‘I don’t think so, it’s OK out here,’ he called back, tottering down to the edge of the roof, peering over and shouting loudly.
For a moment Charity hesitated, staring down into the darkness. She realised to her horror that she couldn’t reach far enough down to place James into Toby’s arms and if she dropped him he could roll off the roof and be killed.
‘Prue! Shut up and help me make a sling for James.’ She snatched up one of the bedspreads and put it down on the floor.
‘I’m scared, I want to get out,’ Prudence wailed, backing away from Charity towards the window, her eyes on the smoke billowing under the door.
‘Don’t wriggle, James.’ Charity sat James down in the centre of the bedspread and pulled up each of the four corners above his head. He immediately stood up, poking his head through one corner.
‘Sit down and stay down.’ Charity pushed him firmly on the head. ‘Please be a good boy.’ Her heart was thumping, her mouth dry and she coughed with the smoke. Surely Mother and Father had smelt it by now? Why didn’t they come?
Her fingers wouldn’t work properly, the bedspread was too thick to tie securely and Prudence was no help at all.
She had the quivering bundle on the windowsill now. Charity couldn’t trust Prue to hold anything, so she thrust her aside with her hip and leaned out.
‘Ready, Toby?’ she yelled, unable to see him now. ‘I’ll lower him bit by bit until I feel your hands grab him. Don’t drop him, whatever you do!’
Her arms were almost pulled from their sockets as she lowered the bundle, slowly feeding it through her hands. Wind bit into her bare arms, pieces of glass were pricking through the eiderdown beneath her belly, but still she talked to James.
‘I’ve got you and Toby’s waiting. Hold on to my waist, Prue!’ she called out.
Prue screamed.
‘Hold on to me!’ Charity yelled back, letting her hands slowly slip back up the bedspread. ‘I’ll get you out too in a minute.’
James was screaming now; the bundle swinging from side to side as he struggled to get free, but at last Charity felt the weight supported.
‘That’s it! I’ve got him,’ Toby called back. ‘You can let go!’
A piece of glass hit Charity on the head as she pulled herself back in. Prudence was coughing, leaning towards the window doubled over.
‘You now.’ Charity lifted her sister up on to the eiderdown and gently pushed her on to the windowsill. ‘Jump, Prue, it’s not far.’
Prudence was frozen on the sill, too scared to jump. Charity leaned out behind her, taking her sister’s hands in hers. ‘Don’t be scared,’ she said. ‘Just let yourself dangle, then I’ll drop you the rest of the way.’
Charity couldn’t hold her any longer anyway. She let her sister’s fingers slip through hers and heard her fall with a thump.
She was jumping up on to the windowsill when she paused and looked back towards the door. A flickering light beneath it showed that flames were close, but she had to make certain her parents had got out.
‘Prue, hold James and stay there for a moment,’ she called down. ‘Toby, try and get down to next door over the wall and get help. I’m going to get Mother and Father.’
Both James and Prudence were screaming now. Lights were coming on in the houses at the back.
As Charity opened the door to the landing, the smoke and heat nearly drove her back. She could hear crackling. The wall at the bottom of the few steps was lit with reflected light from flames further down. Clamping the bottom of her nightdress over her mouth she inched her way down towards it.
But as she turned the corner on to the narrow landing opposite the study, tongues of fire were licking over the sisal mat towards her. Another second or two and she’d be caught in it.
‘Jump out the window!’ she yelled, unable to get to their door.
For just one second she stood there, staring in horrified fascination. The fire was like a monster, lapping up everything in its path. The heat was so intense it scorched her bare legs and arms and she knew she could do nothing more to save them from here.
‘Mother, Father,’ she yelled one more time. ‘Get out. Get out!’
A blast of flames knocked her back, catching the hem of her nightdress. She turned and fled into the dark room, shouting in terror. In one desperate leap she got to the window. Clinging to the eiderdown she flung herself through mindlessly and only the sudden chill and the crash as her body hit the roof told her she was safe.
