The Postcard Read Free Page A

Tomorrow
morning they would go on the train into town, as promised in Aunt Phee’s postcard.
    Marthe and Nan were her daily bread but Aunt Phee was like iced buns: a special treat, for best only. There was so much to tell her about the owls’ nest in the wood, the special flowers
she’d pressed, the songs from Belgium that Marthe taught her, the new stitches she was learning at school and how she could write her name neatly in a straight line.
    On her wall she had a special book with all the postcards Aunt Phee had sent from faraway places: Biarritz, Paris, Malta before the Great War ended and the church bells rang out in Dalradnor
village. There was the Tower of London and a place called Le Havre, after which Aunt Phee had appeared, sunburned, with dolls in costumes – stripy skirts and lace hats – for her display
cabinet. They weren’t dolls you played with, not that Callie played with dolls. She had a stuffed donkey with a real leather saddle, a real pair of Dutch clogs and a necklace of shiny blue
beads.
    None of her friends at Miss Cameron’s had such a famous aunt who acted on the stage and wore beautiful gowns, furs and hats. She knew this was Miss Faye’s home and that her own
parents had died before she was born so she must be grateful that this was her home too. Miss Faye had served her country helping soldiers in their time of need, Marthe said, but there was no war
now, just a big cross in the village square with names carved in gold, names she could almost read. She was slow with her letters but she could name all the flowers in the walled garden and woods,
the birds in the trees. Tam had taught her to recognize their songs. She knew where there were tadpoles and frogspawn in spring, where the blackbird had nested. Marthe would take her to the loch
and they had picnics on the pebbled beach: game pie, sandwiches and chunks of fruitcake, with a Thermos of piping hot tea.
    Callie hated being stuck indoors when it rained but when it snowed in the winter it was a wonderland of snowball fights, snowmen building and sledging down the brae. Sometimes she helped in the
big kitchen with Nan and the maid, Effie Drummond, who was full of tales about kelpies and scary ghosts in the mist. Callie was allowed to lick the baking bowl and cut out pastry tarts or draw with
crayons in colouring books, but today she must shut her eyes and pretend to sleep so Marthe would leave the Nursery in the attic, with its barred windows and coal fire with the brass guard rail
round it, and let Mr Dapple, the rocking horse, guard the door, which was always left ajar just in case she was frightened in the night.
    Callie loved her bedroom, with the brass bedstead and patchwork counterpane. She had her own dressing table with drawers scented with sprigs of lavender in which dresses were layered in tissue
paper. Most of the time she wore a bottle-green school uniform, gymslip and gold-striped shirt with a green cardigan piped with gold, and thick green itchy three-quarter socks and a big green felt
hat with the school hatband. She couldn’t wait to change back into her kilt, handmade in her very own tartan, red with green and blue plaid, belonging to the Clan Ross. Aunt Phee had told her
that Rosslyn was her second name, so she could wear the tartan. It came from Lawrie’s the kiltmakers in Glasgow.
    If only she could wear nothing but a kilt and jumper she could race along with the twins like a boy and not a sissy smothered in the smocked dress with white socks and sandals that she must wear
on Sundays. She’d begged for bobbed hair like Aunt Phee, but Marthe said she mustn’t have her hair cut before she was twelve. It was bad luck, she warned, tugging Callie’s thick
hair into ropes before school every morning.
    Callie snuggled down under the covers with not an ounce of sleep in her. The last time she’d seen Aunt Phee was at Easter egg time and she’d brought her friend Aunt Kitty to stay.
She was a nurse in a big