Free On a Clear Day by Anne Doughty Page B

and the places she knew, she felt tears trickling down her nose. Even when she was trying her hardest not to cry they just seemed to escape without her knowing and once they got goingthere didn’t seem much she could do about them.
    Once, a girl who sat near her, caught her wiping her eyes and called her a cry-baby and she thought how angry Mummy would be at someone being so unkind. But thinking about Mummy made her cry even more, so she ran away and hid in the lavatories until a teacher came calling her name and she had to come out.
    Every day when Auntie Polly hugged her outside school, she made up her mind to do better, but every afternoon as she was swept downstairs and out to the broad pavement where she waited to take her home, she knew she hadn’t managed one little bit better than the previous day.
    Apart from Auntie Polly, the only brightness in Clare’s life was her youngest cousin, Ronnie. The very first thing he did the Saturday after he came back from camp was to take her into Belfast and walk her round all the booksellers in Smithfield Market looking for any of the books she had lost and any others she might want to read.
    He had only two shillings to spend but whenever he found something she wanted he’d tell the man in charge that there was a missing page and that no one else would want to buy it. That way they ended up with a whole bag of books. What did the odd missing page matter if you knew the story anyway, Clare said, as they came back on the bus. But Ronnie only smiled.
    Every evening, just before her bedtime, he’d come down from his room and say; ‘How about tuning in?’
    They worked their way up and down the dial, short wave, medium wave and long wave, laughing when all they got was a sudden ear-splitting blast of static. One night they picked up a radio cab in New York and another night an ambulance in Belfast.
    Sometimes they listened to music, pop music from the Light Programme and Radio Luxembourg or classical music from the Third Programme. When they tuned in to the Third Programme, Ronnie liked to guess what the pieces of music were called, so often they had to wait quite a long time till the orchestra, or pianist, had finished playing so they could find out if he was right. Clare heard Schubert and Mozart and Strauss for the first time.
    Classical music, as Ronnie called it, was very strange at first. To begin with, Clare found it very loud and often there were such sudden explosions of noise that she jumped violently. But as time passed she was less surprised at what the music did, she began to expect certain things to happen and then to feel very pleased with herself when they did. She always knew when the end of a piece was getting near because the musicians seemed to play faster and faster and get very agitated. Often they ended up with a huge noise and the momentthey stopped the audience would clap furiously. That, she enjoyed. It really did sound as if they were having a wonderful time.
    But some music was sad. One night there was something playing that was full of violins and before she knew what was happening there were tears dripping down her nose again and Ronnie had to lend her his hanky.
    ‘What’s wrong, Clare? Why does the music make you so sad?’
    But even to Ronnie she couldn’t explain that it was because of walking past the grey houses every day. The music just jumped over them and ran away, far, far away to somewhere wonderful. It was the thought of that somewhere wonderful and not being able to go there that made it more than she could bear.
    The worst experience of all was the evening when they heard the announcer say that they were about to hear a piece by Shostakovich. Ronnie wanted to try it because he’d never heard the name before, so while the audience coughed and the orchestra made funny noises, they settled down to listen. In was only moments later that Clare clamped her hands over her ears.
    ‘Ronnie, Ronnie, turn it off. Please, turn it off,’ she