If Johnnie could pick up The Times of an evening and understand everything that was written there, then so would she. She’d keep on and on until she could walk into Mr Blake’s cottage with a pie or a pudding and read whatever was lying about. Within a week she’d mastered over fifty words, within three she could read a short sentence and had discovered how to judge the moment when Mr Hayley would finish with the latest copy of the paper and put it into the canterbury. From then on, as soon as she heard his limping step, either on the stairs or retreating into the bedroom, she crept up the backstairs into the library to purloin her precious reader before anybody else could get their hands on it. Then she sneaked it away to the kitchen and hid it in the dresser until she had time to resume her battle with the print. ‘Tell me what it says, Johnnie,’ she would demand, pointing to any word that baffled her. And when she’d been told, she pondered it carefully, pronouncing it and considering it until it was fixed in her brain.
