Auntie Robbo by Ann Scott-Moncrieff — Read

Auntie Robbo sat at the door of the house. Hector had thoughtfully carried out the rocking chair after lunch, before going off to the cliff-tops with Jacques Aristide to study the habits of the lesser black-backed gull. Auntie Robbo had fully intended to go with them, but the after-effects of roasted eiderduck done in an inimitable Swiss manner and the rocking chair set so invitingly in the sun had seduced her into taking a lazy afternoon. The sun glared down from a pale, dried-up summer sky, burnishing the wave-tops, baking the Shanna rock, sucking up the sea so that a haze hung like a curtain off the island. But Auntie Robbo felt no more than pleasantly warm, with her head in the shade of the doorway and a sea-wind playing about her ankles. She rocked gently on the one rocker of her chair and blinked at the dazzling water. On her lap lay a red-covered musty book which she had taken from the sitting-room. It was called _Good Works and Golden Opportunities_, and Auntie Robbo knew it well, for she had been given a copy of it on her fifteenth birthday and every Sunday for a year she had had to read it aloud to her Aunt Sibella, who was short-sighted. A sentimental curiosity had made her take it down from the book-shelf.

But after all she didn't read it. The sun was too bright on the page and she was thinking she would like to buy some new clothes, a thing she hadn't done in twenty years. It was true, her clothes weren't done by any means; built of the best material, reinforced with padding and lining, whalebone and stitching they wouldn't fall to bits for another twenty years at least. But they were no longer so smart and neat as Auntie Robbo's fastidiousness demanded. And the goat had eaten her little green stalking-cap.