The Fleethaven Trilogy

by Margaret Dickinson

  ‘I reckon they’re going to tow it out to sea,’ Danny said. ‘Look, there’s a boat coming.’

  Keeping well hidden so that they would not be ordered away from the area they continued to watch until the bomb was towed into the water behind a boat, ploughing a watery furrow through the waves.

  ‘Shall we see it blow up, Mester?’ Jimmy wanted to know.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jonathan murmured, his gaze on the boat getting smaller and smaller towards the horizon.

  ‘Are you lot going to lie there all day?’ came a voice from behind them and, with one accord, they turned to see Esther standing on the edge of the hollow looking down at them. ‘Don’t you know there’s work—’

  Something above them caught her attention and whatever she had been going to say ended in her mouth rounding in a surprised ‘oh!’

  Everyone swivelled back as they heard a dull ‘boom’ and, out to sea, saw a white plume of water spurting skywards. Jimmy and Janice leapt to their feet and shrieked with delight, but Ella and Rob, catching some of the seriousness on the faces of the adults, just stared.

  Jonathan and Danny got to their feet. ‘Well, that’s it then . . .’ Jonathan began, then seeing his wife standing rigidly, still staring out to sea, he added, ‘What is it, love?’

  She blinked and seemed to shake herself, but Ella felt her glance come to rest on her. ‘They could all have been killed,’ she murmured. Suddenly, she smiled, her whole face lighting up. She reached out and touched Ella’s curly hair. ‘Never let it be said I can’t give praise when it’s due. Ya did well, Missy.’

  Ella took a step forward, started to raise her arms to hug her grandmother, but already the older woman was turning away. ‘Come on, now. All the excitement’s over. There’s work to be done.’ Esther turned and disappeared up and over the dunes, leaving Ella staring after her not quite knowing whether to be pleased or vaguely disappointed.

  The photo and the article were on the front page of the local paper the following Friday.

  The heading read, ORPHAN HEROINE SAVES LIVES and the piece went on to give a dramatic account of how the children in the photograph had found the object but that it had been the swift action of one, Ella Hilton, who had recognized it as being a bomb. Although mention was made in a kindly and sympathetic way of Ella’s mother, Kate, having been drowned so tragically and so recently, there was nothing said about her father. So Ella breathed a sigh of relief and tucked the newspaper away in the blanket chest on top of her mother’s belongings.

  The event was talked about by the locals for a few days and even found its way into a national daily newspaper, though only on an inside page; then it was soon forgotten. There was only one other outcome; Mrs Souter arrived once more in the yard of Brumbys’ Farm.

  Esther stood watching her approach; feet planted firmly apart, hands on hips, her green eyes alight ready to do battle.

  ‘Esther Godfrey, we ain’t allus seen eye to eye, you an’ me,’ the woman began without preamble, ‘but Ah’ve come to thank that little lass o’ yourn for what she did.’

  ‘Eh?’ Esther gaped and Ella, hiding round the corner of the house, stuffed the back of her hand into her mouth to stifle her giggles.

  ‘If it hadn’t been for her, them daft pair of mine might a’ been blown sky high. Dick said it could easy ’ave gone off when they was tugging it about. So I reckoned I owed you that much to come and thank you, like.’

  ‘’Tain’t me you want to thank, Aggie, but I tek it kindly you coming.’ Esther smiled. ‘Kettle’s on the hob. How about a cuppa?’

  ‘Oo ta, Esther. I won’t say no.’

  Towards the end of July, Peggy arrived unexpectedly to stay a few days at the farm. Ella clung to her and buried her face against the slim woman’s smart jacket, breathing in her well-remembered perfume. As soon as they were alone together, she asked at once, ‘Can’t I come back to live with you, Aunty Peggy?’

  ‘Oh, love, you know you can’t. I’m so sorry.’ And though she touched Ella’s cheek with infinite tenderness and love, there was nothing else she could say.

  Peggy seemed anxious and ill-at-ease as if she were worried about something. Several times during her stay, Ella saw her talking earnestly, almost secretly, to her brother, but never when Esther was present. Whenever someone else approached, they stopped talking. Was Aunty Peggy pleading her cause? the girl wondered. Was she trying to get Jonathan to agree to Ella going back to Lincoln? But when the time came for Peggy to leave, still no word of Ella going back had been mentioned.