Dimly she heard Prudence crying as she lay there coughing her lungs up. Then a man’s voice urging her sister to help.
‘Put the cover over her first,’ she heard. ‘Then pass me the babby. It’s all right, sweetheart, we’ll soon have you safe.’
It was a strange, disjointed nightmare. Screams, shouting, sirens and gruff male voices. Suddenly it was so bright and hot she thought it was summer. But then someone lifted her. She could feel rough serge against her skin, hear a man’s voice telling her she was safe and she was carried away into darkness.
Chapter Three
The events between Charity being lifted down from the kitchen roof and ending up in the children’s ward in Lewisham hospital were hazy.
A fleeting glimpse of a crowd of neighbours watching the fire consuming the house as she was carried to the ambulance on a stretcher. Firemen wrestling with hoses, dark shapes against the glow of the fire. Prudence crying and Tobias’s white, scared face. Then bright lights and many faces looming over her and a doctor telling her she needed just a couple of stitches in the cut on her head, but he was giving her some medicine so all the pain would go away.
When she woke up, for a moment she thought she had dreamt it all, but her dry mouth, the bandages on her hands and a dull ache all over her made sense of the flowered curtains pulled round the bed. A nurse came to give her a drink: a big woman with copper-coloured hair and gentle brown eyes who sat on the bed and told her both her parents were dead. Charity listened while the nurse explained how a hot coal had fallen from the fire in the parlour and smoke had found its way up into the bedroom above long before the fire got a grip on the house. She tried to soften it by telling Charity that her parents didn’t even wake, that they had died peacefully long before flames reached them, but somehow it meant nothing.
Charity felt she ought to cry, but she couldn’t. It was as if she was in a cocoon, able to see and hear, but she felt nothing more than the cut on her head and the sting of the burns.
When Charity asked later where the children were, they told her that all three had been taken to foster parents who lived on Clapham Common and she would be going there too once the doctor decided she was well enough. She wasn’t badly hurt, she discovered: minor burns on her arms, hands and legs and the cut on her head.
Between sleeping and waking, nurses kept telling her how brave she was, reassuring her that none of the children was hurt and she’d soon be seeing them.
As the misty, sleepy feeling gradually faded and the bright ward full of children became clearer, a sense of jubilation filled her. She’d been rescued! She would never again have to submit to her father’s will, never step into that dark, cold house again. No more sermons, no more wondering why their mother never stood up for them or showed any love. It was a new beginning, a brand new start for all of them.
The next morning a social worker called Miss Downes came to collect her, bringing brand new clothes. Even as she slipped on the pretty white underwear, a navy pleated skirt and a pale blue twinset, Charity’s delight was tinged with deep remorse. Her injuries were slight and she couldn’t brush her hair properly because of the cut on her head, but when more nurses came and offered sympathy about her parents and complimented her on her bravery she felt like a fraud.
She felt she ought to be crying; to be feeling a real sense of loss. But all she felt now was guilt, not grief.
‘Well don’t you look nice.’ Miss Downes looked her up and down as Charity emerged bashfully from behind the screens
not knowing whether to smile or cry. ‘Now put on this coat. It’s too big, I know, but we’ll get you one that fits in the next day or two.’
Miss Downes intimidated Charity. Perhaps it was only because she said they would stay with foster parents until they were ‘assessed’, but her manner and appearance didn’t inspire trust.
She was tall and thin, a middle-aged spinster who blinked continually behind thick gold-rimmed spectacles, made a humming sound and nodded her head. At first this seemed to mean agreement to everything, but in fact it was a daunting habit which meant nothing. She didn’t seem to be able to manage to smile at all.
Miss Downes explained that Mr and Mrs Charles were temporary foster parents who took children in until relatives were found, or other arrangements could be made. During the car ride to Clapham she fired terse questions at Charity, not about the little ones, but about her school, what she planned to do as a career and if she knew if her father had any insurance?
