Great Granny's Ghost

by Griff Hosker

  Great Granny’s Ghost

  Griff Hosker

  Published by Sword Books Ltd. 20171

  Copyright © Griff Hosker

  First Edition

  The author has asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the copyright holder, 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.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  Chapter 1

  “I am fed up with you Wayne! You have ruined my life. It’s about time you sorted yourself out. Look at this! Another letter from school! You don’t do the homework and you get into trouble. I haven’t got time to waste clearing up after you. I wish you had never been born.”

  This same conversation had crashed around in his head since the social worker and policewoman had picked him up. Was it his fault that he had been taken away from his mother? Had he done something wrong? He knew he wasn’t clever, well at least he thought he wasn’t clever because everyone called him thick: his friends, his teachers, his mum, everyone. He thought, ‘It must be true. That’s why I get in trouble. I can’t read as well as the others and I can’t get the answers out quick enough. That’s why I’m being put into care. It’s my fault I am just thick and stupid.’ If he had thought about it a little more, he might have realised that his reading wasn’t that bad, he just couldn’t read aloud and as for getting the answers out quickly enough, well he just liked to get the right answer and the teachers never gave you enough time. They would shout for the answer and expect it instantly. Wayne couldn’t do that.

  He looked around the social worker’s office for something to do. He worked out that they didn’t get many children in the social worker’s office as the only things to read were golf magazines and ‘Hello’. He had already looked at the pictures in both and read the headlines, neither magazine made him want to read it. He looked at the walls and apart from health and safety notices with pictures of people picking up boxes and hurting their backs, there was nothing for him to see. He closed his eyes and dreamed of living somewhere that wasn’t constantly damp and dirty; a place with clean sheets and food that didn’t come from Iceland. He quite liked some of the food from Iceland but he had become sick of the variations on the chicken theme his mother had bought. And there was never enough in a portion. He also wanted somewhere that didn’t smell of cheap lager and vodka. He had only tasted his mum’s vodka once and he couldn’t understand what the fuss was about. Having seen what it did to his mother, nightly, he still couldn’t understand why adults drank it. At least tonight he wouldn’t have to sleep in a flat which stank of stale cigarettes and overfull ashtrays. He hated that. As his thoughts drifted away, so did Wayne and he fell asleep.

  On the other side of the partition the social worker, Miriam Calvert-Jones, was struggling to find a foster carer for young Wayne. There were many foster carers available in the borough but they were all afro-Caribbean. Finding someone to take a thirteen year old, white boy was difficult. She had had to do the unthinkable and call her team leader, Peter. She hated having to talk to Peter. He was old school, left wing social worker; he didn’t even have a degree. Miriam almost felt unqualified when she spoke to him; yet she not only had her sociology degree, she had a Masters degree and yet she had to seek approval for all her decisions from a pipe smoking lefty, a hangover from the nineteen eighties. As she waited to be connected, she checked her make-up in the strategically placed mirror above her computer monitor. She clucked as she saw that her lipstick needed reapplication. As she adjusted the mirror to see her hair she noted with some satisfaction that her freshly manicured nails were immaculate. “Oh come on Peter,” she moaned into the telephone, “Get off your other line. This is important!”

  Standing to see over the half glass into the other part of the room she noted that her charge was asleep. Well that was one thing anyway; at least he had stopped crying. She couldn’t believe that a thirteen year old would cry so much just because he was taken away from his mother. It wasn’t as if she had put up much of a fight, although as she had been almost unconsciously drunk in their rubbish tip of a flat, it was hard to see how she could have objected.

  “Ah Peter, “I have the Johnson boy. The one with the problem mother. Case reference WJ44123/X/MCJ.”

  His voice, on the other end of the phone was gruff. After smoking a pipe for forty years he sounded as though he had had his vocal cords smoothed by a cheese grater. “Ah yes. Hang on while I get it on my screen.” In his office he tapped in the reference and the file sprang to life on the screen.” Looks straightforward to me. Alcoholic mother, health and safety issues, neglect, malnourished. Yep. Can’t see any problems.”

  ‘You wouldn’t ‘thought Miriam. “Well not with the paper work, of course. That is by the book.” Miriam prided herself on doing things by the book, as opposed to Peter who flew by the seat of his pants. “It is the foster home. I can get him put in Mandela house for tonight but where then?”

  “Let me see. Let me see,” Peter scrolled down the page until he found what he was looking for. “Yes I thought so. There is a grandmother, the girl’s mother, she lives in Hartlepool. Give her a call and see if she can look after him. Between you and me Miriam it would be the best thing. It would make him Hartlepool’s problem not ours.”

  Rolling her eyes she replied, “You mean we are just going to abandon someone we have responsibility for?”

  “How many live cases do you have Miriam?”

  “Thirty.”

  “And you want to increase your work load? You know there will be another emergency like this one next week, it is that sort of borough. Remember we still haven’t resolved the backlog from the riots.”

  “I know, I know. It is just that he seems such a lonely boy.”

  “All the more reason to put him with his grandmother.”

