Floorboards up

[ailbhe]

Today Rob took up floorboards and moved furniture and peered into dark cavities while I lay in bed. I appear to have successfully fought off the bug that gave the children their stomach troubles - though we'll see how I am tomorrow - and he has a very serious Plan of Campaign for getting a light into the children's play corner. We went out and bought a junction box, some 1mm² cable, a pull-cord switch, and a light fitting. We came home and had dinner and bedtimes. There's not a lot more he could do today so he isn't.

I read What Katy Did at School and What Katy Did Next and I think they are less awful than the first one but still full of people who... just don't measure up to Anne Shirley and Jo March, in terms of showing a little human nastiness occasionally. All that mad untrammelled virtue is a bit wearing.

Tomorrow we hope to finish the wiring and go swimming. I need to find another book to read.

Comments

[the-changeling.livejournal.com]

It's been so long since I read them, I suspect there has been a reason I've not read them. Cousin Helen's saintlyness annoyed me even then. But the school adventures were okay. The puzzle of how they could crawl through the drawer spaces to each other's room, took years for my befuddled brain to work out.

But I s'pect they are best left in the past...

[barakta]

Huh, how did the crawling through drawer spaces work? Were they shelves rather than drawers built into the wall or something?

[the-changeling.livejournal.com]

Well, I think it worked it out that the divisions between the rooms were partitions, and that the furniture was built in. And that the drawer spaces backed onto each other, and so if you took a drawer out at both ends (in both rooms) a skinny girl could flit over.

Rosered was the girl if I recal correctly, or was it rosebud? No, I'm sure it was Rosered. Let me see if I can find it on Google...

Oh how annoying! Amazon stop half way through the paragraph! But yes, it's Rose Red and Mary Silver, and the drawers meeting in the middle. I'd forgotten Mary Silver.

I also remember much ado about making sure Katy had her own washbasin and stand, so she could wash her body all over, in private, every day. That stuck too - all those images of Victorian wash jugs and basins in period dramas. (And those with ice on top, the ice to be broken prior to washing, in Victorian orphanages...)