Blonde Roots Read Free

me.”
    “But we don’t have special powers; we’re not fairy god-mothers.”
     
    “It’s a game, you silly lot. Give me one wish or I’ ll throw a cabbage at your thick skulls.”
    “All right then, Pa, you have one wish.”
    “Well, now, let’s see. What would I want? Oh, I know what I’d wish for,” he’d say, scratching his chin like the thought was just coming to him.
    “To see my girls in those crinolines with expensive whalebones that those ladies up there wear, pretty paste on your cheeks, pearls around your swanlike necks; to see you swirling around at dances with kindly gentlemen on your arms, winning smiles on your lips and glass slippers on your feet.”
    “Oooh, don’t be so soppy,” I’d say, before going to fetch the looking glass to see if my neck really was “swanlike.”
    That night I dreamed of a lacy yellow crinoline with puffed-up sleeves. My gown was so exquisite, my glass slippers so dainty, that when I ran across the meadows, hair flowing in the wind, everyone gasped at how elegant I’d turned out.
    Then I ruined it by getting bunions because the slippers were too tight and one of them cracked and the glass cut into my foot, waking me up with the pain of it.
     
     
    PA WOULD RISE BEFORE DAYLIGHT had kicked nighttime into touch. He’d return after dark, when he’d be mardy until he’d eaten.
    He liked a tankard of ale (only ever admitted the one) of a Friday night after dinner when he’d go to Johnny Johnson’s barn over at None-Go-By Farm for a “wee session” with “the lads”—all old men pushing forty. He’d come home reeking of the barley and herbs in his ale, singing a bawdy song, which we could hear from fields off, then catching his breath as he leaned against the opened door frame blasting cold air into our parlor, ranting on about how “the working man will have his day,” before staggering inside in his manure-caked boots and collapsing into his chair, legs sprawled open, head thrown back so that his bristly Adam’s apple stuck out and quivered.
    “How are the lads?” Mam would say out loud once he was snoring, not looking up from her knitting needles, which clacked like warring swords.
    I’ ll never forget the first time it was my turn to take Pa hot bread and dripping for lunch.
    The clouds had sunk so low from the heavens I couldn’ t find him for ages, until there he was, looming out of the fog, one hand rested on his pitchfork, looking for all the world like a scarecrow, and I suddenly saw how all the backbreaking work had drained him.
    He was singing, but not one of his usual smutty songs that made us girls giggle and our mam scowl. Instead he sounded like one of the choir boys at church whose voices hadn’t become coarse and mud-filled and angry from years of breaking up icy ground with shovels, slopping out donkey shit or chopping wood for hours in freezing winter dressed in rough sackcloth, with their bare feet shod only in clogs.
    It was the voice of the boy inside the man. The child inside my father.
    His heart was full of yearning, for something he’d lost or wanted to have.
    My heart crumbled like stale bread.
     
    Are you going to Scarborough Fayre?
    Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,
    Remember me to one who lives there,
    She once was a true love of mine.
     
    On my tenth birthday it was my turn to go out onto the fields blindfolded to pull up the first cabbage of the season. Aged ten you’d already survived the pox, the sweat and just about every other disease that spirited children away early, so it was likely you might grow to adulthood. If the cabbage came up with a lot of earth attached, it meant you’d be rich; if not then you’d be poor.
    That spring dawn we all trekked across the damp grass and past trees beginning to unfurl the tiny lavender-colored petals of blossom.
    I’d already decided on my career path. I was going to become one of those rare silk-trading women, like that young Margaret Roper from the village at