‘Don’t dawdle, Green!’
Nurse Clouter’s voice sounded even harsher and more scoursome than usual, Millie thought. She bent over her boot, retying the bow of the lace with great care, getting the halves exactly even. In fact, if it hadn’t been Nurse Clouter – who told everyone only babies were afraid of the dark as she snapped the gas off at night – with anyone but Nurse Clouter, Millie would have thought her voice sounded scared.
Millie stood up carefully and considered her two feet in their new boots. ‘It’s Greenly.’ She looked up into an outraged O of a mouth. ‘My name is Greenly, not Green. Millie Saint Greenly.’ She had only discovered the middle part recently herself, when The Master of the Institute had summoned her to The Office, where he had told her that she was eleven years old and when a child reached eleven years old the Guardians, being good and generous people, for which she must be very grateful, arranged for that child to earn her own living in Gainful Employment. And she – Millie Saint Greenly – was to be a scullery maid, and what did she think of that, eh?
Millie hadn’t really known what she thought of it, the question catching her out sudden like, but she had said she was Very Grateful because that was always a safe reply and The Master had seemed pleased. And so she had been given two yards of cotton print and one yard of canvas, all at The Parish’s expense, for which she must be grateful, and told to make a new dress and two new aprons and three caps to go away and be a scullery maid in.
And while she had worked, Millie had brooded on her new discovered name. She would have liked to ask if being a Saint meant she would one day be with her Mother. Her Mother was an Angel in Heaven Singing With God’s Heavenly Choir, which her friend Sarah Boggs had assured her was a very good thing. She knew that if you were very lucky then one day an Angel might come down and take you up to Heaven, and she had rather hoped that being a Saint might help if the Angel knew about it, but Sarah Boggs had gone away three months before to be a tweeny, so she had nobody to ask.
‘Oh you dawdling little slut!’ Nurse Clouter pinched her arm and then pinched it again on exactly the same spot which she always managed to do even if you moved your arm away really quickly. ‘Dirty, idle, lying, ungrateful, little slut. And don’t you dawdle. Do you want to be late? Late for them’s as good and kind enough to give the likes of you Gainful Employment. Oh the wicked ingratitude of it! Just you come along of me right now!’
She grabbed Millie’s hand and dragged her along the street, presumably because Millie had now proved herself too untrustworthy to walk under her own locomotion.
Millie wondered how she could be considered a liar for mentioning her correct name instead of agreeing to the false one, but she also knew that she must be in deep disgrace, because to be called Ungrateful was the worst epithet there was in the Marylebone Institute for Destitute and Foundling Children. She knew that she should have hung her head and accepted Nurse Clouter’s pinches as her just due, and fixed her eyes humbly on her boots as they scuffed through the dirt and dust of the streets.
Except that the boots were new – not new to the world, perhaps, but certainly new to Millie, and black and shiny, with eight eyelet holes on each side rather than the mere two of the regulation boots in the Marylebone Institute for Destitute and Foundling Children.
Besides, the streets weren’t dirty at all. They seemed quite fresh really, as if someone had worked very hard with a broom in front of every house to push the dust into the little piles in the gutter which a man in a brown coat was shovelling up neatly into a small hand-barrow. The leaves on the fine young trees that marched along the streets were a lovely transparent sort of green, and the sky was blue, blue, blue, and her feet weren’t shuffling at all. In fact she couldn’t seem to stop them skipping sometimes. And when the man in the brown coat winked at her as they walked past she felt a little smile bubbling up inside her so she had to clamp her lips very tight shut to stop from laughing.