A Better World than This by Marie Joseph Page B

in graceful flight. Well, if he didn’t want to talk about it, then that was okay by her. And nothing,
nothing
was going to mar this one perfect day.
    ‘Technical books,’ he was saying, answering her question. ‘Never fiction. I used to be told that sticking your nose in a story-book was a waste of time.’
    ‘In a book I’ve just read,’ she went on, ‘a young man called Harry wins on the horses. Twenty-two pounds for a threepenny bet! He gives half of it away, but with the rest he takes his girl Helen away to the seaside. Away from the terrible slum they live in to a place where they can lie in the bracken and watch little boats sailing out to sea. It’s called
Love on the Dole
.’
    At the memory of what the two young lovers did in the bracken besides watching little boats sailing out to sea, Daisy blushed. She glanced at Sam to see if he had noticed, but he was walking along by her side with his head bent. As if looking for a coin he had dropped and lost. And was determined to find.
    Florence had walked for what seemed to be miles, staring down at the cracks in the pavement, putting one foot in front of the other, because something told her that was the way you walked. She had been surprised to find that Daisy was not at home, but not amazed. To be amazed would have indicated feeling of some sort or other, and Florence felt nothing. The only thing she was certain of was that she was never going back to the house again. Never. Ever. Ever.
    Being Wakes Week, there were few people about in the streets. The few she met stared at her strangely. She couldn’t think why. After all, she had remembered to put on her long coat over her nightdress, and her lace-up shoes over her bare feet, and if her long pale hair was hanging loose down her back instead of rolled up into its neat pleat, what did that signify?
    The worrying thing was, where could she go? The neighbours on either side had gone on their holidays, Southport and Cleveleys respectively. Daisy was out, and the one friend she had at work had gone further afield, to Scarborough. Florence saw the park side gates looming in front of her, and with her nightdress trailing, crossed over the road. The sun was so hot that a series of gas-tar bubbles had erupted on the newly-laid macadam surface. She remembered the satisfaction of bursting them as a child, leaving flattened blisters and greasy black marks on her clean white dress when she’d wiped her fingers down it.
    There was a bench inside the park, not far from the gates. It was set back from the path, fronting rhododendron bushes, overlooking the duck-pond. As Florence sat down and arranged the nightgown neatly round her ankles, she saw that the hem was all smeared with dust.
    ‘Sorry, Mother,’ she whispered, then pulled herself up sharply. ‘That way madness lies,’ she told herself firmly. ‘Shakespeare.’
    Oh, but her mother had been such a lovely little woman. Neat as a new pin, with a clean blouse on every day, never missing. She had always arranged the clothes-rack so carefully after she’d finished the ironing. Underclothes first, then laid over them her lace-edged pillow-cases and embroidered mats, starched stiff as planks and ironed first on the front then the back, to bring the French knots into prominence. Fastidious wasn’t the word for her mother. Spotless was more like it, from the top of her shining hair to the soles of her polished boots. Not clogs, never, even though her mother had, as a young woman, stood at three looms in a weaving shed. No shawls, neither. She had gone to work wearing a coat and hat, and never stood gossiping on the step like the other women in the street. When she sent Florence out for chips she had always given her a white teacloth to lay over the basket, hiding the basin. When she mopped the front step she had got up early and done it in the dark with a piece of sacking protecting her clean flowered apron.
    ‘Oh, Mother. …’ Two fat tears rolled down Florence’s