Christmas Fireside Stories

by Diane Allen, Rita Bradshaw, Margaret Dickinson, Annie Murray, Pam Weaver

  Sylvia got to her feet, keeping her head down so that she didn’t have to look at their mocking, superior faces. All she wanted was to crawl somewhere dark so that she could curl up and never come out. Trying to keep from sobbing out loud, she hurried away, down to the gap where you could walk through between the wall and the railway fence and into their own garden.

  ‘I’m not stupid,’ she growled in a fierce little voice. ‘I’m not, I’m not! I hate you . . . I hate you.’ She ran into the house, hardly able to see where she was going through her tears.

  Her teachers never understood that she was willing, but not able. Words and numbers ganged up on her. When they learned about the parts of flowers and fruit, everything went well until Miss Patchett wrote names by the arrows, pointing into the parts, and then Sylvia was lost. She sat staring at her slate in despair. A moment later she realized, to her terror, that Miss Patchett was standing over her.

  ‘What’s that?’ Miss Patchett pointed her scrawny finger. She was quite a young teacher, with wire spectacles, hollow cheeks and stony eyes.

  ‘It’s . . .’ The named bits of the flower scrambled in Sylvia’s head. There’d been something beginning with S, she was sure. ‘It’s a staple, Miss.’

  Miss Patchett slapped the left side of Sylvia’s head so hard that for a moment she couldn’t see straight.

  ‘It’s a stamen. As I have written perfectly clearly on the blackboard.’ She pointed witheringly. ‘See? Stamen.’ This brought another slap with it.

  The other children sniggered.

  ‘Yes, Miss,’ Sylvia murmured. She couldn’t see anything now through her tears.

  ‘Thank heavens your sister’s not like you!’ Miss Patchett said. ‘A staple,’ she went on, witheringly, ‘is for attaching one sheet of paper to another. Go on, girl – write the proper label on your flower.’

  Almost beside herself with panic, Sylvia leaned towards the slate, her hand so sweaty she could hardly hold the pencil. She breathed in. S. It began with S. She managed to write a wavery S, but then couldn’t think for the life of her what came next. There was a twinge in her lower body and she was frightened she might wet herself. Miss Patchett was leaning over her. Sylvia could smell her greasy hair and body odour, blended with the stale tea on her breath. She squeezed her eyes closed, fidgeting to avert the urgent pressure from her bladder, and said ‘stamen’ to herself over and over again.

  ‘Come on, girl,’ Miss Patchett insisted, standing tall again. ‘Keep still! What comes next?’ The class had gone quiet. Sylvia felt as if she was the only person in the world apart from her bony teacher with her nasty, slapping hands.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sylvia was about to say when Jane, next to her, dared to breathe, ‘T.’

  ‘T,’ Sylvia said grasping this like a life raft.

  ‘T! Well, write it down then, girl.’

  ‘A,’ Jane sighed next. How Miss Patchett didn’t hear her, Sylvia would never know. She was able to sit still now, for the crisis had passed.

  With Jane’s help she managed to get to the end of the word without another slap. Miss Patchett moved away and Sylvia gave her friend the smile of the rescued.

  She could draw a flower perfectly. Why could she not do the rest? She didn’t know, and no one seemed to understand. She hated school, every part of it except playtime, when she and Jane and some of the other girls played jackstones and skipping in the yard, at the other end from the rowdy boys. When she came home it was like being let out of prison. She tried to shut school right out of her mind so that the thought of it did not pollute the rest of her life.

  But the teasing at home was different. The humiliation and unfairness of it bit deeply into her. She felt it as actual pain in her body, an ache that spread all over her. As she ran inside, Mom heard her sobs and came out to see what was going on.

  ‘Oi, where’re you off to, Miss?’ Pauline asked as her daughter tore up the stairs. She stood in her apron, looking up. ‘Have you hurt yourself?’

  Sylvia curled up tightly on her bed in the room she then shared with Audrey. Hearing her mother’s steps on the staircase, she tensed, afraid this might mean more mockery or punishment.

  ‘Wizzy?’

