No Place for a Woman

by Val Wood

  ‘Wait, Alice,’ she called down. ‘Wait. Leave the door.’

  But it was too late, and the little girl was already spouting her usual question before she hesitated and turned to her mother, putting her fingers to her mouth. ‘Mama,’ she said, ‘I fink this lady’s not very well.’

  Lucy hurried towards her and put her hand on her shoulder. This was just the sort of thing that she had feared; someone ill on her doorstep. ‘Go inside,’ she murmured, but Alice clung to her skirt. ‘The lady knows me,’ she whispered.

  Beneath her hat the elderly woman who stood on the doorstep had white hair streaked with dark strands, and was well dressed in a plain neat fashion.

  She looked at Lucy and clutched her chest, moaning and catching her breath, and reached to hold on to the door frame.

  ‘Go inside, Alice,’ Lucy said again, and to the woman, ‘Are you unwell?’ She called to Dora, who came hurrying towards her and picked up Alice.

  ‘No,’ the woman gasped. ‘I’m not ill. I’m – I’m just – it is Alice, isn’t it?’ But she was gazing at Lucy as she spoke and not at her daughter.

  ‘You’d better come inside,’ Lucy said, and led the woman into the consulting room where she sat her down and poured a glass of water from the jug she kept on her desk.

  ‘Take a sip of water,’ she said quietly. ‘Just a little,’ and then taking the glass from her asked her to lower her head if she was feeling dizzy.

  ‘It’s all right,’ the woman muttered, and rubbed her forehead with her fingers. ‘I’ve – I’ve had a shock. I’m not ill.’

  ‘Have you had an accident? Lucy asked her. ‘Or seen one? Is that why you are upset?’

  The woman shook her head and then began to weep. Lucy sat on the chair next to her and held her hand. ‘Rest for a moment and take a deep breath, and then tell me about it. Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘Yes, please.’ Her hands trembled as she opened her handbag for a handkerchief. ‘I’m sorry – so sorry to be a nuisance.’

  ‘You’re not a nuisance,’ Lucy said, and went to call Dora again to bring a cup of hot sweet tea.

  ‘You don’t know me, do you?’ the woman said.

  Lucy said she didn’t and asked her name.

  ‘Maria Alice Masters,’ she said, and gazed at Lucy as if waiting for a response. When none came, she said tearfully, ‘I’m your grandmother, Dr Thornbury. Your mother’s mother.’

  Lucy felt faint. Black spots appeared before her eyes and her ears thrummed. She heard the front door open and knew it was Oswald returning home. She willed him to come in, which he did, knocking first and slowly opening the door in case she was with a patient.

  ‘Come in, darling,’ she whispered.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ She heard the concern in his voice.

  She lifted a hand to indicate Mrs Masters. ‘This – this lady says she is my grandmother.’

  Oswald pulled the chair from behind the desk and placed it next to Mrs Masters. Leaning towards her, he quietly teased the information out of her; when Dora brought tea for Mrs Masters he asked her to bring in a fresh pot for all of them.

  Mrs Masters explained that her husband had died in 1917. He had been adamant from the day he had banned their daughter from her home that there should be no contact between them; but although her husband had ordered her to destroy it, his wife had kept the letter that Alice had written to them to tell them she was married and had a daughter of her own.

  ‘After he died, I wanted to look for Alice and her family, but I didn’t dare go out alone because of the bombing and it wasn’t until after the end of the war that I plucked up courage to travel to London and begin the search of the records. We had always lived a quiet life and I had no friends that I could ask to come with me.

  ‘I’d never been allowed to go anywhere unless Mr Masters was with me,’ she continued. ‘I think he realized that I would attempt to find Alice, and I would have done.’ She began to sob, and through her tears she mumbled, ‘And then I found that I was too late; that she and her husband had both died many years before.’

  But after returning home with her grief she had remembered the child, and when she felt strong enough she began the search again. ‘It took such a long time,’ she wept, ‘and then it took me even longer to dare to travel here, to a place I didn’t know, and when – when I rang your doorbell and the little girl answered the door—’ She heaved a sobbing breath. ‘It was like looking at my child again – I was so confused, and then you came to the door.’ She gazed at Lucy with tear-filled eyes. ‘And I saw Alice again, as a grown woman – or how she would have been; she was only eighteen when I last saw her – and I thought my heart would break!’

  ‘Lucy’s guardian, her uncle, said that he’d tried to trace you when her parents died,’ Oswald said softly. ‘They were killed in a train crash, but Lucy survived. She knew nothing about her grandparents until she was grown up, when her uncle told her that her mother had been banned from her parents’ home.’

  The door slowly opened and Alice stood half in and half out of the opening, her fingers to her mouth and her gentle eyes, so like Oswald’s, looking anxiously from one to another. Oswald held out his hand to her and she came to him and sat on his knee.

  ‘Alice,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘You’ll never guess who this is.’

  Alice looked at Mrs Masters and then her mother and then up at her father and murmured into his ear, ‘She looks very sad. I fink she made Mama cry.’

  ‘She has been very sad,’ Oswald said gently. ‘But now I think she might be happy again, and Mama will be very happy too.’

  Alice slipped down from her father’s knee and leaning in towards her great-grandmother whispered confidentially, ‘I’ve got a baby brother. He’s called Joseph Oswald Thornbury. Papa calls him Jot because he’s only little.’ She laughed and put her thumb in her mouth, and then she took it out and said, ‘Perhaps you’d like to see him and that might make you happy?’