  She tried once more. ‘Can’t I go and stay with Aunty Peggy for a week? I can, can’t I, Aunty Peggy?’ she asked across the tea-table.

  Peggy, her cheeks turning a little pink, looked anxiously towards Esther. ‘Well, it depends what your gran—’

  ‘We need you here to help with the harvest,’ Esther said sharply. ‘It’s our busiest time and you’re old enough now to lend a hand where you can.’ She turned to look down at Ella. ‘All farmers’ children help. Always have done, always will.’

  ‘But I’m not a farmer’s child, am I?’ Ella glowered, her lower jaw sticking out moodily, the birthmark on her face clearly visible. ‘I want to go back to Lincoln. I want to go – home!’

  She was aware that Peggy’s face was growing redder with embarrassment.

  Her grandmother frowned. ‘This is your home now, Missy, and you’d better make the best of it.’

  ‘Why can’t I even go for a holiday? lf I can’t go now, what about Christmas or next Easter?’

  Ella turned towards Peggy once more for support, but the woman’s eyes were downcast towards her plate and she was pushing the food around it as if she had suddenly lost her appetite.

  ‘We’ll see,’ was the only reply Esther would give. But the girl knew that this time her answer meant ‘no’.

  When she went with her grandfather to take Peggy to the station the following day, her aunt hugged her closely and whispered. ‘Don’t fret, love, please. When you’re older, maybe she’ll let you come then.’

  ‘One day, when I’m older, I will go,’ Ella vowed, ‘and no one – not even her – will stop me!’

  As the years passed, each school holiday the growing girl, now a pupil at the local grammar school, smart in her dark green and gold uniform, asked if she could go to visit Peggy in Lincoln and every time the answer was the same, ‘We need you here,’ until in the end, she stopped asking. Her questions about the family, about her own background even, were always silenced with a frown from her grandmother. Everything seemed to be shrouded in mystery, secrets that Esther would not share. Neither would she allow anyone else to tell Ella anything. Occasionally, she would hear her gentle grandfather trying to persuade Esther. ‘You ought to tell her, love. Where’s the harm? Kate would have explained it all to her by now . . .’

  Always, when she asked about Esther’s early life, about the Elands or even made tentative remarks about the identity of her own father, her grandmother flew into a temper and, as she grew older, Ella ceased to question. But she never stopped wondering.

  As the years flew by, one merging into the next, the days filled with school work, homework and work on the farm, Ella at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, still felt as if Esther treated her like a child; a child who must be protected and guarded and kept in ignorance.

  One day, I’ll find out what all the mystery is, Ella promised herself, just as one day I’ll go back to Lincoln. One day, I’ll go back home.

  Part Two

  Sixteen

  LINCOLNSHIRE, 1958

  When the O level results came out in the August of 1958, Rob had not achieved the grades he needed to get into the farm institute.

  ‘I’ll have to do retakes,’ he told Ella dolefully. ‘It means staying on at school another whole year.’

  ‘Poor old Bumpkin!’ Ella teased him. ‘Never mind, it’ll soon go.’

  ‘It’s all right for you, Townie!’ he grumbled. ‘You’re a clever-clogs.’

  �
�You’ll just have to work harder, that’s all. Not so much “gallivanting”, as my gran calls it, eh?’

  He smiled ruefully. ‘That’s what me dad ses.’

  At sixteen, Rob was several inches taller than Ella, having shot up in the last year so that Rosie despaired of him – for ever growing out of his clothes. ‘I reckon he keeps standing in the muck heap,’ Danny would tease, ‘to mek hissen grow.’ Already his son was half a head taller than Danny, but almost as broad-shouldered and strong.

  ‘Eh, but he’ll brek a few hearts,’ Rosie would say fondly, her eyes following her son lovingly. Behind her back, Danny and his mother, Grandma Beth Eland, would exchange a look, but not a word was ever spoken.

  ‘Are they very disappointed?’ Ella asked him now.

  He shrugged. ‘Don’t seem to be. I think Mum’s quite relieved really that her little boy isn’t leaving home yet.’

