Free Ballet Shoes for Anna by Noel Streatfeild Page B

Anna had got her shoes. At this minute they were on her feet. Enough money had been made when Wally’s mum sold the suitcases for a whole term’s dancing lessons to be paid for.
    “It seemed as if there was a lot to do,” Francesco explained to Gussie, “because everything took so long. I mean, there was four days between taking Anna to the shop to be measured for shoes and them coming.”
    “And what a four days,” Gussie groaned. “With eating allthat terrible food and my hair being cut.”
    “I never have known why The Uncle didn’t get angry about your hair. Of course it had to be because we needed the twenty-five pence but, though I know Wally’s dad tried, it certainly does look most peculiar.”
    “A crying scandal,” Gussie agreed. This was an expression of Christopher’s which his family had adopted.
    “Yet The Uncle, though he frowned and made snorting noises, said nothing – nothing at all,” Francesco marvelled.
    Gussie had an idea about this.
    “I think that was because, if he didn’t like it, the only thing he could do was to pay again and this he will not do. I think he is one with a closed purse.”
    “Perhaps he is poor,” Francesco suggested.
    This made Gussie laugh so much that he rolled on his bed.
    “Poor! In India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Ethiopia, Egypt – every place we have seen poor. Poor is to swell in the wrong places, to seek for scraps from the gutter, to beg. It is not to eat three meals a day sitting at a table in a good blue suit with a clean starched shirt and have a motorcar in the garage.”
    “Perhaps there is two kinds of poor,” Francesco suggested. “The Uncle has perhaps enough for him and The Aunt but not for the three of us.”
    Gussie made a rude noise.
    “He has a closed purse and I dislike him very much and he eats terrible food.”
    Francesco sighed.
    “Cabbage – that is a dreadful vegetable.”
    Gussie shuddered.
    “Cooked to taste like dirty water. No garlic, no curry – all food here is as if eating paper. But perhaps, because it is never hot in Britain, I am getting hungry like we were before the earthquake so, however bad the food, I now eat.”
    Francesco had moved to the window.
    “I’m beginning to too and so is Anna. Do you know we have been here five days and never gone into the garden.”
    Gussie joined him and stared admiringly at the gnomes.
    “Those are elegant. I never before saw statues painted red. I wonder what it is for which those little men fish.”
    “We’ll look,” said Francesco. “The Uncle is gone.”
    The boys ran down the stairs and went into the lounge. They had not seen this room before because it was in there that Cecil worked. They were spellbound by the sight of it.
    “Velvet like in a palace,” Francesco gasped. “Imagine sitting every day on green velvet.”
    Gussie examined the ivy climbing up the trellis work on the wallpaper.
    “And such beautiful paper on the walls. It is good we cannot come in here unless The Uncle is out. It would be terrible if we made a dirty mark on such a wall.”
    There were French windows through to the garden so the boys stepped out and at once saw what a strange garden it was. Not that they had ever owned a garden themselves but they had seen the gardens of others, so they knew what to expect.
    “Nothing is real,” Gussie exclaimed. “Feel this rose, it is made of stuff like clothes.”
    Francesco was stroking a plastic spray of orange-coloured climbing nasturtiums.
    “Do you remember that Christopher said there were no gardens in the world so beautiful as the gardens of England? This must be what he meant.”
    Gussie was for once almost speechless he was so full of admiration.
    “Such an ideal! No flower ever dies.”
    “No earth anywhere at all,” Francesco marvelled. “You could be all day in such a garden and be as clean as when you started.”
    “Hi!” said two voices. The boys spun round, and over the wall they saw two faces looking at them – a boy and a