A Family Christmas

by Katie Flynn

  Jimmy looked desperately around him, but all he could see was snow, smooth and even, with only their footprints breaking the monotony. And the man was getting nearer; a big man, red-faced from the climb, but even as Jimmy moved closer to Wynne he realised that the man was a stranger; not a Huxtable but an unthreatening farm worker, as Wynne had guessed. The man grinned at them. ‘Afternoon, both,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Make the most of the weather, because there’s a thaw forecast for tomorrow.’

  ‘Thanks for the warnin’, Bob,’ Wynne said cheerfully. ‘We’ll get some tobogganing in whilst the snow lasts, though.’

  The man continued on his way and Jimmy felt quite light-headed with relief, but the small incident had reminded him that they were not here just to enjoy themselves. Glenys’s job finished today and he supposed that, since he had visited every Griffiths in the area without finding one who had heard of his mother, it was pointless for them to remain. He realised Wynne was staring at him. ‘What was up with you when you first saw Bob?’ his friend asked curiously. ‘I can tell you, you looked as though you’d seen a ghost. Did he remind you of someone? Someone who scares you? Now I come to think of it, for all I know you could be a thief or a murderer, fleeing from the cops as they say in the cinema. I’m sure you looked scared enough.’

  It was Jimmy’s turn to shrug and feign indifference. ‘You don’t know much about me because there isn’t much to know,’ he said. ‘But if you’re interested, from a distance Bob looked a bit like a neighbour of ours back home in Liverpool. He’s a seaman, and Mo and I steer clear of him when we can, so it was a nasty shock to see someone who looks like him coming up the slope of the hill.’

  ‘But why should he be here, in the middle of nowhere?’ Wynne persisted reasonably. ‘I don’t get it, laddo. You said he’s a seaman, but we’re miles and miles from the sea. So why did you look so scared?’

  Taken off his guard, Jimmy spoke without reserve. ‘Can you keep a secret?’

  Wynne nodded, ‘Course I can; that’s why me nickname’s Oyster.’ He laughed. ‘Go on then, what’s this secret?’

  ‘The feller I mentioned has got a grudge against me and Mo,’ Jimmy admitted. ‘It seems he took something he didn’t oughter have had, and hid it away, not knowin’ at the time that Mo was watchin’ him. It wouldn’t have mattered except that he took himself off to bed – he were drunk as usual – and when he woke up he couldn’t find it. So of course he thinks either me or Mo took it, only we didn’t, honest to God we didn’t.’

  ‘Cor!’ Wynne said, round-eyed. ‘It’s like one of them stories in the Boy’s Own Paper! But what can he do to you, this chap? You’ve only got to go to the police and tell them the whole story and they’ll see you safe.’

  Jimmy laughed bitterly. ‘One, we don’t think they’d believe us – you must admit it’s a pretty unlikely story – two, if he catches us he’d nigh on kill us before we could get to the scuffers – that’s the police – and three, we’d need an armed guard for the rest of our lives, or at least until Cyril accepts that we didn’t do nothin’. Why, he near on broke Mo’s little arm once when I’d done somethin’ to annoy him, so you see we can’t take chances. Catch one catch ’em all, you might say.’

  ‘Cor!’ Wynne said again. He frowned. ‘But you’ve only told me half the story. How about the other half? What did young Mo see this neighbour hidin’?’

  Jimmy grinned as his friend’s eyes positively bulged. ‘Gold sovereigns? Jewels an’ that?’

  His smile fading, Jimmy sighed. ‘It were a necklace, all sparkly and glittery Mo said, though Auntie Glenys thought it were probably just glass.’

  Wynne looked disappointed, but then he perked up. ‘That’s another thing. Where does Miss Trent fit in? You said it were chance that you arrived here just when they needed a teacher, ’cos you were really lookin’ for your family – is she helpin’ you do that?’

  Jimmy thought for a moment. ‘You swear not to tell anyone?’

  ‘Cross me heart,’ Wynne said promptly. ‘We can seal it in blood if you want.’

  Declining this generous offer, Jimmy went on to describe how Miss Trent hoped to find the girl who had abandoned her on a doorstep twenty-six years before, and Wynne’s eyes almost popped out of his head.

