by Rosie Harris
Rebecca decided that since it was in a ‘posh’ area she would play safe and look smart. On her first day she wore a tailored navy suit teamed with a plain cream blouse. She used light foundation cream and a pale-pink lipstick. She was anxious to impress and hoped her honey-coloured hair didn’t make her look too young and frivolous.
Grace decided that dark slacks and a T-shirt were more in keeping with the type of school she had been assigned to in Toxteth.
‘They’re probably all little hooligans or tearaways,’ she explained. ‘It’s an area where a few months back they had riots,’
‘Oh heavens! Are you scared?’
Grace shrugged. ‘Someone has to teach them, I suppose. They’re probably as bright, or even brighter, than the children you’ll have in your class.’
‘Well, that’s something we both have to find out,’ Rebecca said thoughtfully.
‘True! See you tonight if we both survive, then we’ll swop sordid stories.’ Grace grinned as they set out in opposite directions, both of them feeling rather apprehensive about their coming encounters.
Twenty-Five
Rebecca felt very nervous as she set off for her first day of teaching. The journey was much simpler than she had anticipated, which helped boost her confidence, but as she approached the red-brick school building her heart was in her mouth.
The thought of standing up in front of a class of thirty children and holding their attention for a whole half hour was daunting. She knew her subject well enough, but what if her memory let her down or she found her voice was croaky? Or she dropped things and made a fool of herself?
Addressing a class of her peers, as she had done a great many times recently during her training, had been demanding but not nearly as scary as tackling a class of fifteen-year-olds.
Meeting the headmistress was the first ordeal, but she found Mrs Rankin, a middle-aged woman with grey hair and spectacles, far less forbidding that she had expected.
Somewhat reassured, she faced the next challenge: meeting the class she would be teaching with some degree of confidence.
They were a mixed class of boys and girls, all clean and neatly dressed, and they seemed to be as curious about her as she was about them.
By the time the lunch break came and she joined her fellow teachers for their midday meal, she felt far happier than she had at nine o’clock that morning.
The rest of her day was reasonably satisfying. She had one slight tiff with a boy of fourteen, who was bored by her lesson and inattentive. When she asked him a question during the course of the lesson, he’d said with a cheeky grin, ‘What’s the matter, Miss? Don’t you know? Do you want me to take the class for you?’
Unsure of how to handle the situation, Rebecca ignored him and moved on to someone else, but she made a mental note to deal with him after the lesson was over.
Sensing this might happen, the boy made sure that the minute the lesson ended he absented himself from the classroom.
When she recounted this episode to Grace that evening, her friend merely smiled. ‘You’ve been lucky, you should have had a taste of the class I’ve been given! They were absolute little horrors.’
As the week passed, Rebecca could see that she had been very lucky. The children she’d come into contact with were clean, bright and polite with very few exceptions. Grace, on the other hand, had been given a taste of teaching in a very poor run-down area, with a class of tough worldly-wise children.
It made Rebecca wonder what sort of class she would get next time, and whether she would be able to deal with them as efficiently as Grace appeared to be doing.
On her last day at the school in Hoylake, Rebecca finished early and as it was a nice bright day she decided that instead of going straight back to Liverpool she would spend an hour or so looking around the rest of Hoylake.
Danny had taken them to New Brighton, which was situated at the other corner of the Wirral peninsular and had a jolly seaside atmosphere. Hoylake was quite different and far more sedate.
She had heard a great deal from the pupils about Red Rocks, which seemed to be a favourite place for sea and sand and the ideal spot for flying kites.
After making several enquiries from local people, she located it and found that it was at the end of a quiet tree-lined road. The vista was breathtaking and she sat down on one of the great jutting red rocks to admire the view, the flocks of sea birds and the unbroken silence. Across the sand and sea and on the other side of the River Dee she could see the outline of mountains and the coast of Wales.
Her thoughts went back to the wide expanse of green fields to be seen from certain points in Shelston, and for the first time since she arrived in Liverpool she felt homesick.
Life there had been so quiet and ordered, and she had known everyone and had been on friendly terms with everybody when she had been growing up. Cindy’s disappearance had brought that to an end. It had caused such a furore that now that was what generally came into her mind when she thought of home.
Bringing her thoughts back to the present, she watched as the tide went out exposing a great expanse of sand. In the distance she could see the arrival of an enormous flock of seabirds.
Feeling hungry, she returned to the village centre and went into a small cosy-looking café, where she ordered a light lunch of scrambled eggs and salad.
After that, she decided that before catching a train back to Liverpool she would explore the rest of the village high street, where there were all sorts of independent shops and boutiques. She found most of them fascinating and resolved to suggest to Grace that they come over one Saturday for a longer look at them.
As she was hurrying towards the train station, she caught sight of a young woman wearing a bright-red jacket and found herself staring because the woman reminded her so much of Cindy.
Suddenly Rebecca felt a shiver go through her, as she continued to stare at the slim figure hurrying along in front of her.
