Biscuit`s Mummy

Biscuits mummy was not always happy as it was tough bringing up Biscuits on her own and she didn`t always have enough money, although everyone in the village liked Biscuits Mummy. She had borrowed money from the bank over the years because she thought that was where you got money from if you hadn`t any of your own. and she kept going there to get some whenever she needed some. Although she tried to save money when she did have some, so that she could give it back to the bank she never seemed to have as much as she needed so she would receive nasty letters from the bank all the time and she never understood why they always sent them when they knew she did not have any money in the first place. She would never have the money to give to the bank so that she would not owe them anything and sometimes when she sent Biscuits to the shop over the railway line to fetch a large packet of Daz so that she could wash her clothes, she would cry a bit because she didn`t think she would ever have any money and it bothered her a lot.

It bothered her even more when she didn`t receive any nice letters from friends she had in other parts of the country and she hated herself for being poor but she never let Biscuits see her crying and she never told her about the money she owed to the bank.

Biscuit`s mummy was the nicest mummy in the world and she was born in June. Biscuit`s knew that this was good because she was not naughty like Biscuits was but she was practical and she was as good for the village  as she was for Biscuits or herself. She would never say a harsh  word  against anyone as Biscuits sometimes did.
If it was a frog or a stone that she was addressing or silly old Gerlinky who still hadn`t spoken to her in these past three weeks. Biscuits Mummy was careful with her money when she had some but she was not ungenerous. She liked to cook for people and she did her best always to make sure that her house was full of people whose company you could enjoy even if you were the Fuzzer who liked to spend most of his time on his own. He would often come to Biscuit`s mummy`s house if she was holding a gathering and she had left the lights on. Fuzzy would be drawn like a moth to a flame.

Fuzzy would press his thick pebbly glasses to the panes of the window so that his thick and sandy hair would press against the glass and leave a mark like the waves of the sea. Biscuit`s mummy use to hold a chocolate Biscuits up against the glass so that Fuzzy would be only a fraction of a hand's  breadth from his purpose in life and he would have to leave the window to step down to the ground and to scamper around to the front of the house and then back to be greeted by Biscuits with a whole packet of chocolate Biscuits. These were Fuzzy`s favourites. Most of these she would scoff in front of him if she hadn`t scoffed them already because she was always scoffing biscuits. This was how she had got her name.  Fuzzy would get upset  because he thought  there wouldn`t be any left though there would always be one at the bottom of the packet which Biscuits would somehow miss. This is a measure of how naughty Biscuits sometimes was.

One of the things Biscuits liked  most about herself was where she lived. She liked living with her mummy and she liked living close to Fuzzy`s house which was only just around the corner  from where Biscuit`s mummy lived. Biscuits liked the postman who brought the post in the morning and she like the trees and the birds that sang in them and the way the wind reached down the hill and stole into the back of their house making it very cold in winter but cool in summer.

She didn`t have much to look forward to here but nor did she have much to regret. Although it  would have suited her to know more about the world and explore gigantic museums  which there were in all the major cities  of the world and which held all the treasures which you learnt about in school, if you went to school, or that you read about in the encyclopedia if you did not. The truth about Biscuits (if there was anything to know,) was that she had no need of seeing all there was to see in the world or to now all that there was to know. Sometimes she thought that she needed to know everything and that she should travel to every distant part of the globe but she thought that really she need not know anything more than she already knew. Which to some people would be quite a lot, (though to others much less.)

Biscuits was a mystery sometimes, (if she needed to be,) She knew the sounds of all the birds which flew past this way in autumn because Fuzzy had taught her and she had come up with a list of names of all the geese  which flew directly  over her house. She could whistle one down and clonk it on the head with a a pan if she needed to eat something for her supper. She rarely if ever would do this because she had given them all names and because her mummy always made her something to eat for her supper anyway.  If she was not too busy seeing to the accounts  which she kept for Mr Jones or cleaning the house which seemed to take most of her life from her.

Theirs was not an adventurous life, though adventures did happen. The place they had chosen to live was a peaceful one. They had not really chosen to live there, in any case they had been chosen by the large wooden bungalows on stilts which could pass for a design from America but which did not look out of place in this valley.