A Step Too Far
Meg Hutchinson
Hodder Stoughton (2008)
Tags: WWII, Black Country (England), Revenge
* * *
Synopsis
Set amid the privations and dangers of World War II, and rich in the detail of that period, Meg Hutchinson's new novel marks an intriguing departure for this popular writer.
'You be a cheat and a liar Katy Hawley, no wonder your folks d'aint want you! Well we don't want you neither, do we girls?'
It was only a playground spat but the cruel words burned like acid into Katrin Hawley's brain. Revenge is a dish best eaten cold and Katrin waited until she could hit her persecutors where it hurt. However, in her pursuit of vengeance, Katrin takes a fatal step too far. Meg Hutchinson's new novel chronicles the ruthlessly destructive quest of one damaged woman at a time when the onslaught of German bombs was daily robbing families of their loved ones. Just as the stalwart men and women of the Black Country were pulling together for victory, one obsessive woman sought only to satisfy her own malignant, vindictive craving for retribution.
CONTENTS
A Step Too Far
Also by Meg Hutchinson
Imprint Page
FOREWORD
Author’s Note
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PROLOGUE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
About the Author
A Step Too Far
Meg Hutchinson
www.hodder.co.uk
Also by Meg Hutchinson
Abel’s Daughter
For the Sake of Her Child
A Handful of Silver
No Place of Angels
A Promise Given
Bitter Seed
A Love Forbidden
Pit Bank Wench
Child of Sin
No Place for a Woman
The Judas Touch
Peppercorn Woman
Unholy Love
The Deverell Woman
Slxpenny Girl
Heritage of Shame
Pauper’s Child
Ties of Love
For the Love of a Sister
The Wanton Redhead
Writing as Margaret Astbury
The Hitch-Hiker
The Seal
Devil’s Own Daughter
Non-fiction
A Penny Dip: My Black Country Girlhood
First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette Livre UK company
Copyright © Meg Hutchinson 2008
The right of Meg Hutchinson to be identified as the
Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor
be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than
that in which it is published and without a similar condition
being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this
title is available from the British Library
Epub ISBN 9781444718522
Book ISBN 9781444700763
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
A division of Hodder Headline
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
www.hodder.co.uk
FOREWORD
‘During the war, of the 9,000 people employed by Stewarts and Lloyds 56.6 per cent were women. The work done by women deserves special mention. Most of them had never been inside a factory before, yet they stood up to long and arduous hours on night and day shift. It is not often realised that women on some operations were handling one and a quarter tons of shell per hour, and in many special cases this physical effort was exceeded not only in shell manufacture but also in our steel and tube plants. This work was accomplished under blackout conditions, often during “alerts” and with all the irritations and afflictions which total war brings . . .’
Stewarts and Lloyds
Author’s Note
Being a young child during the era in which this story is set I cannot claim to have had personal knowledge of factory procedures at that time. However the title ‘Shadow Factory’ as once applied to ‘New Crown Forgings’, a Wednesbury property of ‘Stewarts and Lloyds’, is still widely recognised in the town and living memory has supported my description of the removal of armaments under cover of darkness and then subsequent transportation via canal. Addressing the question of hours worked and wages paid information was supplied by family and friends employed in similar industries.
Wartime wage was low for the long hours worked but as related from my own experience they had not altered a great deal by 1949 when I earned twenty two shillings and sixpence for a forty four hour week and then in 1964 the convenience of working part time paid a wage of twenty two shillings and elevenpence for a twenty seven and a half hour week.
Meg Hutchinson
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
‘Black Country at War’ – ALTON DOUGLAS
‘Stewarts and Lloyds’ – Loaned courtesy of Samuel Longmore
Wednesbury Public Library for their never failing assistance.
PROLOGUE
They would be sorry!
The promise made to herself so long ago surged fresh and bright as a beacon in Katrin Hawley’s mind.
They would all be sorry!
Hazel eyes, glittering with the ice of vengeance, stared back from the mirror of a small dressing table.
Yes, they would be sorry, every last one of them, and she would laugh. ‘He who laughs last . . .’
They had turned their backs on her! They had sent her away, ignored her as they would a pile of rubbish. Discarded her as they would throw away a broken glass!
But broken glass was dangerous . . . !
Those hazel eyes watching from the mirror spewed darts of glacial venom.
It could cut deeply!
Silent, moving with the sinuous threat of a cobra, she smiled.
It could prove lethal!
And it would!
