Sunday

Biscuits mummy was quite a nice mummy and she used to cook big meals for herself and Biscuits. She used to get quite cross if Biscuits didn`t finish all of her food because she did not like Biscuits to waste any of it as apparently there were children starving in Africa or something... Sometimes she cooked too much so that Biscuits could not eat all of it so sometimes Biscuits felt quite fat.

OnSunday while Biscuits mummy was cooking the biggest meal of the day she would send Biscuits out to the shop across the railway line at the place where the road forked up the hill. Biscuits used to like running errands for her mummy because she liked helping her. Because she was such a nice person  and she used to get very tired and sad sometimes because she had no one to look after her, after Mr Biscuits died, except for Biscuits and her friend in the village. They would do things for her now and then when she needed things to be done but she just had to manage most of the time. And so Biscuits liked to help her when she could. On Sunday mornings, Biscuits mummy always used to ask Biscuits to go down to the shop over the railway line to ask the shopkeeper for some of the washing powder for their clothes and for a cake to scoff for their afters and for a packet of biscuits, which Biscuits would scoff on the way home because she was always scoffing things and she especially loved to scoff  biscuits.

When they had both properly digested their lunch they would sit for a few hours in front of the fire and then Biscuits mummy would fall asleep. She wouldn`t even wake up when the little aeroplanes would go overhead which practiced in the sky.

Sometime Biscuits wanted to sneak off when her mummy fell asleep but she used to tell herself that her mummy would worry if she woke up and found that Biscuits was not beside her. She didn`t want to upset her mummy so she would lie on her back and stare at the clouds out of the huge window which faced south and which caught the sunshine in the afternoon, except on days like today when there were too many clouds for the sunshine to show through.

On these afternoons, although she was very small, Biscuits used to think about things. She used to think how clever a thing life was. How complicated it was but at the same time a very simple thing. She used to think about her own life and how it came from within her and that it was not for the making of anyone else. She used to feel quite useless sometimes and sometimes she would curse her broken foot for being made the way it was, all back to front and useless, and she would curse the callipers which she always had to use whenever she went to the shop to get something for mummy.
She hated the callipers which were meant to hold her legs straight and she hated the fact that her mummy used to have to help her put them on, but she liked her mummy and so she didn't hate herself too much. Because her mummy was always kind and she knew that if she was  kind too, it was better than if she was horrid.  Her mother always used to say that pleasant things were still going to happen if you were sad or wore a frown, and that being nasty would only make you hollow inside.

Biscuits knew that Biscuits was not her real name, although it was what everyone called her. She knew that nobody was really called Biscuits and that biscuits were things you ate, but her mummy never spoke to her formally like they would if she went to school and Fuzzy like to call her Biscuits so she thought that Biscuits was her real name really.