Charity did what she always did when she was uncertain about anything: merely shook her head and looked at her lap. She didn’t know if she was expected to cry all the time, or try to be grown-up, but the same desolate feeling she’d had before the fire came back with a vengeance.
She remembered her father urging social workers to keep a family together when the parents were killed in a train crash a couple of years earlier. Later they heard that the youngest was adopted and the other four split up between children’s homes miles away from one another. What if that happened to them?
The Charleses’ house was welcoming. Not only did it overlook a common that reminded her very much of Blackheath, but all three children were standing at the upstairs window waving as they pulled up, only to disappear and run to open the door.
A big, double-fronted house, its front garden bright with crocus and daffodils. Better still, Miss Downes left after only the briefest word with Mrs Charles and Charity was drawn in by the children to a home she could only gaze at in wonder. That first impression was of colour, space and light, and a sense of having arrived in paradise.
Mr and Mrs Charles, or Auntie Lou and Uncle Geoff as they told the children to call them, were the kind her father called ‘Bohemians’. Auntie Lou wore trousers and a kind of artist’s smock and she had long curly red hair tied up in a ponytail. Uncle Geoff was thin, with a big black bushy beard and hardly any hair and he said he was a writer.
Lou and Geoff Charles had no children of their own, but over the years they had taken in countless children in similar emergencies to that of the Stratton family. They operated what they called ‘a halfway house’, a place of safety where they could monitor and assess the needs of the often emotionally disturbed and traumatised children until a permanent home could be found for them. Deeply committed and caring, they were often appalled at the local authorities’ insensitivity and lack of appropriate training. They had learned too that many of the children who passed through their hands would not end up in ideal homes. But however short a time children were to stay, they endeavoured to make it a happy time.
The first two days Charity was at Clapham was a whirl of new experience. A real bathroom, carpets on all the floors, no chores to do – and television. The food was different too. Strange, wonderful things like spaghetti and grapefruit, and hot chocolate to drink. The house was bright and colourful, there were toys, books and puzzles and the Charleses opened their arms and hearts to all of them without reservation.
Uncle Geoff said he wrote books on germs. Charity didn’t really believe anyone could write a whole book on such a subject, but he certainly knew a whole lot about everything and he made things so interesting she found herself wishing she could overcome her fear of him. Auntie Lou was just as fascinating: she could cook a meal, hold a conversation, do a bit of ironing, all without looking as if she was doing anything. The house was clean, but she never worried if it was untidy. They had hundreds of books, paintings, ornaments and artefacts from all over the world. On top of all the other strange and wonderful new experiences, Lou and Geoff didn’t believe in standing on ceremony about anything.
It was they who shortened Tobias and Prudence to Toby and Prue, something that had always made the children’s parents smart with anger. They complimented the children on their good table manners, but didn’t turn a hair when they occasionally forgot themselves and grabbed food, or turned their forks to scoop up tricky morsels. They turned bathtime into play, let the girls wear their hair loose and allowed Toby to kick a football around the common whenever he liked.
‘It’s good here, ain’t it?’ Toby said gleefully, just a few days after their arrival.
‘Isn’t it.’ Charity corrected his speech out of force of habit, but her thoughts were miles away.
They were standing at the window of Toby’s room. Across the road was Clapham Common, grass and trees stretching almost as far as they could see.
A man and a small boy were flying a kite in the distance. They had been watching for some time as the man ran with it trying to get it into the air. At last the wind caught the kite and up it went, the little boy waving his hands in glee.
‘I shouldn’t feel quite so happy though, should I?’ He moved his head back from her shoulder and she saw tears glinting in his clear blue eyes.
‘You aren’t happy because they’re dead,’ Charity reproved him. ‘It’s just because Auntie Lou and Uncle Geoff are so kind and this house is so wonderful. Don’t feel bad about anything, Toby. Mother and Father have gone to heaven and they wouldn’t want you to be sad.’
