Mrs. Beatup began to cry. She was a large, stout woman with masses of rough grey hair, and a broad, rather childish face, which now looked more like a child’s than ever as it wrinkled up for crying.
“Now, mother, doan’t you taake on,” said Ivy, the eldest girl, getting up and putting her arm round her.
“It’s a shaame, a hemmed shaame,” sobbed the woman. “No woander as faather’s stopped at Woods Corner. To take our eldest boy as is the prop and stay of the whole of us!”
“He aun’t no such thing,” said Ivy, who was a strapping girl—rather like her mother, except that her round face ended in a sharp chin, which gave her an unexpected air of shrewdness. The second girl, Nell, was helping her brother to his supper of pork and cabbage.
“No one can say he’s indispensable,” she remarked in rather a pretty, half-educated voice—she was pupil teacher in her second year at the school in Brownbread Street. “There’s Harry just on sixteen, and there’s Juglery and Elphick, and no one can say father isn’t a strong man and able to look after the farm.”
“Your faather’s no use. Tom, did you tell them as your faather had bad habits?”
“No, I didn’t,” said Tom sulkily, shovelling in the cabbage with his knife.
“Then you wur a fool. You know as your faather aun’t himself three nights out of five, and yet you go and say naun about it. How are they to know if you doan’t tell them?”
“I wurn’t going to tell all the big folk round Senlac as my faather drinks.”
“Hush, Tom! I never said as you wur to say that—but you might have let ’em know, careful like, as he aun’t always able to look after the farm as well as you might think.”