  “Yes but that‘s in Hartlepool.”

  “And what’s wrong with that?”

  Miriam should have detected the warning from his tone but she ploughed on, “Well it’s in the north and it is so cold and well let’s be honest a little primitive.”

  “Miss Calvert-Jones, I was born a few miles away from Hartlepool in Easington. They are good people up there and a cold wind never hurt anyone. Just ring the grandmother.”

  As she slammed down the telephone, she pulled a face at it in frustration. Before she rang the grandmother she reapplied her lipstick and gave her eyelashes a little flick of mascara. Scrolling down the screen she found the number. The telephone rang such a long time that she almost hung up but eventually she heard the flat northern vowels, “Hello?”

  “Hello. Is that Mrs Margaret Thomson? 32 Hope Street, Hartlepool?”

  “Yes it is. Who is this?”

  “I am Ms Miriam Calvert-Jones a social worker from Hackney. “ She suddenly became aware of the sleeping Wayne in the next room and lowered her voice a little. “I have your grandson, Wayne Johnson, with me. I am afraid we have had to take him into care.”

  “Oh no. What’s happened to our Debs? She’s all right isn’t she? Why can’t she look after him?”

  “I am afraid there were issues which I can’t go into over the phone but the senior social worker has asked if you could look after him for a while, as we only have the children’s home, Mandela House available and it isn’t suitable for Wayne for an extended period.” The pause on the other end of the telep
hone made Miriam’s heart sink like a stone. “It would only be a temporary move until we can arrange something more permanent.”

  “Well of course he can come up. He’s family. We look after our own up here. I was just wondering how we could get him up here.”

  Breathing a mental sigh of relief Miriam continued, “Don’t worry about that. If you could come down here on the train we could meet and I would be able to give you a better idea of what is going on and then you could take him back with you. I take it they do have trains from Hartlepool? I am afraid I don’t know the area.”

  “Well I couldn’t get down there before tomorrow dinnertime.”

  “Oh not until the evening…?”

  “No dinnertime, about half past twelve.”

  “Oh you mean lunchtime. That would be fine. I will give you my number and then you can ring me with the details of the train. Er has Wayne met you recently?”

  “I never met him our Debbie took off to London. I told her it was a mistake. She sent me a photo one Christmas.”

  “Yes, well, I will explain to Wayne what is happening. One more thing Mrs Thomson if you could bring some ID with you.”

  “ID?”

  “You know driving licence, passport, something like that.”

  “I haven’t got either. I have my bus pass and pension book oh and I have my card from the bingo.”

  “That will be all right. Well I will see you tomorrow.” Putting down the phone she wondered again about the wisdom of her superior sending such a nice little boy to a place so far from everything he had known and his grandmother didn’t even have a car!

  She opened the door and looked down at the tiny thirteen years old. He was sound asleep, with his legs tucked under him making him look like a hamster curled up asleep. He was so small it was easy to see why he had been bullied at school. She hoped that Peter was right about this Hartlepool move. She had heard that both the schools and the people were quite tough in the north. As she stroked the flick of hair out of his eyes she prayed that he would survive.

  Wayne had lived in London all his life but the tower block in Hackney wasn’t the London the tourist saw. Wayne had never seen that London. His mum had never taken him as, she said, ‘Up west’. He had travelled on the tube before but never a train and King’s Cross seemed enormous to the wide-eyed boy clinging to the beautifully manicured hand of Ms Miriam Calvert-Jones. His little holdall seemed pitifully small to the social worker; she had been appalled at the lack of clothes in the grubby, grimy damp smelling flat. The mother had again been too unwell to register a complaint and the social worker had been glad to leave the awful stink and general dilapidation. She wondered if the doctor she had sent would be able to help. She hoped so.

  “Have you every seen your grandmother Wayne?” he shook his head. ‘That could be a problem.’ When she had spoken earlier that day to the grandmother she had said she was arriving on the Grand Central train from Sunderland. That at least made it easy as it was the only train of that type to arrive at King’s Cross. She would have to stand by the barrier and wait for an old lady.

  Wayne for his part was more than a little nervous. What would she be like? This woman he had never met and this town Hartlepool? What would that be like? At the children’s home he had sat with the house mother and she had Googled Hartlepool on the computer. He had been surprised to see a marina with a sailing ship. At least he now knew it was on the coast. What he was concerned about was this story about a monkey and Hartlepool. It sounded to him like some sort of joke but he would soon find out.

  They heard the station tannoy as it announced the arrival of the Grand Central Train from Hartlepool. He found himself gripping the social worker’s hand ever tighter and she contemplated asking him not to grip so tightly but when she looked down at his fearful face, she relented and gripped his hand tightly. “Will she like me? She might not you know. Or she might not want to keep me.”

  Miriam was quite hardened to hard luck stories but her heart went out to him, he was comparing himself to a puppy. “Don’t you worry. She will adore you.” Inside the young social worker was hoping that the voice on the telephone matched the person she would meet, for the child’s sake.