  Sylvia opened one eye. Mom was standing at the door. She looked comforting, with her round pink cheeks and her auburn hair in thick plaits, pinned around her head and crossing over at the front. Sylvia desperately wanted someone to understand. Her reports from school were very poor, and her parents sighed over them in a way that Sylvia took to mean: Why can’t you be like the Goulds? Or at least like Audrey?

  Mom came and sat on the bed. Her pinner was dusted with flour and there was a whiff of onions about her as well.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she said. ‘I thought you were all playing next door?’

  Sylvia squeezed her eyes closed and pulled herself into an even tighter coil. Words burst out of her. ‘Raymond called me stupid. And Audrey! I hate them. Both of them are pigs.’

  Her mother gave a long sigh and Sylvia felt her hand rest on her skinny shoulder.

  ‘You don’t want to take any notice,’ Pauline said. ‘Your sister should know better than to talk like that – and Raymond. I don’t know why you and Audrey can’t get on a bit better.’

  Sylvia pushed herself up, limbs stiff with outrage. ‘I can’t not take any notice! They’re calling me horrible names and . . . And I’m not stupid!’

  Mom was looking at her with a tender expression. She raised her hand, and Sylvia felt her mother’s work-roughened, oniony thumb rubbing away the tears from her hot cheeks.

  ‘Look at your little face,’ her mother said fondly. She dropped her hand again and sighed. ‘I know you’re not stupid, bab,’ she said. ‘That’s the worst of it. Your father and I’ve talked about it. You’re as bright as a button. So why can’t you read and write properly, like the others?’

  Sylvia hung her head. ‘I don’t know. I just can’t.’

  Pauline had words with Marjorie Gould. Could she please ask Raymond not to be nasty and upset Sylvia? After that, they all kept off the subject. They never got to the bottom of Sylvia’s problems. Year by year she struggled on.

  The one person she felt at ease with was little Laurie Gould. He was younger than her and left-handed, so he struggled with writing. Stanley did not like having a left-handed son. In his day you would have been made to sit on your left hand and write with your right one – that was his attitude. Under the pretence of Sylvia helping Laurie learn to read, she would help him with his little story books; and he helped her, with Sylvia learning along with him. She did get the hang of reading and writing eventually, but she was slow at it. After Paul was born, even Stanley Gould stopped keeping on about success and ‘getting on’, now that he had a son who had little prospect of it.

  Sylvia dreamed of the wonderful day when she would be able to walk out of school and never come back. At last, when she was fourteen, the day arrived and it was one of the happiest of her life. She took her reference and headed away from the place of shame and humiliation, to a job – any job that did not involve reading or writing. At first she worked in factories and then a laundry. No one made her read or write. The work was boring, but restful. No one went out of their way to make her feel stupid.

  Raymond floundered at the grammar school and did not pass his exams with much distinction. He couldn’t sit exams without being paralysed by nerves, which Sylvia’s dad said was obviously Stanley’s fault (‘the silly bugger’). Raymond left school when he was sixteen, almost as glad as Sylvia to get away from it.

  Only when she was much older did Sylvia realize that Raymond’s nastiness that day was in some measure Raymond passing onto her what he felt about himself.

  Pam Weaver

  Pam Weaver has written numerous articles and short stories for magazines including Take a Break, Take a Break Fiction Feast, Woman’s Weekly Fiction Special, Best, My Weekly and The People’s Friend. Her book Bath Times & Nursery Rhymes tells of her experiences as a nu
rsery nurse and Hyde Park nanny and was a Sunday Times bestseller.

  Pam’s saga novels, There’s Always Tomorrow, Better Days Will Come, Pack Up Your Troubles and For Better For Worse, are set in Worthing during the austerity years.

  Pam’s inspiration comes from her love of people and their stories and her passion for the town of Worthing. With the sea on one side and the Downs on the other, Worthing has a scattering of small villages within its urban sprawl, and in some cases tight-knit communities, making it an ideal setting for the modern saga.

  More Books by Pam Weaver

  Bath Times & Nursery Rhymes

  There’s Always Tomorrow

  Better Days Will Come

  Pack Up Your Troubles

  For Better For Worse

  Mary Wood

  Born the thirteenth child of fifteen to a middle-class mother and an East End barrow boy, Mary Wood’s childhood was a mixture of love and poverty. This encouraged her to develop a natural empathy with the less fortunate and a fascination with social history. Throughout her life Mary has held various posts in catering and office roles, and in the Probation service, while bringing up her four children. Mary now has numerous grandchildren, step-grandchildren and great-grandchildren. An avid reader, she first put pen to paper in 1989 whilst nursing her mother through her last months, but didn’t become successful until she began to self-publish her novels in the late 2000s.

