumping Mandy about how her father felt now that he was famous. It never ceased to amaze Mandy that local people almost respected him, while to her he was the same old stingy bastard he’d always been. Her aim in getting away from the family was simply to reach some state in life where there was so much money that it ceased to have either meaning or importance. Lack of it had always cramped her natural zest for living – and so it was more vital in her life than it ought to have been. When she was a child in school the headmistress had said hands high those who want to pay two shillings for a Christmas party. Mandy shot hers up because it was all her father could afford anyway. But no one else moved because they knew what was coming: hands high those who want to spend five shillings for a real party – as if this price included champagne, the sheep! A wheatfield fluttered, naturally. When they subsided she said let’s see again, (laughter already) those who even now want the cheap rate of two shillings. I still said yes, to everybody’s surprise. Imagine thinking I’d change my mind just because I was all on my own! The headmistress went, then came back with a beautifully bound hymn-book inscribed from her, which she was giving me for my ‘independent spirit’. I said thank you. What else could I say? She must have made about five pounds profit on that party, so what was a miserly hymn-book to her? Yet if she gave me something it ought to have been more than a book I never opened and couldn’t even sell to the girls. So I went through all that for him, and he won’t even buy me a car now that he’s rolling in it.
    Once in the car and it stopped raining she wished she’d waited for a bus instead of putting up with Alice Bigwell’s endless ramblings about the best way of making compost-heaps. She pumped on concerning slops and vegetation and manure and proportions of water, (nothing after all except complex euphemisms for common shit) building it up and putting it to bed, taking temperatures and saying how long it took to become soil. Mandy wondered whether she hadn’t an incurable and repulsive obsession with birth and cannibalism, and whether she didn’t serve the stuff up as a first course to any starving and unsuspecting traveller who knocked at her door for a bite of bread and cheese. Nothing would surprise her from the people around here. Though born in the place, she didn’t really belong , for her father had come from Leicester (where they still went occasionally to visit hordes of the family) and didn’t have an occupation like everyone else round about. He’d always been either a malingering no-good on the scrounge or, as lately, a celebrity with a murky past they were so ready to forget that it would surely be thrown up in his face with real fury if ever he went back to scrounging. And with the confidence of people