Above the Bright Blue Sky Read online

  Above the Bright Blue Sky

  MARGARET THORNTON

  Dedication

  To my husband, John, with love, thanking him once again for his support, encouragement and understanding.

  A special mention for Christopher, the youngest of my five grandchildren, who was puzzled as to why he was not included in some of the earlier dedications.

  And to my agent, Dorothy Lumley, and Lara Dafert, my new editor at Allison and Busby; my thanks to you both for having faith in me.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  About the Author

  By Margaret Thornton

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Maisie crouched halfway down the stairs, her ear pressed hard against the bannister railings, listening to the conversation that was going on between her mother and her step-father. It was developing into more of a row though, now, than a conversation, but that was nothing fresh. Sidney Bragg spent a good deal of his time shouting, either at her mother or, sometimes, at his son, Percy, or – most of all – at her, Maisie. Not so much, however, at his two younger children, Joanie and Jimmy, aged three and two, the ones who had arrived on the scene since he had married her mother four years ago. The little kids were learning to keep out of his way as much as possible, just as Maisie herself had soon learned to do when he came to live with them.

  She knew she would get a clout across the ear, or, even worse, what he called a ‘bloody good hiding’ with his leather belt if he were to find her eavesdropping. She knew that that was the proper grown-up word for it – Maisie loved words and what they meant – but it was usually thought of as ‘nosy-parkering’. But she had a right to know what was going to happen to her. Her mum would tell her nothing any more; she was too scared of him, no doubt. Although Maisie knew that once, a long time ago – so long ago it seemed that she could scarcely remember it – her mother had used to tell her all sorts of things; and she knew her mother had used to love her very much… But that was before Daddy had died.

  Maisie hated Sidney Bragg with an intensity that frightened her at times. She knew it was wrong to hate people. The vicar from the big church down the road who came into school sometimes to talk to the children had told them so. He had even said they should try to love their enemies. But Maisie shut her mind to that. In fact, she was not sure whom she hated the most, Sidney Bragg or his son, Percy.

  It was Sidney who was speaking now. ‘The kid’s got to go, Lily. I keep telling yer. I’ve told yer till I’m blue in the face. It’s for her own good.’

  ‘It’s because you want to get rid of her, you mean.’

  ‘Don’t talk so bloody stupid! Get rid of ’er? Why should I want to do that, eh? She’s got her uses, when she can be bothered to take her nose out of her bloody books. She fetches me ciggies and me paper, an’ I know you rely on her to mind the two nippers. Oh aye; that’s why you want to keep her here, i’n’t it? I gerrit. You’re scared you’re gonna lose yer little nursemaid. You won’t have so much time to sit around on yer fat backside…’

  ‘Give over, Sid,’ came her mother’s plaintive voice. Maisie knew she was well accustomed to her husband’s insults and clouts across the head, so much so that she scarcely bothered to retaliate any more. ‘I look after our Joanie and Jimmy as best I can; you know I do. And why shouldn’t the lass help me out now and again? I’ve got me hands full, what with me job and you on shift work, and your Percy an’ all.’

  ‘Oh, stop yer bloody whining, woman! And leave Percy out of it. He’s a good lad, our Percy, an’ he pays his way. Anyroad, it’ll be one less mouth to feed with your Nellie out of the way.’

  Nellie! The little girl detested the name she had been called by ever since he had moved in with them. Her full name was Eleanor May Jackson, and her mother, and her daddy, too, had used to call her by her proper first name, Eleanor. But Maisie had been Daddy’s pet name for her. ‘My little mayflower,’ he had called her, often shortening it to Maisie. Daddy had been a country lad, so he had used to tell her, from a village in the Yorkshire Dales. He had loved the coming of the spring every year, and the sight of the frothy white may blossom in the hedgerows, he said, had been a sure sign that spring had really arrived. Eleanor May had been so christened because both her parents had liked the name Eleanor, and because she had been born on the first day of May. That had been in 1930, and she was now nine years old.

  But Sid Bragg had laughed and poked fun at her. Eleanor was far too pretentious – or swanky, as he had termed it – for a kid from a terraced house in Armley. He had decided she would be Nellie from that time on, a good sensible name, and her mother had had no more sense than to go along with his decree. It was then that the little girl had started to think of herself as Maisie, although to her family, her teachers and the children at school, and her neighbours – almost everyone, in fact – she was known as Nellie Jackson. Only her mum, occasionally, called her Maisie, when she remembered that that was what she preferred, and when Sid was nowhere around. One blessing, she supposed, was that she was not called Nellie Bragg, as she might have been. Her step-father had never suggested that she should have the same name as the rest of the household, probably because he considered her to be of little importance. And the dislike was mutual.

  ‘You’re always going on about not being able to make ends meet,’ Sid was saying now, ‘although God knows why. Yer’ve got yer charrin’ job, ’aven’t yer?’ There was barely enough left over when he had paid his nightly visit to the pub down the road, or his dinnertime visit if he happened to be on late shift, thought Maisie, but she knew her mother would not have the courage to say so; or to remind him that she was forced to go out to work because he left her short of money.