  More Books by Mary Wood

  The Breckton trilogy:

  An Unbreakable Bond

  To Catch a Dream

  Tomorrow Brings Sorrow

  Time Passes Time

  The Cotton Mill saga:

  Judge Me Not

  TIME PASSES TIME

  by Mary Wood

  Theresa’s War. It is 1941, and the world is at war. Young Theresa Crompton is left devastated after giving up her illegitimate child and joins the Special Operations Executive, an organization of undercover agents working behind enemy lines. Her mission is to assist a Resistance group run by the handsome Pierre Rueben and it is not long before they fall in love. Soon Theresa becomes pregnant but circumstances tear Pierre and the child from Theresa.

  London, 1963. An older Theresa is haunted by her experiences during the war. In her damaged mind, the past tangles with the present and Theresa soon feels she has to make a terrifying decision. Her long-lost children are seeking answers. Will Theresa be reunited with them, before it’s too late?

  A thrilling and emotive saga by top-ten Kindle bestselling ebook author of the Breckton trilogy, Mary Wood. Time Passes Time is perfect for fans of Margaret Dickinson, Nadine Dorries and Lily Baxter.

  Read on for an extract from

  Time Passes Time by Mary Wood

  One

  War is a Tangled Memory Linked to the Present

  THERESA – LONDON 1963

  ‘Hey, let go, you old bag . . .’

  Theresa staggered. The hooded young men in front of her grabbed at her bag. Fear paralysed her. Unreleased screams filled her head . . . My secrets . . . Oh, God!

  Images flashed into her memory, but faded away into a haze of confusion as she tried to decipher the snippets of information that her brain managed to filter. She struggled to make sense of them and to separate the now from the past. Her fragile mind had little capacity to give her reality, having never recovered from the mental breakdown she’d suffered after the suicide of Terence, her twin brother, in 1958. And now it took her back in time, compounding her fear as she desperately sought for answers: What’s happening? Are they SS?

  Frail, and old beyond her years, every bone in her body hurt. The sockets of her arms burned as she fought valiantly. Stay quiet, she told herself. Name and number only . . . Don’t give in.

  A sudden thought trembled a deeper dread through her. The training officer of the Special Operations Executive had warned, ‘If caught, you may be subjected to torture.’ He’d listed several possibilities, but one had stuck in her mind: ‘Sometimes they resort to pulling out your fingernails . . .’

  Her terror of this often catapulted her from sleep in the middle of the night. How close she’d come to such a fate! Betrayed and captured, she’d felt the chafing of the irons that had held her and had sweated the cold sweat of terror as she’d thought her fate the same as her fellow SOE officers, Eliane, Yolande, Madeleine and Noor. Just saying their names was an honour, as they were the bravest women she’d ever known. The Germans had captured and executed them. After forcing the women to kneel in pairs, they had shot them in the head.

  With these thoughts intensifying her fear, the cloying darkness of the cell the Germans had thrown her into enclosed her once more, as did the desperate feeling of being alone. Alone and about to die.

  Was it happening again? Were these Nazis? Had they found her? Would she tell them what she knew? Please, God, help me not to . . .

  ‘For Christ’s sake! She’s got some strength for an old ’un.’

  ‘What’s that she said? Did she call us Nazis? The bleedin’ old cow . . .’

  Theresa’s head flew back with the force of the blow. Her fingers felt the cold pavement slab but could not prevent her fall. A boot hovered over her hand.

  ‘Give us yer bag, you stupid old witch. Let go . . .’

  The boot came down. Bones cracked. ‘14609, Theresa Laura Crompton, Officer . . .’

  ‘Christ, she’s bleedin’ mad. She’s saying something about being an officer. Ha, she must be ninety-odd. Bleedin’ officer, my hat. This is 1963, you stupid old bat! Get her bag, quick, she’s let go of it. Come on, leg it.’

