Free Jacky Daydream by Jacqueline Wilson

the tension. We didn’t wear uniform at Latchmere, my new school. I wished we did.
    I kept my Viyella nighties and my vests and knickers and socks and pocket handkerchiefs in the bottom drawer, all jumbled together. Biddy wanted to keep them neatly separate, using the two half drawers at the top, but I wanted these for my special things.
    I kept tiny books in the right-hand drawer. I had the little illustrated prayer book that had once been Biddy’s . Ga gave it to me one day. I was surprised. My dad had once been a choirboy – I’d even seen a photo of him in a long gown with a white collar, standing with his brother Roy – but to the best of my knowledge Biddy had only set foot in a church twice: once when she was married and once when I was christened.
    It was a beautiful pearly white book and I longed to show it off at school. It had my mum’s name neatly written in the front –
Biddy Clibbens
– but in the back I found a pencilled parody of the Lord’s Prayer. It was just a silly schoolgirl version, not really blasphemous, changing ‘daily bread’ to ‘daily bath’ and that sort of thing, but I got terribly worried. We had a fierce scripture teacher at school, who scrubbed our mouths out with carbolic soap if we said rude words and rapped us on the knuckles if we printed God or Jesus without capital letters. I was sure she’d think my mother would burn to a crisp in Hell if she saw her schoolgirl prank. Biddy found me agonizing over her naughty rhyme.
    ‘You silly little prig!’ she said, laughing at me, but she got an eraser and rubbed vigorously until there wasn’t a trace of it left, simply to stop me worrying.
    I worried a great deal. Biddy didn’t seem to worry at all. She’d been bright at school and at eleven had passed her exams to go to the girls’ grammar school. Ga was so pleased. She’d lost her chance of a proper education but now her daughter could benefit. Biddy had other ideas though. She didn’t take lessons very seriously and got distracted by boys. She was happy to leave school at sixteen.
    For various reasons
I
left school at sixteen too. Poor Ga. I wish she could have stayed alive to watch her great-granddaughter Emma grow up – at last a bright, focused child who worked diligently, came top in all her exams and is now a senior academic at Cambridge.
And
she can sew!
    I kept Biddy’s prayer book – without the Lord’s Prayer – with my Mary Mouse series and a whole flock of Flower Fairy books by Cicely Mary Barker. I loved these little books and spent hours poring over the carefully painted pictures, making up stories about all the fairies, gently stroking their long shiny hair, sometimes tickling their bare toes. I never bothered reading the odd little rhymes on the facing pages but I learned all the flower names. The sweet-pea picture of the big sister fairy tenderly adjusting the pink bonnet on her little baby sister was my all-time favourite.
    I had two storybooks by Cecily Mary Barker too, stories that I loved, more stirring than the Faraway Tree books, more accessible than
David Copperfield. The Lord of the Rushie River
was about a sad little ill-treated child called Susan, desperate for her sailor father to come home. She’s carried away by her friend the swan, and of course she’s reunited with her father at the end of the story. She’s worried about her ragged clothes but the swan snatches her a beautiful rainbow-embroidered dress.
    I tried to make friends with the swans on the Thames when Harry took me to feed the ducks, but their beaks seemed very forbidding and I didn’t like the way they hissed at me. They certainly didn’t look as if they’d take me for a ride on their feathery backs and find me a lovely new dress.
    The second book was
Groundsel and Necklaces
, a tender little tale about a child called Jenny who ends up with 365 necklaces, one for every day of the year. I read these stories over and over again. I loved stories about sad, spirited little