  ‘Well, if I hadn’t heard it from your own lips I’d have thought someone were tellin’ tall stories,’ he admitted. ‘So are you goin’ to stay with the old witch? Only you’ve spoken to all the Griffiths I can think of round here and you’ve not come across anyone who admits to havin’ a relative who married an Englishman.’ He grinned at his friend with more than a trace of mischief. ‘Not that anyone from this area would admit to an English relative if they could help it,’ he concluded.

  Jimmy grinned too. Because Miss Trent was teaching all day and Mo stayed with her, it had fallen mostly to him to ask questions. Folk were polite, but now that Wynne had mentioned it, he realised that everyone had been quick to deny any knowledge of a Grace Griffiths who had been unwise enough to marry an Englishman and lose touch with her roots. So now he looked rather helplessly at his friend. ‘Are you tellin’ me that people have told me untruths?’ he asked incredulously. ‘Oh lor’, don’t say all that trampin’ from farmhouse to farmhouse has been for nothin’!’

  Wynne shook his head. ‘It’s all right, I were havin’ you on,’ he assured Jimmy. ‘The Welsh are proud of their family connections, and they’d certainly never lie to you. But remember, it’s more than twelve years since your mother went off to Liverpool to marry without her family’s approval. I dare say it was the talk of the town at the time, but people forget. Now, want to have first go on the sledge?’

  When Miss Trent opened the door to Jimmy well after ten o’clock that evening, she tutted over his soaking raiment and sat him in front of a far better fire than Mrs Hughes would have allowed had she been awake. But the landlady always went early to bed, complaining that she had to be up betimes in the mornings; Mo, on the other hand, who could never now be persuaded to go to bed until she knew her brother was home safe, raised heavy eyes when he came in and asked him rather sleepily whether he had had fun.

  ‘Yes, I had a grand time. But when we first got up there I had quite a scare – well, an adventure you could call it. I was looking back at our footprints, and . . .’

  He began to tell the story of his fear that Cyril had caught up with them and his subsequent relief when he identified the stranger as a farm worker, but halfway through he noticed his little sister’s apprehension and hastily brought his narrative to a close. ‘Tell you what, Mo, if the frost holds I’ll take you with me when we go sledgin’ next,’ he said. ‘But you’d best go to bed now; you look wore out.’

  Glenys shook her head. ‘Wait a bit, Mo my love,’ she said quickly. ‘What Jimmy has just told us is, in a way, what I’ve been wanting to talk to you about. Jimmy, what would you have done if the man following you really had been Cyril, or one of his cronies?’

  Jimmy frowned. ‘But it wasn’t. I thought I made that plain enough.’

  Glenys sighed. ‘Don’t you understand? Listen, Jimmy! What would you have done if the man following you had been Cyril Huxtable?’

  Jimmy began to say that it was just his foolishness which had made him assume the man was after him, but Mo slid off Glenys’s knee and went and gave her brother a poke. ‘You’re stupid you are,’ she said scornfully. ‘Auntie Glenys is asking what you would have done if the man following you hadn’t been a farm hand. Would you have burrowed into the snow, like an ostrich?’ She giggled. ‘Hiding all of you except your bum? Or would you have run further into the hills, or headed here? I suppose you could have done that, only then you might be leading Cyril straight to me and Glenys. Go on, answer the question!’

  ‘Gosh, Mo, you’ve a head on your shoulders,’ Jimmy said admiringly. ‘I was so scared that I suppose I’d have run further into the hills, looking for a hiding place.’

  ‘Oh yeah? What about your footprints?’ Mo said derisively. ‘Wha
t you should have said is: I’d have panicked. Now if it had been me, I’d have persuaded Wynne to go down and tell a lot of lies whilst I sneaked off.’

  Jimmy began to tell Mo, rather unkindly, that she was just as foolish as he was himself, but before his little sister could summon up a retort Glenys interrupted.

  ‘All right, all right, given the weather conditions it’s a very difficult question to answer. So let’s put it another way. How would you let us know the danger we were in? Pretend you’ve come down from the hills without being seen, but then you discover he’s hanging around the railway station. What would you do then?’

  There was a short silence, and then Jimmy spoke sullenly. ‘I don’t know, and I’m tired of this silly game. I suppose whichever one of us found out that Cyril had caught up with us would make their way back here. Then the three of us could sort out the problem.’

