Love Changes Everything Read Free Page A

the shopping in the pram, the same as you do now.’
    â€˜You make it sound so easy, but when I pick her up to put her back into her pram she kicks and screams and makes such a fuss that everyone stops to look.’
    â€˜She won’t make a fuss if you tell her you’re going to do it because you know she’s tired. It’s because you simply pick her up and dump her in the pram without a word that she struggles and tries to resist. Remember the hullabaloo she used to make when you went out and left her on her own in the afternoons, but now she accepts it. It takes her a while to get used to any changes and you have to tell her why you’re doing them and then she stops protesting.’
    â€˜She does for you,’ Maggie sighed. ‘You’re more a mother to her than I am because you have more time and a lot more patience and never try and rush her.’
    â€˜I tell you what, let’s go out shopping together on Saturday morning,’ Trixie suggested. ‘We’ll let Cilla walk to the shops and then I’ll explain to her that you’re going to pop her into the pram once we’ve done the shopping so that she knows that’s what we both want. I’m sure she won’t cry. I think the secret is to talk to her all the time and to keep telling her what you are going to do.’
    â€˜Perhaps you’re right, I tend to think she doesn’t understand and I don’t talk to her half as much as you do. The trouble is she’s going to have to be on her own a lot more once you start work.’
    â€˜Then before you go off to work tell her that’s what’s happening. Explain to her that she has to be strapped into her chair so that she won’t come to any harm and tell her that I’ll be home in no time at all. Perhaps if I can teach her how to tell the time you can show her where the hands will have to be before I come home.’
    â€˜It still means leaving her on her own,’ Maggie said worriedly. ‘She’s grown quite a bit lately and is so much stronger than she used to be. I’m afraid that she’s going to struggle to get out of her high chair and tip it over and fall and hurt herself and there’ll be no one here to help her.’
    â€˜Perhaps you should pack up your cleaning jobs and stay home and look after her. Don’t forget you’ll have my wages and I’ll be working a full week now I’ve left school, not just a few hours each day.’

Chapter Two
    It was not yet eight o’clock, on a sultry Monday morning in late July, with the promise of unbearable heat to come later in the day. Maggie Jackson could hear Cilla screaming the minute she turned into Virgil Street.
    She’d skimped on her work that morning in order to get home as soon as possible. Trixie had left school the previous Friday and had started work that morning so she knew Cilla would be playing up.
    Although the biscuit factory in Dryden Street was only a few minutes away from their home, Maggie knew that on her first day Trixie would have left over an hour ago because she was due to clock on at seven.
    That meant Cilla would have been on her own ever since Trixie had left and so she was probably hungry and thirsty and wondering why no one was picking her up. Even if Sam was still there he would ignore her.
    Maggie thought again about Trixie’s suggestion that the time had come for her to give up her charring to stay at home and look after Cilla. So far she hadn’t plucked up the courage to find out what Sam thought about that.
    â€˜You ought to tell him that’s what you’re going to do, not ask him,’ Trixie had told her. ‘If you ask him he’s bound to say it’s impossible. You need to do it right away before I get my first wage packet and he has the excuse to give you less housekeeping money.’
    Maggie knew that what Trixie said was right, but she lacked Trixie’s courage when it came to