So. I'm returning to my writing after a long (unintentional) break and feeling a tad overwhelmed. If you have the time I would love to hear any feedback. Granted you can't tell an awful lot with a snippet but, I'm procrastinating!
I remember sitting on the faded carpet in our living room, munching on marmalade toast and listening to the faint sound of mothers radio drift through from the door to the kitchen. I was wearing my favourite pair of pale blue pyjamas, the ones with a green pinstripe. The neat little collar and row of wooden buttons looked more like a uniform than anything else and I always felt rather grown up in that set. I had been watching the sluggish parade of red double-deckers pull up outside our window, one after the other, after the other, as they made their way down to Waterloo. Staring at the passengers in grey, black and blue, yawning their way to another busy day. It must have been a week day, the day that we left. People on the bus wore more colour on the weekends. Brighter colours, wider smiles and the addition of children were a sure sign of a Saturday. Now, what must mother have been doing? Presumably things that she'd usually done whilst we'd lived on Islington Road. Washing the dishes, folding the sheets and preparing the supper before noon. Of course, this probably wasn’t the case on that particular morning. She would have been folding our clothes, wrapping her valuables, packing our lives in the smallest way possible as not to raise suspicion with father.
"Tommy?" she called, "Have you finished your breakfast?" "Almost," I replied, whilst scraping the remains of crust and crumb onto the carpet for Rabbit. (Dear Rabbit. She was not, as you might presume, an actual rabbit, but rather a mongrel two bit scrap of a pup. Something between terrier and terrible father had said, but father didn't care much for pets. Our neighbour Mrs Parry had brought her round just a month earlier and said her husband John had found her wrapped in a sheet, bungled down a rabbit hole on his latest shoot on the moors. Mrs Parry explained that her youngest Jack appeared to be allergic, after developing a terrible prickly rash and cough in the dogs presence. It hadn't taken mother much convincing to keep baby rabbit, providing I kept her out of fathers way).
Mother appeared in the doorway, golden from the glow of the morning sun that shone through the window behind me. "We really need to get a wriggle on now," she said, as she picked up my plate off the floor. "What are we doing? Don't I have school?" "Not this morning," she said. "We are taking a little trip. I have packed your things and set some clothes out upstairs, you just need to get dressed and maybe pick a book or two". "But where are we going? What about Rabbit? Will father be joining us too?" "Daddy is working, but Rabbit can come. Now go get your things and I will tell you more on the way". I did as she asked, and when I came back downstairs I found her placing a note on the kitchen table with 'Ralph' scrawled in ink on the top. "Just leaving a goodbye for daddy," she said, her eyes turning glassy and wet. "Don't cry," I said. "We'll be back soon enough and we can tell him all about it". She smiled and touched my cheek. "How did you get so sweet Tommy Bird?" I reached down into my trouser pocket to retrieve a crumpled paper bag and placed a frosted yellow lump in her hand. "Pear drops!" I said, "Shall we go?".