  He was looking at Glenys’s face as he spoke and saw that she was smiling. ‘Good lad; you’ve gone straight to the heart of the matter. There are three of us in this tangle and I really do think it’s important that we stick together. You know my job here ended today, so I’ve told Mrs Hughes we shall be off on Monday, and when we leave, which we shall do as unobtrusively as possible, we must carry on being Auntie Glenys, and her nephew and niece. Remember, if Cyril really is still looking for you, it will be for two ragged little children – sorry, Jimmy – who would scarcely stay in a nice house as paying guests.’ She pointed at Mo. ‘I know you don’t like plaiting your hair, or rather you don’t like me plaiting your hair, and you complain that the headscarf tickles your chin. But it’s things like that which will put him off the scent. Now, what are we going to do next? The railway runs from here right to the coast, so I thought we might go on to Bangor, since it’s possible I might get work there.’ She smiled at them. ‘How does that appeal to my fellow adventurers?’

  Jimmy said it sounded like a good idea, for he had seen how his little sister’s face had brightened at the mere mention of the seaside. ‘You’ll enjoy that, won’t you, Mo?’ he said encouragingly. ‘If Bangor is a fair-sized town, we could both go to school, so I’d make friends of my own age. Come to that, if there’s a harbour I could probably get work on one of the fishing boats – I’d like that. In fact I wouldn’t mind if we never went back to Liverpool.’

  Glenys laughed. ‘Well, I don’t know about that. The Huxtable problem can’t last for ever,’ she temporised. ‘I think we’ll have to return to Liverpool one of these days; we can’t spend our whole lives running away.’

  ‘I can,’ Mo said dreamily. ‘But we wouldn’t be running away, we’d be making . . . what was it Frank said . . . oh, yes, making a new life for ourselves, ain’t that so, Glenys?’

  ‘You may be right,’ Glenys said. ‘But something has just occurred to me. No one knows how to get in touch with us. I haven’t been able to reach Frank on the number he gave us, and I’m a little cautious about writing in case the letter falls into the wrong hands, so what do you think we should do? We really need to know what’s happening at the Court. Suppose we found someone really reliable to look after the pair of you while I returned to Liverpool to find out what’s going on . . . is that possible?’

  ‘No, you can’t go,’ Mo said, clinging tightly to Glenys’s hand. ‘You said yourself we should stick together: auntie, nephew and niece.’

  ‘True,’ Glenys said, smiling down at the little girl. ‘I just wish I could get in touch with Frank.’

  Mo brightened. ‘Never mind. If we go to the seaside I’ll be able to make sand pies and paddle in the little waves. I just can’t wait!’

  ‘Oh, go to bed, baby,’ Jimmy said, laughing. ‘You think of this whole thing as a holiday adventure, whereas Auntie Glenys and I know it’s deadly serious. But surely we must have outwitted Cyril the moment we stepped aboard that train. How could he possibly know where we are? Unless he’s much cleverer than I think, we ought to be safe enough. Off with you, Mo!’

  His sister opened the door into the corridor, squeaked as the cold air rushed into the warm room, and then turned a suddenly pale face towards her brother. With infinite care she closed the kitchen door again, then tiptoed to where Glenys and Jimmy stood staring at her. ‘What’s up?’ Jimmy said, then lowered his voice as Mo made a frantic signal. ‘What’s the matter, silly? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘Not a ghost. It’s Mrs Hughes,’ Mo hissed. ‘I thought you said she was in bed?’

  ‘I thought she was,’ Glenys admitted. ‘Are you sure you saw her, darling, and it wasn’t just a shadow? The stairs creak and I didn’t hear anything. Oh, damn, damn, damn! Did I mention where we were going? But why should she care? She can’t possibly be in league with the Huxtables, so unless they come knocking and asking for us we’ve nothing to fear. And anyway, the kitchen door’s pretty sturdy; I doubt if she could have heard much through it.’

  ‘Of course she couldn’t,’ Jimmy said, with an eye on Mo’s pale face. ‘Don’t worry, chuck, she can’t do us any harm.’ He looked significantly across at Glenys and dropped his voice. ‘Imagination,’ he murmured, tapping the side of his forehead with one finger. ‘Now let’s go to bed. Today has gone on quite long enough.’

  Chapter 9

  GRUMBLING, MO BADE everyone goodnight in a subdued voice and left the room whilst Jimmy and Glenys tidied round, for, as Glenys said, if they were to leave within a day or so they might as well leave a good impression behind them. She was banking down the fire and brushing out the ash when the kitchen door opened and Mo shot back into the room, then closed the door carefully behind her. Then she turned a pale, frightened face towards the others. ‘When I were passing the witch’s bedroom door I looked at it and it were closing,’ she said in a scared whisper. ‘She’d been listenin’, Auntie Glenys, I’m sure as sure. Oh, what’ll we do?’