  ‘I would miss her,’ said her mother. ‘She’s my little girl. Of course I know you’ve never taken to her…’

  ‘I’ve never said that…’

  ‘You don’t need to, Sid. It’s quite obvious you don’t like her, and the child knows it, I’m sure she does.’

  ‘Huh! All the more reason for her to go then, if she hates me so much…’

  ‘I didn’t say she hated you,’ replied Lily. (But I do, thought Maisie, I do, I really do…)

  ‘She’s quite a pretty little thing, I suppose,’ said Sid, to Maisie’s surprise. ‘An’ I know our Percy thinks so. I dare say the lad’ll miss her, but he’ll have to get used to her not being there, same as you will.’

  ‘Percy hardly ever bothers to speak to her,’ replied Lily. ‘The child might as well be a fly on the wall for all the notice he takes of her.’

  ‘Oh, you’d be surprised,’ said Sid. ‘I’ve a feeling he’s rather taken with her.’ He laughed, a nasty sneering laugh, just like the one Maisie had heard Percy make when he crept into her bedroom at night.

  He knows! she t
hought. Her step-father actually knew what Percy was doing to her when the others were fast asleep, his hand over her mouth so that she did not cry out. Percy had threatened her that she would get a good belting, worse than any she had ever had, if she were to tell, if not from his father then from Percy himself. It sickened her to think that Sid might even have been egging him on, and now was laughing about it.

  ‘But she’s only a kid, ain’t she?’ Sid continued. ‘My lad’ll have to wait till she’s grown up a bit, eh, Lily?’

  Lily did not answer that. ‘I don’t see the need for her to be evacuated,’ was what she said. ‘We’re not even at war yet.’

  ‘Bloody close to it. Only a matter of days, they’re saying.’

  ‘Aye, well, that’s as may be. If we lived in London, happen I could see the sense of it. But not up here in the north of England…’

  ‘Don’t talk so bloody daft! Liverpool’ll cop it when Hitler starts dropping ’is bombs, an’ Manchester an’ all.’

  ‘But we’re in Leeds. I can’t see as there’ll be much danger here…’

  ‘Then that shows how stupid you are, don’t it? It’s a big city, ain’t it? So is Bradford an’ Hull an’ York. An’ there’s factories an’ mills an’ munition works an’ God knows what else. Look ’ere; the Government’s started this evacuation lark, and Nellie’s school says as how they’re going…’

  ‘They won’t all be going, Sid…’

  ‘Give over butting in, will yer? Nellie’s going and that’s that. What’s the matter with yer? Don’t you want her to be safe?’

  ‘Of course I do, but if she’s in danger staying here, then so are our Joanie and Jimmy, and me an’ all. And you and Percy.’

  ‘Yeah…well; we can’t all go running off, can we? We’re doing vital work, me and our Percy, at t’ mill.’

  ‘There’s nothing to stop me going though, is there, Sid? Me and the little ’uns. They won’t let kids under school age go on their own, but they’re encouraging mothers and babies to get away as well as schoolchildren.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about, woman? Who’s gonna look after me and t’ lad if you go gallivanting off into t’ countryside? No; you’ll stop here. Somebody’s got to keep the ’ome fires burning. So that’s settled, right? An’ I don’t want to ’ear no more about it. Now, you go an’ gerron with yer washing up, and I’ll fetch me ciggies from upstairs. I’m going down to t’ pub…’

  At the sound of her step-father getting up from his chair, Maisie scuttled silently up the stairs and into her bedroom. She leapt into bed and pulled the covers tightly around her, closing her eyes and feigning sleep. It was doubtful that he would come in and look at her… Him, Sid, her mother’s husband. She could never think of him as her father and never, in all the four years he had lived with them, had she called him Dad or Daddy; she had managed to get away with calling him nothing at all. But he might cast a glance at his own two children, Joanie and Jimmy, fast asleep in the double bed at the other side of the room.

  Fifteen-year-old Percy had a room to himself, little more than a large cupboard really, but he had flatly refused to share a room with two ‘snivelling smelly brats’ as he put it. He had had the larger room to himself at first, when Sid had married Lily Jackson and they had come to live there. It was only right, as he was by far the older of their two children, Sid had decreed, and Lily, even then, had not had the courage to argue with him. So Maisie had slept in the box room, not much caring where she was, only knowing she was unhappy and all mixed up inside herself since those two awful bossy males had taken over their household.

  Now she was back in the bigger room again, so that Percy could have the privacy he demanded, but it was very much changed from the time she had slept there four years ago. Percy, in fact, was quite right when he declared that Joanie and Jimmy – half-brother and -sister both to him and to Maisie – were smelly brats. So they were. Jimmy, at two years old, was still wearing nappies, and Joanie, one year older, still wet the bed frequently. Maisie knew that her mother had a difficult job trying to keep up with the washing. It was often skimped on, the sheets being dried hastily and put back on the bed just as they were, making the whole room stink of stale urine, or worse, at times.

