Lillipilly Hill by Eleanor Spence Page A

your brother?’
    â€˜He went inside,’ said Harriet, rather shame-facedly. ‘He hates people shouting and making scenes.’
    â€˜Why didn’t he hit Paddy, then? Paddy’s all noise—he’s not all that good at fighting, though he thinks he is . Here, Pete, stop snivelling!’
    The child thus addressed was the smaller of the two—indeed, to Harriet’s eyes, he looked as if he should have been at home in the nursery. He was crying quietly to himself, wiping eyes and nose on the grubby sleeve of a jacket several sizes too large for him.
    â€˜Pete’s only just started school,’ Dinny explained. ‘He’s four. Ma asked Mr Burnie to take him because the baby’s sick an’ Ma hasn’t got much time to look after Pete.’
    Rose-Ann was staring at Dinny as if at a creature from another world. Harriet remembered that Dinny was only a year older than Rose-Ann. Compared to the Barley Creek girl, Rose-Ann was hardly more than a baby.
    â€˜She’s real pretty, your sister, ain’t she?’ Dinny observed, making Rose-Ann blush. ‘How d’you like my ribbon?’
    She wore Harriet’s ribbon proudly on her tangle of black hair. Her dress was the same washed-out blue as before, but today it was clean.
    The hearty clamour of the school bell, hung from a post near the water-tanks, made the Wilmots jump. Since Dinny’s arrival, the rest of the pupils had straggled into the grounds, and most of them were grouped at a distance, studying the strangers with frank interest.
    â€˜Just stay with me,’ ordered Dinny. ‘You can sit at my desk.’
    Harriet never forgot her first glimpse of the classroom. Over Dinny’s shoulder, she could see a floor of rough, uneven planks, bark walls with several chinks through which the sunlight entered, two high windows which failed to give sufficient light, and four rows of battered desks and narrow forms. The only adornments to the room were two coloured religious pictures, a globe, and some large sheets of multiplication tables. Harriet’s optimistic spirit quailed a little at the sight of the place to which she had so cheerfully consigned herself and her brother and sister.
    Aidan, having not yet been told where to sit, was leaning against the wall beside Mr Burnie’s desk. He met the stares of the other pupils with a cool indifference, and refused to respond to Harriet’s encouraging smile. That he absolutely loathed his new school, and everyone in it, was only too obvious.
    Mr Burnie came in, brisk and smiling, and, to Harriet at least, infinitely reassuring.
    â€˜We have three new pupils today,’ he told his classes, and the Wilmots immediately became the object of further curious stares. ‘Aidan, Harriet, and Rose-Ann Wilmot. They are still strangers in this country, and we should all do our best to make them feel at home. Now, Aidan, as you will be in my top class, you can sit at the end of the back form, next to Bill Mackenzie. The girls seem to have put themselves in the right place, in the middle there. We shall now have our morning reading from the Bible. Your turn, Maggie.’
    A plump, red-cheeked girl on Harriet’s left stood up, stumbled unhappily through a few verses of Genesis, and sat down hastily and thankfully. While Mr Burnie handed out slates and copy-books, and set his pupils to work, Harriet furtively surveyed her schoolfellows. Of the twenty present, fourteen-year-old Paddy Tolly was the oldest, being kept at school byhis widowed mother, the storekeeper, until she decided what to do with him. The youngest was Dinny’s brother Pete, now placated with a box-full of assorted buttons, a bodkin, and some wool—equipment which Mr Burnie kept for his smallest pupils, still too young for reading and writing. On the same bench as Pete sat four or five slightly older children, who made up the first and second classes. The next form held half a dozen