Mad Joy by Jane Bailey
Chapter One
At the age of five I ran into a wood, and nearly two years later I walked out of it and into the nearest house. I was covered in filth, shoeless, with leaves and plant stems matted in my hair. My mother – or the woman I would call my mother, Gracie Burrows – found me curled up on her armchair beside the fire. I did not say where I’d come from, because I did not speak.
For a long time I lived mute with Gracie Burrows and she, for her part, was quite happy to be ignorant of my origins in case anyone should reclaim me as their own.
Imagine the scene. On that very day in 1927 Gracie had buried her father, the clockmaker Edmund Burrows, and last remaining member of her family. There had been a small gathering back at the house afterwards. A pitifully small gathering: just three half-dead neighbours, in fact, who’d had nothing better to do on a Thursday morning. Gracie had washed up the last plate of crumbs and covered the pyramid of uneaten paste sandwiches with an upturned bowl. She had most probably fought back tears of anger at her wasted life, just as she had always kept her emotions in check through years of duty and restraint. And the newly-orphaned, life-long childless spinster was about to yield to some fierce unfettered grief at last, when she unlatched the parlour door to find me, a fetid, grubby gift of fate.
We both played our parts so well: she not wanting to know, and me not willing to tell. It was a fine act. We thought we could keep it up forever.