Great Meadow Read Online Free

Great Meadow
Book: Great Meadow Read Online Free
Author: Dirk Bogarde
Pages:
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certain.’
    â€˜She’ll be rather surprised if you do.’
    â€˜Well, I mean, one has to be decent about this sort of thing. The woman has a name and it seems to me correct to use it. I don’t know her familiarly, do I?’
    â€˜I don’t know,’ I said, not knowing really, and being a bit worried by the grown-up sort of speaking.
    â€˜Well, of course I don’t. First time I clapped eyes on her was yesterday evening when we got in from the bus. She seems a decent sort of person, so I would like to behave correctly. I think it very demeaning not to give her her proper station.’
    We walked up, crossed the road, pushed open the iron gate into Great Meadow and started the climb up to the cottage. But we didn’t say very much, because we didn’t really know what to say to Brian Scott Bromley. My sister crossed her eyes at me, when he wasn’t looking, and put a finger to her head, meaning that she thought he was a bit wonky. Which I was beginning to think too. But I pretended not to notice what she was doing in case hesaw. And so she just clumped ahead singing any-sort-of-song and holding her khaki shorts up by pushing her hands into the pocket because they were too big really for her, and she had broken her snake-belt when she fell out of a tree when we were picking sloes.
    Just as we got to the beginning of the gully, I said to Brian Thingummy that it might be quite interesting for him to see the smugglers’ way to the cottage, instead of walking up Great Meadow, which was in the blazing sun, and the gully was shady and cool, and he said, ‘Very well.’ So we slid down a chalky slope under the trees, and heard my sister scream out in the field on top.
    It was quite a terrible scream, three very loud ‘Eeeee!’ s.
    â€˜What’s the matter then?’ I called out through the tangle of ivy and roots from the bottom of the gully.
    â€˜You’re vile!’ she shrieked. So I knew she wasn’t dead or bitten by an adder or something. Just furious. ‘How do you know the stallion isn’t loose in the field? It may be, but you don’t care. Oh no! Just leave me alone here and disappear down the gully. You’re a stinking beast.’
    â€˜What’s the matter with her?’ said Brian Thing, pushing in his shirt where it had come out all bumfley from his shorts because of sliding down the chalk slope, which was the only way you could get into the gully because it was so overgrown.
    â€˜I think it’s because of Aleford’s stallion. She is frightened it might trample her to death or something.’
    â€˜Most unlikely,’ said Brian. ‘I mean, unless she provoked it.’
    I didn’t know what he really meant, so I didn’t say anything, and anyway she was coming down the slopeand making a dreadful clattering noise scrabbling under the bramble and ivy.
    â€˜Some people are so rotten’ she said. ‘I could have easily been frightened to death up there, all alone. In a field full of stallions’
    â€˜You don’t know it’s there,’ I said.
    â€˜You don’t know it
isn’t
there,’ she said as we pushed through trailing old man’s beard. ‘Don’t you think this is very nice indeed, Brian?’ she said, as if she had made the gully all by herself. So I quickly put that right – she was such a show-off.
    â€˜The smugglers made it,’ I said. ‘Years ago. And they used to smuggle brandy and all manner of things down from the little church at the top of Great Meadow. It was their secret way to the village, you see.’ I felt quite pleased –
that
shut her up a bit.
    But then he said, with that squinty smile, ‘I very much doubt it. I think it was just a downland track which went up from the main road to the windmill at the top, beyond your cottage. You showed it me last evening.’
    â€˜Our mother fell through the floor once, in the cottage,
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