Unspoken: A story of secrets, love and revenge T. Belshaw (good books to read for beginners txt) 📖

sorry to be a pain, but we don’t really want to go to the expense of building a bathroom if we have to come outside to use it.’ I was disappointed, and it showed.

‘Ah, sorry,’ said Mr Hart. ‘I forgot to say, we’ll also knock a door into the parlour so that you can access the bathroom from there.’ He tapped his nose as though he was about to let me into a big secret and beckoned me to follow.

He led me back into the kitchen and stood by the sink.

‘We’ll fit a large Ascot gas heater in here and that will give you hot water wherever you want it. We can also replace this old sink and put in a new one with hot and cold taps. The town gas pipes run past here to the Cooper farm at the bottom of the lane. I know, because I fitted them out with a new bathroom last year.’

Talk about keeping up with the Joneses, we were keeping up with the Coopers. First the telephone, now the new bathroom. I wondered what else they had that we could copy.

Miriam, who had been standing by the front room door, rushed across the kitchen.

‘You mean I won’t have to boil that infernal copper for a decent amount of hot water. I can just turn on a tap?’

‘That’s exactly what I’m saying,’ replied Mr Hart.

Miriam grabbed hold of him in her bear-like hug. ‘Oh, thank you, thank you.’

When Michael eventually wriggled free, he straightened his hat and returned to business. He gave me his fee for the work, told me it could all be started within a week as he had two jobs that were finishing this weekend.

‘Will I receive a written estimate? I’ll have to put it on the farm’s expenses sheet for tax purposes,’ I said, sounding just like my father.

‘If you agree the price now, I’ll send the estimate and invoice with the lads when they start. It will probably be Wednesday.’

‘So soon,’ I said, getting excited at the prospect of instant hot water.

‘I always try to put locals before outsiders,’ he replied. He smiled at Miriam. ‘I’ll oversee this job myself.’

Miriam blushed twenty shades of red in as many seconds.

I grinned at her and winked again.

‘I’ll, err, just go and check on the Mister,’ she said, hurrying across the kitchen.

Chapter 53

June 1938

Mr Hart was true to his word, and at seven-thirty on Wednesday morning he arrived with one of his sons and two other men. If you played a game where you had to guess their occupations just by looking at them, you’d choose builder, every time. Michael’s son was, confusingly, called Michael, so I called him Michael Junior when I mentioned him. Michael himself didn’t like the epithet Senior, so he just remained Michael.

‘One of the lads I was going to bring with us today is called Michael too,’ said Michael, ‘but I thought that might make life difficult.’

Miriam came out of the kitchen in a fluster with a tray laden with mugs of tea. When Michael took his, he winked at her and complimented her on the brew. I lost count of the amount of times she stammered ‘thank you’ but it was at least six.

‘Keep them plied with tea,’ I said to Miriam as we stood by the sink watching the workmen offload wheelbarrows, shovels and sledgehammers from their open-backed truck.

The lorry was similar to ours but much newer, and as I found out over the next ten days, it started first time, every time. I thought about getting a new truck for the farm, but it would have to wait. The cost of the telephone and the bathroom had made a bit of a dent in our finances. The cottage that I had put up for rent a few weeks earlier now had tenants, a lovely Welsh couple with one child. Mr Owens had brought his family from Cardiff to take up a job as a pattern designer at the mill. The money they handed over every Friday would help pay for the cost of the building work.

We had money in the bank and money in the safe. We were due payment for a batch of pigs, a few bullocks and twenty lambs too. So, it wasn’t like we were on our uppers, and our credit was good, we could get farm loans any time we liked. We never had though, and as far as I was concerned, we never would.

By the end of the first day, the dividing wall had been demolished; the space for a window had been knocked into the old lavatory wall, and a hole the size of a door knocked through to the parlour. The brickwork had been wheelbarrowed up long planks onto the back of the truck and driven away.

Mr Hart came in for a cup of tea and a progress report at five o’clock and informed me, and a flustered Miriam, that he would be bringing his plumber with him tomorrow to get the gas into the house from the main road. He would also check the drains from the lavatory and install the pipework for the water supply out of the kitchen wall and into the new bathroom.

Friday would see the Ascot and new kitchen sink installed.

I thought Miriam was going to faint when that news was announced.

On Friday lunchtime, Mr Hart ceremoniously switched on the Ascot and turned on the hot tap. A few seconds later, a torrent of boiling water splashed into the huge, white Belfast sink, which was easily big enough to bath twins in. Mr Hart thought of everything.

He held up a warning hand to stop us testing the temperature of the miracle hot-water supply and adjusted a thermostat controller on the pipework of the Ascot which lowered the water temperature to a safer level.

Miriam loved the new sink almost as much as the hot water system. Not only was it huge, so that she could do the washing in it, but