Far From My Father's House by Elizabeth Gill

known that his grandmother would be weeping at the loss of his mother and her dreams. Nobody was to blame that he loved Annie so much. He couldn’t hurt her now even though he wanted to because her father and mother had given him a life here. Nobody was to blame that he had to leave this place he loved so much and the girl that he wanted. He could never come back here like this because if he did then he might find somebody to blame and then he would know that he had been mistaken about himself and he was worth nothing. He shrugged her off as gently as he could considering how he felt and walked back to the farm with her following, crying, and that was the worst part of all, he thought afterwards when he had gone. He thought that nothing in his life would ever be that hard again.

Ten
    Blake had always thought that he was at home in the country, that he would be content always to stay there and he would have been. It seemed to him that things went on there as they ought to and that he would hate life anywhere else but the minute that he stepped on to the beach at Seaton Town he knew a different kind of homecoming.
    It was late autumn by then and there was a stiff breeze. The waves were flinging themselves over the harbour walls, the limestone cliffs were high, the beach was sandy away from the town, the water moved with the wind on it and he felt a kind of exhilaration, an excitement which he had never known before. There were ships in the harbour too and he had discovered that he liked to potter about down there, seeing the comings and goings at the coal staithes, hearing the accents and the languages which were new. The men had different-coloured skins and different kinds of clothes and he felt the excitement. He loved the noise and the people and all the buildings and seeing the ships away over on the horizon.
    He was by himself, had gone for a walk away from the house where Annie’s grandmother and step-grandfather had been so kind. Blake had not expected to be so well-received, he was nothing to them, but they seemed so pleased to see him. He did not feel at a loss, that had passed and this was as different as it could be with the cars and railways and shops. It was so busy and Blake had thought that he would find it overwhelming and too strange but he didn’t. Already after only a few days he felt as though he had lived there for quite a long time.
    Ralph and Blake had tramped the streets in search of work. Blake had said that he didn’t want to go down the pit and Ralph had laughed. He worked in the pit office now.
    ‘You’d never stand it,’ he said. ‘Not that there’s work to be had. There isn’t.’
    Blake had not been surprised to find that there was nothing for him to do. From the beginning he had not been hopeful, only of getting away and it was easier being away from Annie altogether than seeing her every day, especially watching her go out with Paul Monmouth. He didn’t think about her any less but the ache eased when there were other things to think about and other people to see. Also, although Ralph and Mary Ann had a much smaller house than he was used to, there was now nobody but them in it. Their family all had their own houses, they had married and gone. At first it occurred to Blake that it could be like his life alone with his grandparents but it was not like that at all.
    In the first place the pit town was as different as it could be from the countryside and it took him weeks to get used to the dirt and the smell and all the people, the close way that everybody lived and the way that there was never silence. He couldn’t sleep to begin with and he even hated it for the first few days, but Ralph and Mary Ann were so kind and the people around him all spoke to him even when they had no idea who he was. The pit people, introduced to him by Ralph, took him to them in a way in which Blake had not expected just because he was living there. He thought they were the kindest people he had ever met