My Real Children Read Free Page A

before church they had been the very first, and they had run across the great flat sand in the early morning light, “the lone and level sands stretch far away” as it said in the poem, with the waves lapping with little white edges and beyond them the sea stretching out even further away, stretching all the way to America. Dad walked along the edge of the sea looking for shells and seaweed, but the children ran barefoot and free. Patsy could run as fast as Oswald, even though he was two and a half years older. She could run faster than any of the other seven-year-olds. One day later in the week Dad would organize athletics on the beach, he had promised, and she would win, she knew she would. She could do a handstand every time and a cartwheel twice out of three times.
    “This is going to be the best pulpit ever!” she said, digging enthusiastically. “Better than last year. And Mr. Price will give the best sermon ever and convert all the heathens!”
    “That’s right, old girl,” Dad said. “But don’t throw your sand out behind you without looking, you’re getting it on people.”
    She looked around guiltily, but he was laughing, not angry, although her sand had spattered his legs. It was so nice to spend whole days with Dad like this. It only ever happened in the summer and perhaps for a day or two at Christmas. He worked so hard selling wirelesses and mending them for people. He went off on his bike before she was up in the morning and sometimes didn’t come back until after she was in bed. On Sundays he didn’t work, but he was usually so tired that Mum made her and Oswald tiptoe around after they came back from church. Sometimes he would rouse himself in the afternoon and take them out for a walk, or organize a ball game in the park. Then she would catch a glimpse of her summer father, the man who loved to play. He had the older children running down to the sea now with buckets, to bring water to wet the sand to shape it. Patsy dug more carefully.
    “Why aren’t you a minister, Dad, like Mr. Price?” she asked.
    “God didn’t call me that way,” he replied, talking to her the way she liked, as if she were an equal.
    “And He did call you to be a wireless installer?”
    “Well, I learned about radio in the war, and so when I was demobbed it seemed like a good choice,” he said.
    That didn’t seem as grand as God calling him. “Didn’t God—” she began.
    “Why do you want me to be a minister anyway, Miss Patsy?” Dad interrupted.
    “Ministers only work on Sundays,” she said. “You’d be home with us the rest of the time.”
    For a moment she was afraid from the look on Dad’s face that she’d said something naughty, or worse, blasphemous. Her mother shut her in the cupboard when she said anything blasphemous, though she never meant to. She knew thoughts about God and ministers had the potential to get to dangerous places. Then he threw back his head and laughed so much that all the other children laughed too, even though they hadn’t been listening and didn’t know what he was laughing about, and other groups on the beach, people they didn’t know at all, turned their heads and looked at them. Patsy hadn’t meant to be funny, but she was so relieved she had been funny by mistake and not blasphemous by mistake that she laughed too, but hers wasn’t a real laugh or the infectious hilarity of the other children.
    “I must tell Mum that,” Dad said. “How she’ll laugh! I dare say she’d not like it if I was under her feet six days a week instead of only one!”
    Oswald was back with a bucket almost full of sea water. He must have been carrying it very carefully so as to avoid spilling. “Tell Mum what?” he asked.
    “Patsy wants me to be a minister so I’ll only have to work on Sundays!”
    Oswald didn’t laugh. “I’m not sure Mum would find that funny,” he said.
    “No, maybe you’re right,” Dad agreed.
    “Patsy’s not a baby any more. She should know that