Welcome to Silver Street Farm by Nicola Davies Page B

person. Not good enough to own fine poodles.
    “Yes, yes,” she said carefully, “I have money. Cash.”
    “Right. Then meet me at the corner of Milsom Street and Park Row in an hour.”
    He didn’t even wait for her to reply. Perhaps the puppies were stolen. Auntie Nat pushed the worrying thought to the back of her mind and, thinking instead of what Karl would say when he got home and found two little poodle puppies in the apartment, almost skipped down the hall to the creaking, cranking old elevator.
    The man was definitely not a refined person. In fact, he looked as if he could use a bath. What was more, he seemed to be in a great rush to get rid of the puppies. He shoved the box into Auntie Nat’s hands and told her that the puppies were sleeping and that it would be better not to open the box until she got home. This had made her suspicious, but when she’d poked a finger in through an airhole in the box, she’d felt the warm, woolly fur. She handed over the money and hurried home.
    Back in the apartment, Auntie Nat brought the box into the kitchen and sat down gratefully on a chair. She looked at it, but she didn’t open it. Now that her long-held dream was about to come true, as the horoscope had predicted, she realized that she didn’t really know anything about poodles. They were cute and fluffy, but what did they eat? How did you train them? Where, she thought with sudden horror, did they “do their business”?
    Inside the pet carrier, the pups were starting to wake up and move around. She would have to let them out. She opened the top of the box, and two sweet little white woolly faces looked up at her and opened their mouths.
    “Baa!” said the puppies. “Baaaaaaaa!”

The old station was most definitely
not
open to visitors: the huge wrought-iron gates were closed with a giant chain and padlock and covered in signs that shouted fiercely, NO ENTRY! and TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED! and, most worrying of all, DANGER! GUARD DOGS PATROLLING AT ALL TIMES .
    “We can’t go in there!” said Karl.
    “Yes, we can!” said Meera.
    “What about the guard dogs?” asked Gemma.
    “Oh, that’s just for show,” said Meera, waving her hands dismissively.
    Karl, who was still small for his age, looked up at the gate.
    “How will we get in?”
    “Climb, of course. Duh!” said Meera.
    Gemma laughed. “But you’re terrible at climbing, Meera!”
    “That’s where you come in, Daddy Longlegs. Get up there, Gemma!”
    Gemma
was
the best climber of the three of them, and she could never resist a challenge.
    “OK. I’ll get on top of the gate, then I’ll help you guys up,” she said. “And if we get thrown in jail, at least I won’t have to spend all vacation with my brother.”
    Once they were on top of the gates, it was easy to slide down the other side and start to explore. There were several old brick buildings, some with faded signs still hanging above them: TICKET OFFICE , WAITING ROOM , and STATIONMASTER’S OFFICE . The windows were broken and there was ivy growing up the walls, but the roofs still looked solid and weatherproof. The space around the buildings was big, about half the size of the school soccer field, Karl guessed. It was completely overgrown, but where brambles and nettles would grow, so would grass for animals to graze. As the children wandered around, the dreams they’d had since the first day of kindergarten finally seemed within their reach.
    They pushed through the jungle of plants and at last reached the edge of the canal, where they sat down with their legs dangling over the wall.
    “It’s brilliant!” said Gemma. “I think there could be enough grazing in summer for a couple of sheep.”
    “The ticket office would make a great cowshed,” said Karl.
    “We could have ducks on the canal,” said Gemma, “once we’ve gotten the shopping cart out, of course.”
    That was when they heard the growl and turned around to see a huge black dog with a row of very big