  Across his sister’s head Jimmy winked at the teacher. ‘Too much talking,’ he murmured. ‘She gets like this when she’s over-excited.’ He turned to his sister. ‘Come on, queen, just think; the old witch shuffles along panting and grumbling. If she’d come downstairs we’d have heard her – and if she’d heard us she’d have come in and told us off; she loves doing that. Now you go off to bed and don’t worry any more. If the old woman hadn’t shut her door properly she might have felt a bit of a draught and got out of bed to close it. Now no more fretting; promise me?’

  ‘Course I does,’ Mo said sounding relieved. ‘I never thought how she wheezes and mutters when she walks. G’night, Jimmy; Auntie Glenys will tuck me up when she comes to bed.’

  Some time later, Mo woke from a strange dream. She had been on the platform of the little station surrounded by her friends and anticipating a trip to the seaside, for in the dream it was high summer and the children were off on a school trip to Prestatyn. She was full of excitement, and was about to climb into a carriage already occupied by some of the other girls when a voice called her name urgently. ‘Mo, Mo! Someone’s on the telephone asking for you!’

  The voice had come from knee level, and when she looked down there was Solomon Grundy, Mrs Hughes’s big black cat. Mo promptly squatted and reached out a hand to smooth his velvet fur. ‘I never knew you could talk, Solly,’ she said wonderingly. ‘But if it’s the telephone at Banc-y-Celyn I can’t possibly answer it. If I try, the train will leave without me, and Jimmy and Auntie Glenys are already aboard. So you see . . .’

  The big cat blinked its big green eyes and put a demanding paw on Mo’s knee. ‘The train will wait; you can take the call from the public box on the station,’ the cat said. ‘It’s important.’

  Mo awoke. The dream had been so real that she had already slid her feet out of the bed when common sense stopped her. How foolish she was to think that a dream was anything but a dream. She was just cuddling down once more, however, when she heard the shuffling footsteps of their landlady heading for the stairs. Mo nudged Glenys, on the other side of the big double bed. The teacher rolled over, clearly still more than half a
sleep. ‘Whazza time?’ she enquired in a sleep-drugged voice. ‘Has the alarm gone off? Oh, I feel as if I’ve only just got into bed.’

  Mo glanced at the clock. ‘It’s nearly five o’ clock . . .’ she began, then stopped. Glenys had heaved the covers up over her shoulders and was clearly fast asleep once more.

  Mo sighed. Probably Witchy was just going to use the privy, and yet . . . and yet . . . the cat had said the phone call was urgent; suppose the old woman was up to something? It was Mo’s duty to find out what.

  She slipped out of bed and padded across the lino to where the long cardigan lay on top of the chest of drawers. She pulled it on, wishing she had some slippers, for her feet were growing colder with every moment. She was tempted to get back into bed, but curiosity now forbade her abandoning the adventure. She stood on the landing looking down the flight of stairs, and heard the click of the latch as their landlady entered the parlour. She did not attempt to shut the door behind her, but shuffled across the room, sank into a chair and unhooked the telephone from its perch on the wall. She gave a number as soon as the operator answered, but since she gave it in Welsh Mo was no wiser. In fact, she was beginning to turn away when Mrs Hughes spoke into the receiver. And she spoke in English!

  Mo crept down the rest of the stairs and slid into cover behind the coat rack which stood close to the parlour door. What on earth was Mrs Hughes doing telephoning someone in the middle of the night? But she was very soon to find out, as an irascible voice at the other end said loudly, in the way of the slighty deaf, ‘What? What’s that you say? Who’s phonin’ me at this bleedin’ unearthly hour? Is that you, Lizzie? If so, what the devil do you mean ringin’ at this time in the morning?’

  ‘I’ll tell you why I’m ringing,’ Mrs Hughes said. ‘Remember you telled me your mate what’s married to a policeman said there were a hue and cry out after a couple of kids what had gone missin’, believed kidnapped, an’ a reward offered for information what leads to them bein’ found? Well, sis, I do believe I’ve been harbourin’ them kids for the past two weeks, not knowin’ they weren’t legit.’