Page 5 of The Girl from the Tea Garden
‘MrsDavidge said it turned out to be a lucky let-off ’cause she ended up with an officer in a prestigious Gurkha regiment and not stuck out in the sticks with a penniless tea planter.’
Margie pushed past and left Adela gaping after her.
Adela hardly ever cried, but that day she ran off to the spinney and howled behind the thick trunk of a pine tree. Crouching down, she eventually forced herself to be calm. She refused to believe Margie’s poisonous words. Surely a grown woman like MrsDavidge wouldn’t say such malicious things, let alone admit them to her daughter’s friend. She had glimpsed Nina’s mother at speech day: a thin woman dressed in a fashionably belted frock and a large straw hat with matching ribbon over a neat blonde perm. She had hung on to the arm of a much older man wearing a military-style topee and an array of medals, presumably Nina’s father. Henrietta she was called; Adela had heard her being introduced. She had looked so sophisticated that Adela had felt a guilty stab of relief that her own mother had not felt well enough to travel the bumpy two hours by car from Belgooree. She would have worn one of her ancient tea dresses and an old-fashioned hat, the kind that no one had worn since before the Great War.
But Auntie Tilly had travelled all the way from the Oxford Tea Estates with gruff Uncle James, and her adored father had come from Belgooree looking handsome in a white linen suit and brown fedora hat. Adela had felt so proud marching up on stage to receive a small silver cup for singing.
Had her father and Nina’s mother spoken to each other that day? Auntie Tilly had demanded to be shown around her schoolhouse, so Adela hadn’t been with her father all of the time. It made her feel strange inside to think her father might have had feelings for another woman. She knew that her mother had been married before; she had run a tea room in Newcastle and named it Herbert’s after her first husband. Adela’s parents had made no secret of that. But these other hurtful accusations were a different matter.
Suddenly she had an overwhelming urge to run away, to escape the cattiness of Nina and her followers and the strictures of boarding school. She longed for home, for her mother’s fussing attention and her father’s companionship.
‘What are you doing out here?’
Adela looked up to see Flowers peering anxiously at her. Adela rubbed her eyes.
‘I hate it here,’ she admitted. ‘The only thing I was looking forward to was being in the inter-house play competition, and now I’m not even in that. Nina has said horrible things about my parents, and now Margie and all the other girls hate me.’
‘I don’t hate you,’ said Flowers, squatting down beside her. ‘I think you’re the nicest girl in the class– in the whole house. I’ll never forget the way you stuck up for me.’
Adela’s eyes watered again. ‘Thank you.’ She slipped an arm around the girl’s bony shoulders.
Flowers said, ‘I thought StNinian’s would be like the Chalet School in those novels Daddy used to bring me back from the library– all girls together and having adventures. But it’s nothing like that, is it?’
‘I don’t know– I’ve never read them– but it doesn’t sound like StNinian’s. It was all right when Margie was my best friend, I suppose, but I’ve always preferred playing with boys. My cousin Jamie was the best fun– till he got sent back home to school.’
‘To England?’
‘Yes. Durham, in the north of England. Not that I’ve ever been there.’
Flowers looked at her with dark, solemn eyes. ‘I’ll be your best friend if you like. I’m not pretty like Margie and I’m not a boy—’
Adela snorted with sudden laughter. ‘No, I can see you’re not a boy.’
Flowers giggled and sucked her hair. Adela considered the idea. Flowers was not as timid as she looked; she had fought back when the girls had tried to force her to drink Nina’s potion. And she had come out here to find her even though she must know that speaking to her, Adela, would make her more unpopular with Nina and the others. Flowers had a quiet strength and an innate kindness. Adela was growing fond of the railway girl.
‘Can you sing and dance?’ Adela asked.
Flowers smiled. ‘Mummy says I’m her little nightingale, and I went to ballet classes in Sreemangal.’
‘Good.’ Adela stood up. ‘We’re going to enter our own act in the inter-house competitions. There’s nothing to say we can’t.’
Flowers gaped at her. ‘But what will the others say?’
‘Who cares?’ Adela said with a grin, pulling the skinny girl to her feet. ‘All that matters is that we get on that stage and show them they haven’t beaten us.’
CHAPTER 2
Hello, sir.’ Sam Jackman gripped DrBlack in a firm handshake. Sam’s handsome, expressive face grinned with pleasure under a battered green porkpie hat that sat at a jaunty angle far back on his head.
‘So kind of you, dear boy, to collect me from the station,’ said Norman Black, delighted to see the son of his old friend Jackman, the steamship captain. The lad had grown into a tall, athletic young man, yet his boyish looks made him look younger than his mid-twenties, as did the mischievous hazel eyes, creased in a smile.
‘Delighted to do so,’ Sam said, seizing the missionary’s battered case from the wiry porter who carried it on his head, then tipping the man in thanks. ‘And I’m looking forward to showing off my Kodak cine camera. I think it’s a great idea to film the work of the school.’
‘Well, the footage you sent me of river life was so very good,’ enthused Norman, ‘that I thought it would be an excellent way to help my sister fundraise for StNinian’s. She needs donations to cover the bursaries of the disadvantaged girls she takes in.’
Sam smiled. ‘A worthy cause,’ he said, thinking how the kind doctor had helped him with his own school fees.
Sam strode ahead, leading his old mentor to a dusty motor car– an ancient open-topped tourer that he’d won in a drunken card game from a tea planter in Gawhatty, but there was no need to tell that to the good doctor.
