儿子与情人（纯英文版）/5000词床头灯英语学习读本

作者简介

内容简介

The Bottoms succeeded to the notorious Hell Row. Hell Row was a block of thatched, bulging cottages that stood by the river on Greenhill Lane. There lived the coal miners who worked in the little mines nearby. Some sixty years ago Hell Row was burned down in a big fire. To accommodate the regiments of miners, the mining companies built the Squares, a section of blocks for the incoming miners, with twelve houses in a block. The houses themselves were substantial and very decent on the outside, each one with a porch overlooking a sunny garden. But that was outside. The kitchen was at the back of the house, facing in- ward between the blocks, looking at a scrubby back garden, and then at the ash-pits. So, the actual con- ditions of living in the Bottoms, that looked so nice, were quite unsavory because people must live in the kitchen, and the kitchens opened on to that nasty al- ley of ash-pits. Mrs. Morel was not anxious to move into the Bottoms, which was already twelve years old and on the downward path, when she descended to it from Bestwood. But it was the best she could do. She was thirty-one years old, and had been mar- ried eight years. A rather small woman, of delicate build, but resolute bearing, she shrank a little from the first contact with the Bottoms women. She came down in the July, and in the September expecting her third baby. Her husband was a miner. The world seemed a dreary place, where nothing else would happen for her at least until William, her eldest child, still only seven years old, grew up. But for herself, nothing but this dreary endurance till the children grew up. P1-2