It wasn’t her imagination, there really was something familiar about the woman and from what she could see of the woman’s face she was sure it was Cindy.
‘What utter rubbish!’ she told herself. ‘What on earth would Cindy be doing in a place like Hoylake? I’ve spent too long sitting watching the waves at Red Rocks and reminiscing about home in the uncanny silence there and it has turned my mind.’
She stared again at the woman in the bright-red jacket as she followed her down the street. The woman seemed to sense she was being watched and turned to look to see who it was.
In that brief moment Rebecca was able to see her face even more clearly. Their eyes met for only a second before the woman hastily looked away.
Before Rebecca could call out to her, the woman had disappeared. Rebecca increased her pace until she was running in an attempt to see where she had gone. The woman had turned off the main street and vanished up a quiet road behind the shops.
Rebecca knew it was pointless trying to follow her. She was shaking as she went into the nearest café and ordered a strong black coffee to try to steady her nerves.
As she looked down into the dark liquid, she saw again the eyes of the woman as she had stared back over her shoulder at her and she was convinced there had been a spark of recognition in them. She was sure the woman had recognized who she was, just as she had known that the woman was Cindy.
So why hadn’t she stopped to talk? What was she doing living in Hoylake?
The questions buzzed round and round in Rebecca’s head, like trapped bluebottles, all the way back to Liverpool.
She wasn’t sure whether to take Grace into her confidence or not. If she did, then it meant telling her all about the vile accusations that had been levelled at her and her family when Cindy had gone missing.
So far she had kept that part of her life a secret, and she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to share it now or not.
Perhaps, she thought, it would be better to make another visit to Hoylake on her own and see if she could find the woman again. Her br
ight-red jacket was so distinctive that possibly someone might know from her description who she was if she asked about her in some of the shops.
What should she tell them if they asked her why she was trying to locate this woman? It was something she needed to think about, but for the moment she decided to keep the matter to herself.
Twenty-Six
For the rest of her first term teaching in Hoylake, Rebecca found herself scanning the road every time she went into the High Street, hoping that she might see the tall, slim young woman in the bright-red jacket again and find a chance to speak to her. She even made discreet enquiries, but most people looked at her blankly as if they didn’t know who she was talking about.
Once or twice she considered mentioning it to Grace’s brother Danny. As a policeman he would probably know how to go about tracing the woman, but she thought he would want to know why she was so anxious to talk to her. Also, he might discuss it with his fellow officers.
She wasn’t sure what to do, so in the end she did nothing. She still kept watching out for her, however, because she was convinced it was Cindy.
When she went home to Shelston at Christmas, she was dismayed to find that the feud between the Masons and her own family had still not abated.
‘We’ve no idea if there has been any news of her or not,’ her mother told her with a deep sigh when she asked about Cindy. ‘I often think about her and wonder what really did happen to her. Your dad refuses to discuss the matter. I think he would like to stop selling the Masons’ produce, but to be honest we can’t afford to do that and I don’t think they could afford for us to do so either. Jake brings their stuff down early on a Friday morning and they send in a bill for it at the end of each month. We pay by return of post and that’s the extent of our communicating.’
‘What about if you see Mavis out, or Dad meets up with Tom in the pub?’
‘I rarely see anything of Mavis. As far as I know she still shops at the new supermarket, and for things I can’t buy locally I still go into one of the nearby towns like I’ve always done. It suits us both.’
‘What about Dad and Tom Mason?’ Rebecca repeated.
‘They go to different pubs. Your dad still goes to the Red Lion because he and Jack Smart have been friends for years, and I believe Tom Mason goes to the White Hart because Harry Shepherd, the landlord there, is his cousin. It works well for both of them.’
Rebecca was tempted to mention to her mother about the girl she had seen in Hoylake but she was sure her mother would only think she was being fanciful so she said nothing.
They were extremely busy in the shop in the days leading up to Christmas. For the festive spread, most families bought turkeys or capons or joints of beef or ham.
‘We’ve had fewer orders than usual this year,’ Bill commented as they closed up late on Christmas Eve. ‘I suppose we have that damn supermarket to thank for that.’
‘There’s not as much money about anywhere this year as there was last year,’ Sandra pointed out.
‘Either that or Tom Mason is going behind our back and supplying people direct.’
‘No, I don’t think he would do that,’ Sandra assured him. ‘He would know that it would get back to us, and he would have lost his market for their butter and cheese as well as their poultry and he couldn’t afford that.’
Although her father nodded in agreement Rebecca could see he wasn’t wholly convinced, and not for the first time she wished she could find out exactly what had happened to Cindy and set all their minds at rest. It would be such a relief to bring an end to all the ill-feeling there was between their two families and to scotch the malicious gossip that still went on in the village.
On Christmas Day they had a surprise visitor. To Rebecca’s delight, Nick Blakemore turned up mid-morning with gifts and wine.
‘Well, this is an unexpected surprise,’ Rebecca smiled.
‘I didn’t tell you I would be popping in because I’ve been working as a relief manager at a shop in Bristol and I wasn’t sure if I would be able to get here.’
