On a Clear Day Read Free Page A

harder to deal with than girls, though most people seemed to think it was the other way round. She said that her ownmother, Granny Scott, had always said it was the boys that had her heart broke with their complaints and worries while the girls just seemed to make the best of things.
    ‘Not all wee boys are like William, Clare, just some of them. Your Daddy would never have been like that, but your Granny Hamilton said that your Uncle Jack was never away from her skirt tail till he got his first job in the fruit factory. And look at the age he’d have been by then.’
    There was no doubt, Clare agreed, boys were funny. Funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha, as her father would say. You could never tell what they were going to do next. Whatever it was, it was usually a nuisance. But, as her mother always said, what you can’t change you must thole.
    The last of the line of big girls had reached Miss McMurray’s desk. She stood awkwardly as she presented her work, the ‘garment’ which represented the culmination of the years of sewing samples and the previous year’s effort of making an apron with two pockets outlined with bias binding in which to place dusters.
    Mary Bratten’s garment was large and shapeless and although Clare knew that it was either a blouse or a pair of knickers it was quite impossible to tell which. Of course, if it were knickers the elastic would go in last. But, even allowing for that, the voluminous spread of green gingham lookedmore like a laundry bag than either of the possible garments it was supposed to be.
    Clare knew exactly what her mother would say if she saw it: ‘It would fit Finn McCool and leave room for Mary as well’.
    Miss McMurray spread the fabric out, surveyed it wearily and reached for a box of pins. Mary shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other and tried to avoid the glances of her friends sitting in the back row. She looked all around the room as if desperate to escape the sight of the green shape that twitched and writhed below Miss McMurray’s pins.
    Clare felt sorry for Mary. It was all very well if you liked sewing or were good at it, but it wasn’t very nice for you if you didn’t. And it was clear that Mary didn’t like sewing and was no good at it at all.
    The clock clicked audibly in the quiet of the room where even the senior girls had fallen silent, their gossip expended or their observation of Miss McMurray judging it expedient.
    From the corridor, footsteps sounded, firm and measured. As Clare glanced towards the window on that side of the room, she caught sight of a blue figure. The dungarees were a blur behind the moulded glass of the lower panes, but where the panes reverted to plain glass above the level at which pupils could be distracted from their work, the head and shouldersof Mr Stinson, the school caretaker, were clearly visible as he moved steadily past.
    Clare didn’t know Mr Stinson very well because his store room was on the Senior corridor and he was seldom to be seen in her part of the school. Occasionally he would appear with a bucket and mop when some child had been sick in the classroom and every few weeks he would arrive with a huge bottle of ink to refill the inkpots. She always liked seeing him because he wore exactly the same blue overalls her father wore for work, and like her father, they nearly always had marks of grease or oil from some job they had been doing.
    ‘I’m sorry Ellie, they’re a bad job this week,’ her father would say when he came downstairs on Saturday afternoon wearing his old trousers for the allotment and carrying the blue overalls on his arm. ‘Ye may put in a drop of that stuff I got from Willie Coulter down at the depot.’
    ‘Never worry, Sam, there’s no work without mess. I’ll soak them in the children’s bathwater tonight and they’ll have all Sunday to loosen up. Sure the better the day, the better the deed. Your other pair came up a treat last week even after you working on Jack’s car.