But first it must cut, slash and tear at their lives, stab and thrust, rip each life to shreds as her own had been ripped eight years ago.
It had happened at school.
The afternoon break, the fifteen minutes of freedom from the classroom was, whenever weather allowed, spent playing hopscotch in the school yard. The four of them, friends from the first tearful day at Infant School, were intent on the game, Katrin bending to slide her piece of broken floor tile across the chalk-drawn pattern of interspersed squares. The others had objected to her pitch, it was ‘more slidey’ than their pieces of shattered brick or stones found on the slag heaps of metal foundries; they said it was unfair. But she had stoo
d her ground; hopscotch had no rule saying a piece of tile was not allowed.
Among the shadows a golden-haired head turned sharply to darker-haired companions.
‘That’s cheating.’
Becky Turner’s indignant cry rang again in Katrin’s mind.
‘. . . It were on the line . . . I seen it, your pitch were on the line!’
‘No it wasn’t!’ Her denial, equally loud, had followed the quick snatch of the tile into her hand.
The golden head tossed again. ‘Yes it were, we all seen it. You seen it d’aint you Alice? And you Freda, you seen it as well d’aint you?’
Two dark heads nodded clearly in the eye of Katrin’s mind.
‘Told you! We all seen it, your pitch landed on the line . . .’
‘It didn’t! It didn’t land on the line! You are telling lies, you are jealous because I always win!’
‘And we knows how you win, it be cos you cheats, you be a cheat and a liar Katy Hawley, no wonder your folks d’aint want you . . . ! Well we don’t want you neither, do we girls? We don’t play with cheats!’
Beneath the sheets Katrin’s fingers curled as they had curled about that piece of tile. Eight years had not dulled those words nor the determination which later understanding of them had given rise to.
Explanation!
Rejection swelled hard in her chest. What good had that proved? It had been meant to console, to dim the hurt of the barb thrown by an angry child, but it had merely cast a veil. Consolation had not been elimination; it had soothed the smart but not removed the sting! That had remained buried inside, remained to fester with every passing day becoming a longing, a longing time had cultivated, had nurtured, feeding it with anger until it had grown beyond a childhood need to punish three friends whose words had stung. It had become more than desire for revenge, it was an all consuming passion, a lust no words could eradicate.
Caught in the grip of indignation at being called a cheat, an emotion not helped by being ignored for the rest of the afternoon, by being left to walk home by herself she had asked her mother, ‘Why, why would Becky Turner say I was not wanted?’
‘It be no more than a spat on their part . . .’
Her mother’s reply had been quick, so quick it could have been rehearsed, and that was what time had revealed it to be: a carefully stage managed response.
But the response had held more. The words had been accompanied by a swift flash of alarm in her mother’s eyes, a strange expression on her face, a look which only years later had Katrin understood as being a closed ‘Ask no question.’
‘. . . no more than words!’
Her mother had gone to stand at the kitchen sink, her attention given to the vegetables she was preparing for the evening meal, but though her face was turned away, she could not conceal the tightness of her voice.
‘. . . that’s all it is, words . . .’
Potatoes scraped clean of skins had rained like blows into a saucepan set on the draining board.
‘. . . words you should take no notice of! It is just a bit of bad temper on losing the game, nothing more than that; things’ll be back to normal tomorrow you’ll see, you’ll all be friends again.’
Yet ‘tomorrow’ had never come. Katrin Hawley’s life had never again been normal.
1
He was gone. The man she loved was gone from her life. Miriam Carson watched the spill of cartridge cases drop into a large metal container. They were so pretty, like droplets of light filled water, a gleaming glittering cascade of gold. But that was where the beauty ended, for these small, shining brass objects would become bringers of death. Filled with gunpowder, a bullet at its heart, each one could take the life of a man, shatter the happiness of a family, break a woman’s heart as hers was broken.
‘We regret to inform you . . .’
The words had spun in her mind, whirled in her brain, danced like black confetti blinding her eyes!
‘We regret to inform you . . .’
Dark symbols, strokes and dots, marks made with a machine – but those on that small piece of buff coloured paper had been much more. Like the bullets she helped make, those lines and marks had been lethal, each letter, every word dealing a death blow to her heart.
‘. . . killed in action.’
Killed! The finality of it had not registered at the time; how could Tom, her Tom, be dead? It was absurd! He was coming home on leave, hadn’t he said so in his letter? It had been a mistake, whoever had sent that telegram had got names mixed up, her Tom was not dead, she knew he was not dead.
