Chapter 2

Back at the house, Ellen was up and rousing the middle children. She let her mother and the twins, who slept with her, sleep a bit longer. As she helped the little girls get ready for breakfast Jamie and Jon took care of Mathew, who at almost 9 was getting too old to be washed by his big sister.  Mary-Anne, Jane and Victoria were almost like her children now, at ages six, five and four she had been caring for the little girls since she was 10, and now with the twins occupying so much of her mother=s time outside the bakery she was also taking care of three year old David. Mattie now identified more with his brothers than his sisters, whom he had started calling “Babies”. Mary-Anne missed her brother’s company, she was close to him in age and something of a hoyden, always getting into the boy’s games, even though Ellen and Maria had tried to tame her; with three elder brothers it was only natural that she would be boyish. The littler girls adored their big sister so much they were easy to handle, but Mary-Anne was a different kind of creature and always a challenge.

Being the first child, and for the first few years the only girl, Ellen had always been closer to her mother. The boys, Jamie and Jon, were only 10 months apart, and were almost more like twins than the twins were. They had always been a unit, with their own language and secrets.  They were alike in appearance, tow- headed and brown eyed and similar in size and build. She had been almost two when Jamie had come along and had some experience of being an only child. With the boys then coming so close together, and then the three girls, her mother had been so occupied with them that Ellen had spent much time with her father until she was  about 7; he had taught her all about the horses, and she had led a carefree life. As the boys grew older he had started taking them on too and she had learned to share him. Her father had still been working with his parents then, and until they died he had been a warm and loving father to the three oldest children.

Jamie had been the youngest of his own family, his two oldest brothers had gone to America, his three sisters to service and then to their own large families, and two boys had died in infancy.  The farm was no longer a working farm by then; London had reached out and swallowed much of the farm land. So when his parents died James had sold the remaining land and bought the present house and barn. It was inside the borough of South London, and was close enough to set up the hotel delivery business and the stall. The reputation of his goods, which had been built on his mother’s talent for making pies out of the farm’s chickens and lambs and largely catered to wealthy local homes, had enabled him to make a go of it from the start. It was a good life, but he worked too hard to pay any mind to his younger children, and had become quite stern with the older ones, even his favorite (though only he knew it!) Ellen.