  Despite what Rob said, the autumn term in the fifth year at the grammar school was hard work for Ella. O levels now loomed for her, too, the following June, and decisions would have to be made about her future. Should she leave school the next summer or stay on to do A levels and maybe go on to university?

  ‘University? Huh!’ Her grandmother would sniff each time the subject was raised. ‘What good’s a fancy education for a girl? Won’t help you milk the cows and harvest the corn, will it?’

  ‘But Aunty Lilian went. You didn’t stop her,’ Ella would argue, standing toe to toe with her grandmother. At almost sixteen, she was now slightly taller than Esther. Still boyishly slim, Ella had changed little in appearance in the five and a half years she had lived at Brumbys’ Farm, except to grow taller. Her short hair curled tightly and her skin, tanned to a smooth light brown from helping on the farm, was devoid of the make-up with which her schoolmates experimented. Only the birthmark marred her complexion.

  ‘Aye, an’ look what’s happened,’ her grandmother would fling back. ‘Dun’t want to know us now, does she?’ Her grandmother, too, was little changed: still slim and lithe, a few more grey hairs and another line or two on her face which, she assured Ella, were put there by all the worry the girl caused her.

  To her grandmother’s bitterness about Lilian, even Ella had no reply for the fact was that Esther’s younger daughter was a shadowy, distant figure, who had virtually cut herself off from her family.

  Ella would sigh and shake her head. ‘I don’t think you can blame her going to university for that, Gran.’ But her grandmother would carry on muttering dark threats about ‘folks getting above theirsens and despising their upbringing’.

  It was fortunate for Ella that she was a tough, healthy child, for with the extra homework in preparation for examinations and yet still expected to help on the farm, by the end of the term, even she felt exhausted.

  A glowing school report at the end of the autumn term emboldened Ella to ask once more, ‘Can I go to Lincoln to see Aunty Peg? After we break up from school?’

  She still longed to be in the city again, especially just before Christmas to see all the shops decorated, hear carols sung and get caught up in the excitement of it all. So many of her childhood memories were becoming hazy, she was afraid she would lose them altogether.

  ‘Ya see Peggy when she comes here,’ Esther argued.

  ‘Let her go for a night or so, Esther,’ Jonathan said, winking across at Ella from behind his newspaper. ‘Peg would love to see her.’

  ‘But Peg’s at work all day. I dun’t like her wandering the streets on her own . . .’

  ‘Gran, I’m almost sixteen . . .’ She paused and then her blue eyes sparkled. ‘How about if I ask Janice to come too? She’d love a trip to the city. I think she’d be able to get time off work. They’re not very busy this time of year.’

  Janice had left school the previous summer to work in a café in Lynthorpe.

  Esther looked from one to another. ‘Oh, I see, ganging up on me, are ya?’

  Jonathan smiled gently. ‘Come on, love. Let the lass have a bit of fun.’

  Esther’s glance was going from one to the other as if she were considering. Slowly, she said, ‘All right, then. Ya can go, but there’s one condition.’

  Ella’s eyes widened in delighted surprise. ‘What?’

  Then, suddenly, Esther smiled. ‘Bring me a present. I dun’t often get a present from the big city.’ She put her head on one side, considering, and said slowly, ‘D’ya know, never in me whole life have I spent a penny on something that wasn’t useful or – or sensible.’

  Ella gasped. ‘Of course I will.’ Leaping up from the supper table, she flung her arms around her grandmother’s neck. ‘Oh, thank you, Gran, thank you.’

  Esther wriggled under Ella’s embrace and murmured, ‘There’s no need for all that,’ but when Ella drew back she saw that the older woman’s face was pink and she was still smiling.

  ‘I’ll write to Peg tonight and ask if it’s all right for you and Janice to go,’ her grandpa volunteered. ‘You could stay two nights.’

  On the morning of their trip as she waited in the yard for Janice, Jonathan pressed some money into her hand. ‘Get something nice for your gran, something really pretty and frivolous.’

  Ella grinned up at him. ‘If she chunters at it being a waste of good money, I’ll blame you.’

  ‘She’ll love it, I promise you. She deserves to be spoilt for once.’ He chuckled. ‘But I’m sure she wouldn’t want us to make a habit of it.’

