Free A Better World than This by Marie Joseph Page A

given the chance.
    ‘I am not brave enough, alas,’ Florence said, and held up a netted finger. ‘Don’t get up, Daisy. You look as if you might be coming down with a cold.’
    But Daisy followed her through the kitchen and out into the yard, surprised to find that the fog which had threatened as they walked back from Sunday School was now a blanket of sulphur-smelling thickness, so all-enveloping it was almost tangible.
    Florence lifted the sneck on the back gate. ‘Even if I had decided to throw myself into Potter’s Pond,’ she said, ‘I’d never find it in this lot, would I?’
    ‘See you next week.’ Daisy closed her eyes in relief. Her friend’s wit might be as dry as a ship’s biscuit, but at least she still retained it. And that was all that mattered. Florence would survive.
    Peering up the street she tried to see her walking with her loping stride, large feet encased in nurse’s lace-up shoes because standing so long at work had dropped Florence’s arches. For a moment Daisy thought she saw her, wreathed in yellow fog, a shadowy figure in a spy thriller, Mata Hari going to her doom.
    ‘They never do it when they say they’re going to,’ Daisy reassured herself, rubbing the tops of her arms as she walked back up the yard. ‘It’s the ones who suffer in silence and say nothing who do it.’
    She imagined Florence walking past her own house, up Earl Street fields, past allotments with their hen-pens and pigeon cotes. Tall and long-necked with a felt hat like a flying helmet hiding the scragged-up hair. On across fields to the local pond, a sheer drop into a murky splash of water into which it was said a man, three years on the dole, had hurled himself one wintry day, sinking like a stone to his death.
    ‘Why is life so … so awful?’ she asked herself, setting the table for a boiled ham tea, turning an anguished face towards her mother appearing droop-eyed from her long sleep.
    ‘They never do it when they say they’re going to,’ Martha said, when Daisy voiced her fears. ‘I only dozed,’ she went on. ‘I’ve been reading the paper. It says that the people living on the dole are existing far below the threshold of adequate nutrition. And
they
don’t go jumping into mucky water. Neither will Florrie Livesey. Her mother was a grand little woman, God rest her soul.’ She pulled her chair up to the table. ‘Fourpence a quarter for that ham,’ she grumbled. ‘It’s cut that thin I can see the pattern on the plate through it. I’ll have to double it up if I’m going to make it into a sandwich.’
    *
    It snowed that Christmas, and on mill lodges ice formed. On Christmas Day nearly thirty thousand followers of the Rovers watched them play football at Ewood Park. A very much alive Florence came to tea and advised an exhausted Daisy to use Knights Castile soap for tired skin to revive her sallow complexion. Or to use rouge, just a touch on the cheek-bones, to brighten her tired eyes.
    ‘You’re doing too much,’ she told her friend kindly, and went on to describe the current film at the Rialto:
I Was a Spy
with Conrad Veidt, Herbert Marshall and Madeleine Carroll. ‘Her humanity impelled her to serve in a German hospital,’ she informed Daisy and her mother. ‘And they trapped her so she was forced to work as a spy. But they wouldn’t have forced
me
,’ she added, pale eyes glistening. ‘Put me against a wall and shoot me, but never expect me to betray my heritage.’
    ‘A fat chance,’ said Martha, eyeing her malevolently.
    The biting winds of a spring coming too late for comfort flattened the daffodils in the park as if an army had trampled them. Still there was no word from Sam.
    In May the Broad Walk in the park was lined with mauve and pink rhododendrons and Daisy, to cheer herself up, bought a new straw hat from the Hat Market. She wore it for the Anniversary Sunday at chapel, its spray of scarlet cherries bobbing as she walked up the street with Martha who was breathing hard