Margaret Cropper (This lady lived up here in the north from 1886 to 1980.)

From Little Mary Crosbie

This is taken from a much longer poem. It is the story of a child who had lived all her life in an orphanage.

She never did just what you told her to do,
Because she saw everything so curiously new;
And the old things people kept doing were dull,
And the new things she thought of so wonderful.

Yes, everybody doing the same all day,
Everybody putting their clothes away'
Everybody eating porridge and bread,
Everybody turning the sheets on their bed,
Everybody polishing the same old floors,
Everybody shutting the same big doors,
Everybody singing the same hymn,
Everybody wearing the same trim
Institution clothes of Institution cut,
Institution talk in the same old way
Institution plays that weren't real play,
Made little Mary Crosbie have to break away.

So the little wild eight-year-old cut like a knife
Right across the ordered Institution life;
An odd child, that you couldn't bear
When you had to have things even and square
To make the machine work decently.
She was like a wheel that turned into a tree,
Like a rule that became a riddle,
Like a brush that turned into a fiddle.

Mary is told that a lady wants to adopt her, quite an old lady, Susannah, living alone in a house in the country.

Lying awake,
In the long room,
With twenty others
In snoring gloom;

Mary Crosbie
With shining eyes
Surveys her future
With dark surmise.

After her latest
Escapade,
She remembered that
The matron said,

"We'll have to tell
The lady where
You're going, how naughty
You've been here.

Mary Crosbie,
A little afraid,
Lies on the bed
That she has made.

"But I'll be by myself",
She says,
"I won't have everyone
Always.

If she's unkind,
She's only one,
And there'll be places
I can run.

If there wasn't so many
Of everything,
Perhaps I'd be as good
As anything".

The social worker delivers Mary to Susannah's house, and goes 'picking her way across the fields' back to her car.

Mary and Susannah,

Now they turned home together, hand in hand,
And Mary asked: 'Does the door be open here?'
The question standing for all manner of things.
Susannah, cheered by the sound of the little voice,
Smiled down, 'It mostly does in Summer time'.
She longed to get a good look at the child,
But divined that this was no way to break the shyness;
Instead she set a round stool by the fire,
Saying, 'That was mine when I was a little girl',
And went about the business of setting tea.
She put the promised brown egg in a pan,
And reached the mug with roses from a hook,
Cut some good slices of bread, spreading the butter
Handsomely over them, and, all the while,
Stealing a glance at the elvish sparkling eyes
That followed her so alertly. Mary Crosbie
Had never seen an intimate meal prepared,
Never seen kind trouble taken for one,
Never seen Love laying a homely table.

Mary settles in, and Susannah likes her odd ways -

Mary trying a fresh place
For everything, with a grave face.
"My shoes would like to sit
On the staircase for a bit.
I'm turning this pot round
To show my doll a flower I've found.
My stool would like to go
By the big clock for a minute or two.

Can I start my dinner with jam
And finish with this bit of ham?"

Sometimes she got her own way,
Sometimes Susannah used to say,
"Nay, my love, not for today".

Mary opening the door,
With her frock put on wrong ways before:
"I thought my buttons would like to see
What happens in front of me".

Then it is autumn, and the social worker comes back to inspect Mary, who is terrified, and hides in case she is taken back to the orphanage. But the committee decide that she is happy with Susannah and must not be moved. The poem ends with Mary singing to invisible friends in an empty ruined house where she plays,

"Don't be afraid of the wind, he sings for us;
Don't be afraid of the rain, it's very soft;
Don't be afraid of the snow, it's white and clean;
Don't be afraid of the dark, there's spangles in it.
Go to sleep till Spring."