Orphanage Runaways

Just another day

“Everybody up,’ Miss Thompson shouted as she bashed a wooden spoon against a pot. We get woken up every morning at 6 o’clock to clean, eat breakfast and wash the dirty plates and cutlery, and clean again. We just try to make as little mess as possible so there isn't as much to clean up.

After the sound of the banging stopped echoing around in my head, I could hear that the other girls were up and talking quietly amongst themselves. There were 10 of us in the orphanage. Miss Thompson who ran it, Mrs Reed - Miss Thompson’s sister - who helped run it, the mean older girls - Elizabeth, Maggie, Ella and Lillian, me, Evelyn and Ruby who are twins and little Ethel who was half my age at 6.

The mean girls were always picking on us as we were younger. Also because no-one but us cared. They would make fun of how Ethel loves her teddy bear so much, or how the twins had nightmares and sometimes screamed or talked in their sleep. One of them always crawled into the other’s bed even though their beds were next to each other anyway. It was a good way to stay warm though. Every night before I slept I prayed that someone would come to get me and my friends and take us away to someplace else to live happily without the older girls or mean Miss Thompson. They would laugh at me and say, "No-one wold want to take you and those weird creatures you call your friends." I try to ignore them. Hope is all I have left, but I don't think that God has heard me yet.

Just as I finished making my bed, which consisted of a cotton sheet and a scratchy blanket on a creaky mattress with a flat pillow, Ethel came up to me.

“Hello Ruth,” she said.

“Hello Ethel. How are you?” I replied.

“Fine, same as always. Were you cold last night?” she asked.

“Yes, it was a cold night, and winter's coming so it will not get any warmer for a long while,” I sighed.

“Oh, I do hope Miss Thompson will get us some more blankets.”

“So do I Ethel. So. Do. I.”

After another breakfast of claggy porridge, we swept the floors and opened the windows to air the rooms out. Icy dry winds swept through the building. It made my dirty chestnut hair fly and sent chills down my spine making me cold and reminding me just how bad it is to live here. Ethel was lucky because that day it was her turn to wash the dishes from breakfast. They were washed in hot water so it was a bad job in summer, but great when it was cold because it warmed your whole body.

The afternoons were good. We got to read the newspapers from the morning that Mrs Reed and Miss Thompson didn’t want anymore. There wasn’t usually anything that I wanted to read but I flicked through it anyway in case anything big had happened. Something caught my eye. It was an advertisement that said ‘Come and see the acrobats and clowns at the Grayson Brothers’ Circus!’ I read below, ‘At the town square for a limited time!’
‘This is our chance of escape’ I thought. About anywhere was as good as the orphanage.

That evening I talked to the twins and Ethel about my idea. We had been wanting to get out of this place for ages but didn’t know where to go.