  Her mother was a different person since she had married Sidney Bragg. Maisie was well aware of the change in her, although it had come about gradually. She often wondered what had happened to the pretty happy lady with the curly brown hair and laughing eyes whom she remembered from the time when she, Maisie, had been a very little girl. The person she lived with now was slovenly and careworn with lank greasy hair, and all the sparkle had gone from her silver-grey eyes. They did not chat and sing and laugh together as they had used to do. It even seemed, at times, as though this person that her mother had changed into did not love her little girl any more. And then, occasionally, Maisie would catch a glimpse of the old mummy in a smile or a kiss or a sudden hug, and she would tell herself that her mother must still be the same person deep down, beneath all her cares and anxieties.

  The bedroom was shabby now and not very clean. The net curtains hung in tatters at the windows; neither they nor the faded draw curtains had been washed for ages, but, from what Maisie had gathered, they would soon need to be replaced by blackout blinds. The wallpaper was dirty and hanging off in places where the two younger children had pulled at it. It had been drawn on, too; a scribbly mess of red and blue wax crayon that would not come off. Maisie had been taught, as a little girl, to take care of the few possessions she had and she would never have dreamed of scribbling on the wallpaper. But Joanie and Jimmy, it seemed, could get away with all sorts of dreadful behaviour. Joanie ran wild in the street with the neighbours’ children, with Jimmy usually not far behind her, and Maisie knew they were regarded as a couple of ruffians with their dirty faces and habitually running noses.

  They were big children for their age, but then Sidney Bragg was a giant of a man, over six feet in height and hefty with it; and Percy was of a similar build. The children had inherited, too, the straw-coloured straight hair and pale blue eyes of both Sidney and Percy; and Maisie, whenever she looked at them, could see no resemblance to either herself or her mother. Which was, no doubt, the reason that she could not like her half-sister and -brother very much.

  Sid went downstairs again without entering the bedroom, to Maisie’s relief, and soon afterwards she heard the door banging; he was off on his nightly visit to the pub. She relaxed her tensed-up limbs and thought hard about what she had heard. She knew about the evacuation scheme, of course. They had been told about it at school. They had been back only a few days since the long summer break, but already some of the kids had got their cases packed, awaiting the signal that it was time to go. Maisie had taken the official letter home that they had been given at school, but her mother, after giving it a cursory glance, had shoved it behind the wooden clock on the mantelpiece, where the few items of mail they received always ended up. She had been pleased to hear her mother say, a few moments ago, that she would miss her, and Maisie knew that if she were to be evacuated, then her mother would be the only person she would miss at all. But she knew, also, with a tiny stab of guilt, that she would not miss Mummy nearly as much as she would once have done, when she had been the happy and bubbly young woman of her memory.

  What odd words they were that had recently come into their language. Evacuation, evacuated, evacuee… Maisie said them over to herself several times to get used to them. And she would be an evacuee. Where would they go? she wondered. And how would they get there? On a train or on a bus? Or a charabanc, as they were sometimes called. Maisie remembered, in what seemed to be the dim and distant past, going on a ‘chara’ once with her mum and dad to a place called Scarborough, by the sea. She vaguely recalled the castle up on the hill – they had stayed near there in a boarding house – and she had made sand pies on the beach and paddled at the edge of the sea; and Daddy, with his trousers rolled up to his knees, had paddled too, holding her hand,
whilst Mummy had sat in a deck chair. That was the only holiday she could remember. Since her mother had got married again and had the babies – it had seemed no time at all before the house was full of babies and bottles and nappies – they had not been anywhere together, not even for a day. Maisie had been on Sunday School outings to Kirkstall Abbey and to the grounds of a big house called Temple Newsam, but those places were only a few miles away and the trips were only once a year. And just lately she had not been to Sunday School at all; she had been too busy helping her mother with the babies and the endless washing.

  Yes; Scarborough, she mused… Wouldn’t it be just great if they were to go there; she and the rest of the kids from her school? Probably not all of ’em though. It was quite a big school and no doubt a lot of the mums and dads would not want their children to go away. Not like Sid, whom she knew could not wait to get rid of her. Well, she could not wait, neither, to get away from him and his horrible son. She made up her mind, in that minute, that if Percy came to her room that night, then she would scream out and wake everybody up. She had nothing to lose; she would be far away from them all in a few days time, with a bit of luck.

  She pushed the thought of Percy to the back of her mind again; the memory of him mauling at her beneath the bedclothes; touching her legs and other, more private parts, that she knew you shouldn’t let anybody touch, and his wet red mouth slobbering all over her. She shuddered, and concentrated instead on how nice it would be to get away. It might not be to Scarborough, of course. She knew that was quite a long way. Perhaps it would be to the countryside. There were lots of lovely villages in Yorkshire. Her dad had lived in one called Grassington before he had moved to Leeds to find work. And it was then that he had met her mum, when they had worked at the same woollen mill.

  She closed her eyes, thinking of the black-and-white cows in the meadows, munching at the grass and the golden buttercups, the white mayblossom in the hedgerows, and, above it all, the sun shining from a clear blue sky. It had always been a gloriously sunny day, or so it had seemed, on those infrequent trips to the countryside. Here in Leeds, particularly nearer to the city centre, the sky was more often grey than blue, the sun obscured by the smoke from the chimneys of the myriad factories and mills.