About this story
Years on, your tutor Elizabeth Rodney has you copying out a Cambridge scholarship notice on the cliff path, promising a life your parents never intended you to want. You bring the papers home; your father orders them burned and banishes Elizabeth; your mother, more frightened than angry, pockets the form and sends you upstairs alone.
How it opens
Breakfast at Leaside shared a room with your father's desk, pipe smoke, and military photograph.
The grocer's book lay open beside cooling bacon while the sea brightened the curtained windows.
Colonel OgdenMary, this advertisement proves we pay too much, though you denied it a minute ago.
Mrs OgdenI shall change the order today, James; there is no need to excite yourself.
Choose
I did, Mother; please leave Milly out of the row.
Milly knocked it down, but the quarrel frightened her.