  Margaret Thomson was a little dot of a woman. She had been a slim, young girl, whom motherhood had bloomed into a slightly more rotund lady. Her grey hair was cropped short and she had a busy way of walking. Forty years of cigarettes had taken their toll and although she had given up years earlier, the lines on her face and her hawking cough were all reminders of a habit she had had for far too long. It had been many years since she had been in London but the train journey seemed to be an improvement. It had only stopped four or five times and the journey only took two and a half hours. She could remember when it had taken six hours, with changes at Darlington and York and no seat.

  Stepping down from the train, which seemed to go on forever, she peered down the platform to catch a glimpse of her grandson. Debbie had never sent a picture and she hoped that he would look like his mother. She had never seen the father and if he took after him she would not have a clue who he was. Everyone around her seemed in such a hurry, carrying laptops, rucksacks or enormous wheeled suitcases which threatened to mow her down as she walked. There were families going on holiday with trolley loads of bags and all she had was her voluminous, ancient handbag. As she neared the end of the platform, it seemed to rise quite steeply and she had to pause to catch her breath. Lately she had found it hard to breathe sometimes. She felt as though she was still smoking. She rested her arm on the barrier at the end and as she looked up she saw a very attractive and fashionably dressed woman with a child, who was an exact replica of her daughter Debbie. It was her grandson. She opened her arms and with a smile splitting her face came towards him as fast as her old legs would carry her, “Wayne! What a bonny lad you are. Come here pet and give Nana Thomson a hug.”

  Later Miriam would chide herself for not checking ID but in that moment she knew she had made the right decision; the look of love on the old lady’s face and the readiness with which the shy young boy ran to her, knocked any idea of health and safety into a cocked hat.

  “Mrs Thomson?”

  “Yes dear and you must be the social worker?” She struggled to open her bag. “I expect you’ll want to see my bus pass?”

  “No no, well not here. Let’s go across the road and have a coffee.”

  The old lady looked a little unhappy, “If you don’t mind I’d rather have a cup of tea.”

  “I think we can manage that Mrs Thomson.”

  “Call me Maggie luv, everybody does.”

  After the tea, the coffee and Wayne’s coke, Miriam was secure in the knowledge that she had struck lucky with the little grandmother and that Wayne had, for the first time in his short life, the chance of happiness. He would have a new start in a new town with a woman who would, unlike his natural mother would look after him. “Well Maggie you have my number. I suspect Hartlepool Social Services will be in touch within the next few days. If they don’t, then I suggest you find a secondary school for Wayne. If you have a problem, then ring me. You have Wayne’s ticket for the train and, she gently eased her to one side to speak privately to her, “and I will keep you informed about your daughter. If things improve…”

  “Thanks pet but I know my daughter. She was always a bit wilful. I suppose that was my fault. I could only have the one and I think I spoiled her. Her dad always said that I did but she was such a pretty little bairn, I didn’t see the harm in spoiling her.” She began to sniffle and then coughed. “Well this is no good. Tears never solved owt did they? As I say I can’t see her changing but it is good of you to keep your eye on her. Thanks again. Anyway don’t spend too much time on my family a bonny lass like you will have a boyfriend I daresay. You’ve done more than enough. Come on Wayne there’s our train. Bye love.”

  Like a miniature tornado, the tiny woman steamed out of Miriam’s life and strangely the social worker felt that she had had
the poorer part of the deal. Waving a goodbye to Wayne, she watched the two of them disappear beneath a forest of legs, arms and bags as the passengers for the Sunderland train raced to get their seats.

  Chapter 2

  As they hurried down the platform, Nana Thomson kept up a running commentary, all the while hanging on to her grandson, his small holdall and her huge handbag. “’Course I had a seat reserved when I came down. I didn’t know what train I was going to get coming back and I didn’t reserve a seat so I suppose we’ll have to take what we can. “She peered intently at all the carriages as the passed them. “Look. There’s a couple of empty seats in that compartment.” She made for an open door and struggled to board the train. Huffing and puffing like an old steam train going up the incline, she hauled her grandson on board. “Eeeh pet you’re as light as a feather. We’ll have to build you up. Has our Debbie not been feeding you?” Without pausing for an answer, she made for the two seats she had spotted. Rushing, more than was good for a woman of almost sixty five, she made the seats just before two blousy women sporting Sunderland AFC tops grabbed them. With a disarming smile, she said, “I think I saw two more empty seats further up.” Muttering the two overweight shoppers trailed away. Winking at Wayne she said, “That was lucky besides I don’t think they could have sat in these seats. They need one with a table eh?” She managed to put the tiny holdall in the luggage rack and then took off their coats and put them up as well. Finally with a red face and a huge sigh she sat down. “Well thank the lord I don’t have to move again before we get to Hartlepool.”

  Wayne looked up at her as she finally stopped for a breath. “Nana Thomson?”

  “Yes dear?”

  “What‘s Hartlepool like?”

  “Oh it’s lovely. It’s not filled with busy people rushing around like London is and we don’t live in those high rise flat thingies. You know, like the one Miriam said you and your mam lived in.”