  Maria Masters, her eyes streaming, looked at Lucy, and when Lucy, her own eyes wet and too choked to speak, nodded, she said, ‘I would. It would make me very happy indeed.’

  In his usual intrepid manner Oswald gathered everyone together, ushering Lucy and her grandmother and Alice into the sitting room where there was a warm fire burning and asking the nursery maid to bring a sleepy Joseph down to be introduced before being taken back to his cot again. He asked Dora to make more tea and bring cake, and told her that if anyone else should ask for Dr Lucy she should say that she was unavailable. Then he set about telephoning his mother at her Pearson Park home to say that as soon as Pa arrived from the bank would they please come over straight away and bring Eleanor too if possible as something momentous and wonderful had happened and they should be here to share it.

  Lucy wiped her eyes and gazed at her grandmother sitting next to her on the sofa; she had taken off her hat and coat and was having a conversation with Alice who was showing her one of her dolls; she could hardly take it in. How this poor gentle woman must have suffered for so many years. Hard enough for me as a child to lose my parents, but my loss has been lessened by the love that Uncle William and then Aunt Nora have shown me. Grandmother Masters had had no one with whom to share her grief of losing a daughter, not just once but twice.

  The door quietly opened and Oswald stood half in half out, just as Alice had done earlier. Lucy stretched out her hand to him, to bring him to her side, into the fold.

  I am so lucky; I have my dearest Oswald whom I love so much, William and Nora, Eleanor who is a sister to me, my good friends, and now I have my beautiful children. I have been blessed, she thought, and felt Oswald’s tender touch on her shoulder, and I must restore and make amends for the hurt that has been done.

  ‘Dearest Grandmother,’ she murmured, reaching to take up the veined hand and pressing it to her cheek. Here was her very own flesh and blood. They would need time to get to know one another: so many questions to be asked and answered. ‘You must come bac
k into my life, and that of my husband and children.’

  Grandmother Masters brushed away her tears. ‘I would like that very much, Lucy dear,’ she said huskily. ‘So many years have been wasted and I would like to make up for that lost time.’

  ‘We can’t forget the past,’ Lucy told her. ‘It is part of who we are.’ She smiled and blinked away her own tears. ‘But we can at last look forward to a brighter future.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND SOURCES

  I have used many websites and independent sources for information on the First World War and for general reading. These include:

  Hull and East Riding Institute for the Blind (HERIB), www.herib.co.uk

  Kingston Upon Hull War Memorial 1914–1918 – The Story of Hull in World War One, www.ww1hull.org.uk: website for details of the Hull Pals and Zeppelins over Hull.

  The Hull People’s Memorial, www.hull-peoples-memorial.co.uk: with thanks to Alan Brigham for valued information on aspects of the First World War and the memorabilia in the remarkable Hull People’s Memorial Gift Shop and Museum.

  Blind Veterans UK, www.blindveterans.org.uk: with thanks to Robert Baker, information and archives officer.

  BBC World War One at Home, Endell Street, London: Only All-female Run Military Hospital [audio], 3 Feb 2014, www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01rjcsv: deeds and words of the suffrage military hospital in Endell Street, London.

  EyeWitness to History, www.eyewitnesstohistory.com: gas attack.

  Scarlet Finders, www.scarletfinders.co.uk: British military nurses, QAIMNS and TFNS.

  The Long, Long Trail – The British Army in the Great War of 1914–1918, www.longlongtrail.co.uk

  Firstworldwar.com – A Multimedia History of World War One, www.firstworldwar.com

  My grateful thanks to Professor Martin Goodman for allowing me to use details from his excellent and informative book Suffer and Survive: The Extreme Life of J. S. Haldane (London, Simon and Schuster UK Ltd, 2007).

  Thanks are also due to Tony Kaye of T. S. Kaye and Sons, Yorkshire tool merchants, for permission to use details from his company’s archives.

  And my grateful thanks, as always, for the guiding hands of my efficient and supportive team at Transworld Publishers.

  This is a work of fiction and any inconsistencies or inaccuracies contained within it are mine.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Since winning the Catherine Cookson Prize for Fiction for her first novel, The Hungry Tide, Val Wood has published twenty-two novels and become one of the most popular authors in the UK.

  Born in the mining town of Castleford, Val came to East Yorkshire as a child and has lived in Hull and rural Holderness where many of her novels are set. She now lives in the market town of Beverley.

  When she is not writing, Val is busy promoting libraries and supporting many charities.

  Find out more about Val Wood’s novels by visiting her website at www.valeriewood.co.uk

  Also by Val Wood

  THE HUNGRY TIDE

  ANNIE

  CHILDREN OF THE TIDE

  THE ROMANY GIRL

  EMILY

  GOING HOME

  ROSA’S ISLAND

  THE DOORSTEP GIRLS

  FAR FROM HOME

  THE KITCHEN MAID

  THE SONGBIRD

  NOBODY’S CHILD

  FALLEN ANGELS

  THE LONG WALK HOME

  RICH GIRL, POOR GIRL

  HOMECOMING GIRLS

  THE HARBOUR GIRL

  THE INNKEEPER’S DAUGHTER

  HIS BROTHER’S WIFE

  EVERY MOTHER’S SON

  LITTLE GIRL LOST

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  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Bantam Press

  an imprint of Transworld Publishers

  Copyright © Valerie Wood 2016

  Cover photographs: girl © Jonathan Rig; tents © Australian War Memorial; soldiers © Henry Guttmann/Hulton Archive.

  Lettering © Stephen Raw.

  Design by Becky Glibbery/TW

  Valerie Wood has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

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  Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473509528

  ISBN 9780593074336

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