  Pain seared her. Jumbled questions frustrated her: Is this London? Is the war over? Oh, dear God, what year did he say it was?

  No answers came, only the knowledge that she had lost the fight and that her attackers had gone. So too had the spirit that had powered her efforts. In its place lay a pit of despair.

  The leg she lay on started to throb. She had to shift position to release the pressure on her hip. As she did, an agony beyond endurance brought vomit to her throat. She swallowed it down. Felt the choking sting it left in its wake. How could Derwent have thought her capable of doing this job? Yes, she spoke French, and yes, she knew the country well. But she wasn’t brave enough . . . She wasn’t brave enough . . .

  And what about the mission? Pierre will be waiting . . . Oh, Pierre, my love. Please, God, keep him safe from capture. And our son, protect our son. For hadn’t she put them in grave danger? Those Nazis had her bag, her papers and the secrets she was charged with keeping. ‘Never write anything down!’ they’d told her. She’d disobeyed that golden rule. She’d written everything down. She’d told where her baby son and his grandparents were and that they were Jews. The Germans would . . . Oh, God! Why had she done it? Why had she compiled a complete record of her life from the day she’d had to give her first child away? Now the Nazis would know everything: the rendezvous point, the codes . . . Millions will die . . . But, no, that wasn’t right. It was 1953 when I began to write about it all – long after the war. Oh, why do my thoughts swim away from me?

  A voice with a twang of Cockney to it broke into her thoughts, ‘Blimey, it’s that Miss Crompton. Have you fallen, love? It’s alright, don’t be afraid . . .’

  It sounds like Rita, but no, Rita wouldn’t call me ‘Miss Crompton’. Rita loved her and called her nice names. Rita was a Land Girl on her brother’s farm. They were having an affair, a liaison. Exciting, different . . . Oh, God! Stop it, stop this confusion . . . That was then. Rita is old now and smells of drink. She can be cruel and demands money. Has Rita sent these people to hurt me?

  ‘Her nose is bleeding, Mum. She’s shaking . . .’

  ‘Okay, Trace, don’t just stand there. Nip across to that phone box and dial 999. Now then, love, help will be here soon. You keep yourself still. Bleedin’ ’ell, this is a turn-up, but you’re safe now.’

  Theresa’s trepidation intensified as her yesterdays crowded her brain once more: These people seem to kno
w me. Are they the ones who will be nice to me and try to gain my confidence?

  ‘Don’t be scared. We ain’t going to hurt yer, love.’

  Opening her eyes she tried to focus, but the glare of the sun overwhelmed her and she snapped them shut again. Before doing so she’d seen a blue light flashing. She’d never known the Germans to use such a warning sign. Would they take her back to Dachau? Would they shoot her? Or – no, dear God, not that . . . Not burned alive in the oven as they’d done to one poor girl. Oh God, help me! More voices. How many were there? Men’s voices, trying to soothe her and to calm her. I must stay strong. Sing, that’s the thing. Concentrate on a song. ‘There’ll be blue birds over . . . Tomorrow, just you wait and see . . .’

  ‘That’s the spirit, love. My old mum used to tell us to sing when we were afraid or in pain. I’m Marcus, and I’m just going to give you an injection to make you more comfortable, then we need to put a splint on that leg. We think you may have fractured it. Lie still now.’

  ‘No . . . No . . .’ She tried to push the man’s hand away, but couldn’t. Her thigh stung; her head swam. Oh, God, no! They had warned her about this new method. ‘They may inject you,’ they’d said. ‘It’s not lethal, but it relaxes you and you are no longer on your guard. If they do, try to think of something important and concentrate on it. Shut everything else out.’

  ‘Don’t like needles, eh? Nearly done. You’ll be better for it, love.’

  Pierre, oh, Pierre, I have let you down. Please, God, don’t let them capture him. He will face certain death! No, I couldn’t bear it . . . I love you, Pierre. The words he had said to her came into her mind: ‘Tu es le souffle de mon corps. Le sang qui coule dans mes veines et la vie dans mon coeur.’ That is what I will think of. She could hear his voice, and drank his words deep into her as she said them in her mind over and over: ‘You are the breath in my body. The blood that courses through my veins and the life inside my heart.’