The Primrose Railway Children by Jacqueline Wilson & Rachael Dean

Author:Jacqueline Wilson & Rachael Dean [Wilson, Jacqueline & Dean, Rachael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241517789
Publisher: Penguin Random House Children's UK
Published: 2021-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

Nina had painted the lettering in different colours to make it look pretty. She’d selected interesting shades of sage and emerald and jade for the leaves on the trees and the grass and plants, and a watered-down Prussian blue for the stream. Robinson himself was all in brown: brown clothes, brown sandals, brown hat, brown basket, brown parasol and a long brown beard. It was all painted very carefully, but I was interested to see she’d gone over the line slightly once or twice, and there was a smudge at the edge of the page. She didn’t colour much better than me. Well, maybe just a little bit better, but not much.

Robinson’s long beard was disconcerting. Would Dad grow a beard too? I wasn’t sure it would suit him. I hoped he might shave it off when he came back, though if he was giving television interviews he might want to keep it to look the part. I hoped it wouldn’t tickle too much when he kissed me.

There were two small coloured-in pictures on the first page of the story: one of a parrot, and another of a big sailing ship. This seemed promising. It looked as if the exciting part of the story was starting straight away. I peered at the very small print. It started with Robinson’s birth, hundreds of years ago. He said he was born of a good family.

Dad wasn’t really born into a good family at all. His dad was mean and nasty and drank too much, and his mum was ill a lot, and was often away in hospital. I always felt so sorry for little boy Dad, but he insisted his childhood wasn’t as dreadful as I thought.

‘Half the time I wasn’t me anyway. I was Charlie in the chocolate factory, I was James in the giant peach, I was Danny and champion of the world, and I didn’t live in our flat, I lived up the Faraway Tree or in Narnia or on a desert island,’ he always said cheerily.

‘But you still didn’t have a happy family,’ I said.

‘You’re my family now,’ he’d say, meaning Mum and Becks and Perry and me.

I suppose we had been a happy family, but how could we be that now without Dad? I read several rather dull pages of Robinson Crusoe, having to concentrate hard, and then at last came to a picture of a young Robinson without a beard, in fancy clothes, clinging to the rail of a ship with huge waves rising up all around him. At last, the shipwreck! But it wasn’t; it was just the start of Robinson’s sea adventures, and I wasn’t really interested. I just wanted to get to the island part.

I flipped through the dense yellowed pages. Nina didn’t seem to think much of them either, because she hadn’t bothered to colour any of these pictures. I was about to give up on the book altogether, when I saw the words ‘THE JOURNAL’, and then there was a flurry of short entries, each with their own carefully painted picture.

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