  She tucked the notes safely in her purse with her own spending money as the Souters’ car swung in at the gate, Janice’s excited face peering out of the passenger window. ‘Come on, Ella, we’ll miss that bus.’

  ‘’Bye Grandpa. See you Thursday night.’ Ella ran to climb into the back of Mr Souter’s old car, wrinkling her nose at the inevitable smell of chickens and sitting on the edge of the seat to avoid the feathers.

  ‘Hang on to ya hats,’ Dick Souter called wheezily from behind the wheel. ‘’Cos I’ll tek ya round corners on two wheels.’

  ‘Oh, Dad,’ laughed Janice. ‘This car couldn’t possibly go fast enough!’ But the next minute the two girls found themselves rolling from side to side and hanging on for dear life as Dick Souter, foot pressed to the floor, rocketed them into town to catch the bus.

  The journey took two and a quarter hours, but Janice, excited at her first trip to a city, never stopped talking, and Ella was quiet with her own thoughts; every mile was taking her nearer and nearer Lincoln.

  After all this time – six long years – she was going home.

  They got off the bus in Broadgate and walked along Clasketgate into the High Street and to the large department store where Peggy Godfrey worked.

  ‘Oh, look.’ Janice gripped her arm. ‘Look at all the – the . . .’ her bright eyes flicked from side to side, fearful of missing something ‘. . . things. Oh, isn’t it wonderful?’ She walked through the departments, touching leather handbags and gloves, leaning over the glass counters displaying jewellery, holding her nose in the air and breathing deeply near the perfume counter and staring in amazement at the range of make-up, lipsticks, eye shadows. ‘Oh, look, do look, Ella. I must buy some of this – and this – and oh, look, blue mascara.’

  They walked up the plush carpeted stairs to the ladies’ lingerie where Peggy was now the head of the department.

  ‘Ella!’

  Tall and slim, in a navy costume, Peggy seemed to change little through the years: perhaps there were more grey strands in her hair, maybe there were a few more lines on her face, but other than that she looked just the same as Ella always thought of her. She came towards them now with outstretched arms. ‘My dear, I think you’ve grown again since I saw you in the summer. You’re as tall as me now.’

  Peggy bent forward and kissed Ella’s cheek. ‘And this is Janice?’ She held out her slim, well-manicured hand. ‘I’m pleased to meet you, Janice.’

  ‘Hello, Miss Godfrey.’ But the girl’s eyes were darting everywhere, wide with wonder at the m
odels dressed in flowing satin nightwear and frilly underwear.

  Peggy smiled and asked, ‘Now, what do you want to do? Do you want the house key to go home, or do you want to leave your overnight cases with me and stay in the town for a while?’

  Before Ella could reply, Janice said, ‘Ooh, stay in town, Ella, do let’s,’ and Ella nodded ready agreement.

  Peggy laughed. ‘Now you’ve got here at last, you’re not going to waste a moment, I can see. I tell you what. You have a look round and I’ll meet you both at the High Bridge café at one o’clock for lunch. I only get an hour so you go in and get a table. It’ll be packed today with all the last-minute shoppers.’

  Ella nodded and handed over the small suitcase that had once been her mother’s and Janice’s canvas bag into Peggy’s safekeeping. ‘All right. See you later.’

  The city was in festive mood: every shop window was decorated with Christmas trees and festooned with paper chains, red, silver and gold. On a corner near the Stonebow, the Salvation Army band played carols and as they stepped out of the double doors of the department store, they were lost in the bustle of the crowded pavements.

  Janice clutched Ella’s arm again; it was becoming rapidly bruised with all the girl’s excitement. She was staring at a model in one of the huge plate glass windows of the store and watching a window dresser at work.

  ‘Isn’t that just the most wonderful dress you’ve ever seen, Ella?’ Janice gasped.

  It was a royal blue A-line dress that curved over the model’s breast and into her slim waist and then out over flounced petticoats. They stood gazing at it for a long time and then Ella pulled her mesmerized friend away. ‘It’ll be far too dear for the likes of us. Come on.’

  ‘No, no, look at the ticket. I’ve brought all me savings to spend. If I . . .’ She licked her lips in anticipation. ‘If I don’t spend so much on presents, I could get it. I’m sure I could.’