‘But you’re sad.’ He buried his face in her thin bony chest and hugged her fiercely.
She wished she could tell him her sadness wasn’t grief so much as anxiety about their future. But he was just a little boy and she couldn’t lay her burdens on him.
When Toby said it was lovely here that was an understatement. It was heaven. The kind of wonderland Charity had never even imagined in her dreams. But a voice of reason kept telling her that it was only temporary.
Downstairs a radio was playing and she could hear Prue laughing as she rolled out pastry with Auntie Lou. Uncle Geoff had taken James along to the shops and soon it would be dinnertime. The fire was such a short time ago, ahead was the funeral and she didn’t dare look beyond that point.
But Charity kept thinking of that word Miss Downes had used. ‘Assessing.’
For one thing Auntie Lou made notes about things they said and did. Her questions came out so naturally, with such interest that Toby and Prue fell over themselves to inform her about every aspect of their former life, about their school and how they felt. But Charity was more wary.
It was good to have smart new clothes. To see Prudence’s eyes light up with pleasure at a short grey pleated skirt, patent leather strap shoes and a pale blue jumper with a matching ribbon for her hair. It made her happy to see Toby making friends with other children as naturally as if he’d always lived here. But not so good to have James snatched away from her.
Auntie Lou said she was too young for so much responsibility and insisted on washing and dressing James herself. She wouldn’t even let him sleep in the same room as the girls. Was this preparing Charity for the time when she would be pushed out the door, not only to work, but to find lodgings of her own?
‘But I’ve always looked after James,’ Charity said on her second day there, when Auntie Lou took James off to bed. ‘It was my job.’
Auntie Lou let her come up to the big bathroom while she bathed James, but in her gentle way she spelt things out.
‘You’re only fifteen, Charity and I know you’ve shouldered a great deal of responsibility for your brothers and sister all your life.’ She sat back on her heels beside the bath as James splashed vigorously, her red hair loose and attractively tousled round her thin, expressive face. ‘But soon you’ll be going to work and they have to learn to lean on someone else. Now’s a golden opportunity for you to sit back and let them get used to new people. Because you aren’t their mother, only a
loving sister, and you deserve a life of your own.’
Deep down she knew what Auntie Lou said was right but her feelings were so mixed up. On one hand she wanted an adult to take over, she wanted to be a little girl, to cry and be comforted the way Prue was. But she was angry and jealous, cut off from everything that was familiar, with a sense of betrayal that her brothers and sister were accepting this new woman as a mother.
‘Lunchtime!’ Auntie Lou bellowed up the stairs, startling Charity and Toby. ‘Wash your hands before you come down. Don’t be long now!’
Toby moved away from his sister, turning at the door of his room with a wide grin lighting up his pale face.
‘Don’t worry. All we have to do is make them like us so much they keep us for ever.’
‘They already like you, you little scamp.’ Charity forced herself to smile reassuringly. ‘Just be a good boy, that’s all.’
There were four rooms downstairs. A very grand one the Charleses called the drawing room. A dining room and a huge kitchen right along the back of the house, then the one they referred to as ‘the den’. It overlooked the Common, and had big bay windows and a settee big enough for five people all at once. There was a table to do jigsaws on, hundreds of books on shelves, games, paints and the television.
It was quite the jolliest room Charity had ever seen. Auntie Lou had a way of flinging herself down on the settee or carpet which encouraged them all to feel relaxed in here. She never told them to put things away, she watched the children’s programmes with as much enthusiasm as they did and let James curl up on her lap whenever he felt like it.
Charity waited until both younger children had gone up to bed. Uncle Geoff was working in his study and Auntie Lou had sat down with some sewing.
The den was very warm and cosy with a stove kind of fire that never went out. Two big lamps either side of the fireplace shed soft, golden pools of light and the bright print curtains were drawn tightly. Auntie Lou was on the settee. Charity sat opposite in an armchair, one eye on the television, the other weighing up the older woman.
Charity Page 4