Dear Doctor Lily by Monica Dickens

used again before she could turn around. Verna Legge produced mostly frozen food from a huge freezer chest in an outside shed, thawing it out at fullpower, so that the outside was burned and the inside ice-cold.
    Ida helped as much as she could with the children and the baby Vernon and the washing-up and throwing away – cartons and tins went out of the back door in the vague direction of some old oil drums – and there didn’t seem to be any sweeping, nor a broom to do it with.
    She went shopping with Mrs Legge. ‘Downtown,’ Verna said. She was stuffing dirty clothes into a heavy cotton bag that was stencilled USAF.
    â€˜I could clear out the sink and wash some of those,’ Ida offered. ‘I have some things of my own to do.’
    â€˜By hand?’ Verna was alarmed. ‘This is America, girl. We don’t wash our own clothes here.’
    Her own outfit could have done with a soak and a scrub. Vast grey knitted trousers, as wide as they were long. A purple T-shirt over bellying breasts that fell to where her waist might be. Hairy black cardigan that rode her gross shoulders like an animal of prey, its loaded pockets swinging at the front, the back ending half-way up her back in a ragged arch, the T-shirt ending soon below that, and half a yard of bumpy flesh before you came to the stretched elastic of the elephantine trousers. When Verna moved about the small house, knocking things over or aside, she created a disturbance in the air, and the wind of it was sour.
    On the way downtown where the shops and launderette were, Verna’s great rustic car, whose back window was taped up with plastic, coughed up the hill and rattled down the other side into a valley of superb pine trees and scattered white or red farmhouses, swinging from side to side round the corners, kept on the road by Verna’s powerful arms at the helm. Ida had to hold Vernon tightly on her lap to prevent his head bashing against the window. He was a passive little boy. Born to hubbub, he had decided not to compete.
    At the foot of the hill the car crossed a wide river and slewed to a stop behind the grain mill, where Henry Legge worked.
    â€˜Henry!’ His wife leaned an arm and a squashed bosom out of the window. ‘C’mon out here!’
    â€˜Shaker!’ A man doing something outside called into a shed. Henry was called Shaker at work.
    He hurried out, flapping long hands at his wife. ‘You’ll like to get me fired. This place is full of visitors.’
    â€˜Bunch of snots.’ Verna put her finger under her spread nose, and pushed it into a pig’s snout. ‘Why can’t they buy their flour at Lefty’s?’
    The mill ground and sold earthy grains and cereals and special flour of all kinds from coarse to silky. Ida, yearning to the rustic like all city people, was entranced by the old waterwheel turning slowly in the swift river. Lunchers in the glass-walled restaurant above watched the great wheel dip and raise and spill the water as it had done for a hundred years, wet green whiskers dangling and dropping silver pearls, and floating soaked again to rise dripping.
    Henry could not take her into the milling shed or the barn or the mill store, or anywhere the visitors went. The old waterwheel was believed to power the grinding, so Henry must be invisible in his oily overalls in which he ran the machinery that actually turned the grindstones.
    Lefty’s Market was a grocer’s in a town no bigger than a large English village, but with many more shops. The shelves of the low-ceilinged market were crammed with things that Ida had never seen. She wanted to stay and explore, but Verna careered through the place like a lava flow, throwing tins and packets on top of Vernon in the trolley, criticizing, swearing at prices, smelling the pork chops.
    â€˜This here is Ida that Buddy brought over from England to marry,’ she told Lefty at the paying counter.
    â€˜American