She had lived on that belief, fed on the hope, but hope could only nourish for so long before its strength began to wane. That had been almost as devastating as the telegram; losing hope was to lose faith and in that she would be failing Tom. But he had not come home, and in the end hope had withered.
Love had supported her in those long dark months. Not the breath-catching, blood flaring emotion she had felt when in Tom’s arms, not his quiet whispered words. It had been the strength of another had carried her, his gentle arms comforted when tears could not be held back, that love which had been hers from birth: the love of a father.
The last of the cartridge cases had trickled into the container, the whole lying like a golden lake, yet Miriam saw only a beach, a stretch of sand stained with blood, littered with men injured and dead. So many had died on those beaches of Dunkirk, so many lives had been swallowed by the demons of war, so many hearts broken. She had tried to think of others like herself, wives, mothers and sweethearts, tried in the loneliness of night to tell herself she was not alone in her grief, that thousands of other women were feeling the same pain, yet that brought no solace; drowning in an ocean of despair, she could think only of Tom. Her father had saved her. He had sat with her those dreadful hours when sleep had been a stranger, had listened to her cry her grief, understood when those cries had become ones of anger against a world which had deprived her of a husband; her father had understood, for he had lived through the grief of losing loved ones, the emptiness of life without the wife he had cherished, the life she must now lead.
‘C’mon Miriam wench . . .’
At her side, the gnarled fingers of Simeon Cartwright closed on the container.
‘. . . Can’t afford to slack. If we be a’ goin’ to put that ’Itler in ’is place, then our lads will be a’ needin’ o’ every bullet we can mek an’ they don’t get med if ’ands be still.’
His eyes deep with sympathy, he continued quietly.
‘It be ’ard wench, God only knows ’ow ’ard, but we all ’as to go on. A wanderin’ mind be a luxury we can’t indulge. Daydreams be precious but like so many other things right now, Miriam wench, they ’as to be rationed, kept along of moments afore sleep, for dreams don’t win no war.’
Too old for the armed services, long past retirement, Simeon Cartwright had returned – as had many who thought their days in the workplace to be long past – to take the place of sons and grandsons conscripted into the armed forces, engineered into a war begun by one man’s fanatical dream of world domination. We must all do our bit was their dogma, but with Tom as with thousands of men that ‘bit’ had been their life.
Watching the elderly figure half bent from the effort of pushing the container, she heard Simeon’s words echo in her mind.
‘. . . dreams don’t win no wars.’
Her throat tight with tears, Miriam turned back to the making of bullet cartridges. No, dreams did not win wars . . . neither did they return the lives war demanded.
She must not know. She must not ever know!
Watching the slender figure shrug into a smart camel-coloured gabardine trench coat, Violet Hawley felt the sharp prick of conscience. That coat had accounted for more money than Jacob earned in a fortnight. ‘It won’t have the partin’ wi’ any clothing coupons; and as for style, you don’t get that outside of London nor will it be available there for very much longer . . . things of quality such as that coat are getting harder a
nd harder to come by.’
Harder to come by meaning less easy to steal? That was a question she had no need to ask. Jim Slater had a reputation for ‘coming by’ things, things often ‘lost’ during transport or, as seemed likely with this coat, taken from premises during or immediately following an air raid. It was a risky business. Black marketing was frowned upon but looting, stealing from blitzed property, was a crime which carried a heavy prison sentence. She had said as much the time she’d been offered a pound of butter. It was so strictly rationed . . . how come he had this? The question had been brusquely overcome.
Asking no questions resulted in hearing no lies. If she didn’t want what was offered there was many another who did. So she had taken the butter, and Jim Slater had taken the money. That had been the first of what had become regular visits, each one having an offering of ‘a bit o’ summat picked up, a bit on the QT’. A bit on the quiet! At first she had felt a sense of guilt but stretching meagre rations of food, of almost everything which had once made life comfortable, the constant stress of queuing hours at a stretch only to be told what she had stood in all weathers for was ‘sold out, there was nothing ’til next week’, had pushed guilt aside. Like the one who had brought this coat, she would take while she had the chance, take for Jacob and for their daughter, take anything which would return a little of that comfort to their life.
‘I will try not to be late home.’ Katrin touched a hand to her hair before turning to look at her mother. ‘But I can’t promise, air raids have work stopped so often it is piling up, chances are I might be asked to stay on for an hour or two and I really don’t feel I ought to refuse.’ She shrugged, ‘It has to be done.’
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