Mud and Gold Read Free Page A

(it was too bare to be otherwise), but the floor
showed half-swept traces of dirty boots, the range had obviously
not been cleaned at all during its short life, and the pans had had
only cursory attention from the scrubbing brush.
    ‘That’s what a man calls clean!’ She could
hear Granny saying it now with a disgusted sniff. In Granny’s
opinion men were incapable of performing any household task
satisfactorily. Charlie obviously fitted the mould; though Amy
thought back to the state Frank’s house had been in when she and
Lizzie had visited, and she wondered if Charlie had, in fact, made
an effort to tidy up.
    Well, she was used to cooking and cleaning.
And it would be nice to have her own kitchen again, even though she
was going to have to spend days getting everything cleaned up. But
the first task was to prepare Charlie’s breakfast. Amy did not know
how many cows he had, so had no idea how long he was likely to take
over milking.
    A side of bacon hung from a hook in the
ceiling, there was a plate of dripping on one of the shelves, and
Amy found knives in a drawer of the sideboard. The eggs would still
be under the hens, so she would have to go searching for them.
    She found a large, wooden barrel at one
corner of the house, and was pleased to think she had found the
water supply. But when she looked inside she saw that its base was
rotten, so any water that fell into it from the guttering simply
trickled away. There would be no water from that source.
    Amy disturbed a sitting hen under a tree
close to the porch and retrieved two warm, brown eggs, but she had
to search under hedges all around the house before she had gathered
six, which she carried carefully back to the house in her
apron.
    Finding the eggs had taken longer than she
had expected, and Amy began to get flustered. She had to have
everything ready before Charlie came back, and he surely couldn’t
be much longer. She ran through the tasks in her head: put the
kettle on to boil, fry the bacon, then keep it warm on the side of
the range while she fried the eggs. Water! There was none in the
kitchen, she had used the last few drops from the tin in the
bedroom, and the rain barrel was useless. Did she have time to go
searching for the well? Did she dare not have a pot of tea ready
for Charlie? She decided it was more important to get the food
ready; she could fetch water while Charlie ate if necessary.
    Amy knew she should sweep the previous day’s
ashes from the range’s fire box before using it, but it seemed
safer to leave that till after breakfast. The next blow came when
she attempted to light the range and found there were no matches.
She hurriedly searched the kitchen for them without success. Had
she but known it, the matches were at that moment in Charlie’s
pocket as he sat in the cow shed. In desperation, she opened up the
fire box and found that a few of the embers were still glowing; she
spent a valuable few minutes coaxing these into flame using some
newspaper and blowing at the cinders. Her face was hot and she was
short of breath by the time she had a fire going.
    There was no time to let the flames settle
down to the steady heat she needed, so she just threw the bacon
into a pan with some dripping and hoped for the best. The fat
hissed and smoked, and the bacon became badly singed around the
edges before she had time to pull it off the heat. She shoved the
pan to one side, and broke the eggs into another pan with more
dripping. Clumsy with nervousness, she managed to break the yolks
of four of the eggs. She watched in dismay as the edges of the
whites burned while the yolks of the unbroken eggs remained
uncooked. Suddenly overcome with weariness, Amy felt tears starting
from her eyes.
    It was at this moment the back door opened
and Charlie came in, carrying a billy of milk. He stared at the
scene: a kitchen full of smoke, bacon half blackened and half raw,
a pan containing something that might once have been eggs, and in
the midst of it