‘Busy night, last-minute rush of customers was it?’ Bill laughed.
‘Very much so. I didn’t finish until half past eleven last night. But I managed to catch a very early train this morning, so here I am.’
‘You kept that very quiet,’ Rebecca commented as she went through into the kitchen to help her mother prepare their meal.
‘Not really,’ her mother told her. ‘I asked him weeks ago, but I didn’t say anything because he wasn’t sure if he would be able to manage it.’
It certainly made Christmas special for Rebecca. More than once she found herself comparing Nick and Danny Flowers. They were so completely different not only in looks and colouring but in character as well, and at this moment Nick was far more to her liking.
She felt much more at ease with Nick than with Danny. Perhaps it was because Danny was a policeman and whenever they were together she felt he was on duty, mentally if not physically. With Nick, she felt she could relax and was far more comfortable and at ease.
Overnight they had a light fall of snow, and on Boxing Day she took Nick for a long walk to show him how lovely Shelston looked with its pristine white covering.
As they returned through the woods at the back of Woodside, it was Nick who brought up the subject of Cindy.
‘Even the tree where we found your friend’s clothes looks less sinister with its covering of snow,’ he commented.
‘Did you ever find out what had happened to her?’ he went on when Rebecca remained silent.
‘No, not really.’ She hesitated for a moment, then began to tell him about the young woman in the red jacket she had seen in Hoylake.
He remained silent when she’d finished and, giving him a sideways glance, she noted the deep frown on his face.
‘You think I’m mad, don’t you?’ she said with a small self-deprecating laugh.
‘No, not at all. But I am a little worried though because obviously you are still very concerned about her.’
‘You think I imagined it was Cindy?’
‘Perhaps you were thinking about her and it was a sort of thought transference? You saw this girl, about the same age as Cindy, and because she was wearing a bright-red jacket you immediately thought it was Cindy.’
‘No, it wasn’t only that. It was the look of recognition in her eyes as they met mine.’
‘Are you quite sure that was what it was? It might have been surprise or unease because you were staring at her so hard.’
‘Then why did she rush off and disappear as if she was afraid I was going to speak to her?’
‘She probably was afraid. After all, if you were a complete stranger, she might well have been scared of you.’
‘I could understand that if it had been a man following her.’
‘I don’t know about that, but …’
‘Ssh!’ Rebecca put her finger to her lips. They were approaching her home and she saw that her father was collecting logs from the shed in the garden to take indoors. She didn’t want to talk about Cindy in front of either of her parents.
Nick seemed to understand immediately. He said no more and hurried over to the shed to help Bill Peterson to carry in the logs.
Next morning Rebecca tried to have a moment alone with Nick before he left for Bristol, where he would be working over the New Year.
‘Perhaps we’ll have a chance to see each other at Easter if you are coming home for the holiday break this year?’ he said as they said goodbye.
‘I think I might be doing that,’ she smiled.
‘You’ll be able to bring me up to speed about Hoylake then,’ he murmured quietly as he kissed her on the cheek and they wished each other well.
Twenty-Seven
When she went back to Liverpool after the Christmas break, Rebecca found herself caught up with her studies and kept so busy that she did not have time for anything else.
Her next teaching assignment was with an inner-city school, wh
ich proved to be very different from the one she had been sent to before in Hoylake.
The Liverpool school was mixed in every respect. On her first day the headmaster, Jeffrey Wilson, handed her a sheet of paper on which was printed a head-and-shoulders photograph of every child in the class she would be teaching with the name of the child below it.
The class consisted of so many different nationalities that Rebecca looked at it with dismay. The only thing they seemed to have in common was that they were all about fourteen years of age.
‘They’re all such individual characters that I’m sure you will soon be able to tell them apart,’ the headmaster told her curtly. ‘If you have difficulty pronouncing any of their names, ask one of the staff to help you.’
It was certainly hard work teaching them. Some of them were exceptionally bright and grew impatient when she repeatedly had to stop to explain things to the ones who were slower.
There were also a few who appeared to be so uninterested that she found it difficult to hold their attention.
When she mentioned this to Grace, she admitted she’d had the same problem.
‘So what did you do?’
‘In the end I simply ignored the ones who didn’t want to learn.’
‘I don’t think it’s right to do that. After all, that’s what teaching is about, isn’t it? We’re supposed to be helping them understand things they don’t know but which they ought to know.’
‘But it’s not right to bore the more intelligent ones or those who are keen to acquire knowledge just because of a few who aren’t.’
‘Are you still ignoring the ones who don’t want to learn?’ Rebecca asked.
‘No, thank goodness, I don’t need to in the school I’m at this term,’ Grace said smugly. ‘At the school I’m teaching at in Wallasey they’re all average to bright, so I don’t have any problems when it comes to holding their attention. They’re much better behaved in every way than the children were at my last school.’
‘In fact our positions have been reversed,’ Rebecca sighed. ‘I had an easy class last term and you’ve got one this time.’