EDIE’S HOME FOR ORPHANS
Gracie Taylor
Copyright
Published by AVON
A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021
Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 2021
Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers 2021
Cover photographs © Lee Avison / Arcangel Images (main image) and Shutterstock.com (all other images)
Gracie Taylor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008407599
Ebook Edition © April 2021 ISBN: 9780008453329
Version: 2021-01-08
Dedication
For my own Home Front hero: my grandad, Eric Firth.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Epilogue
Aggie’s Cheese Pudding
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading …
About the Author
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
January 1941
Edie Cartwright had been staring into her cup of tea for nearly half an hour when Susan arrived to meet her at The Sparrow Café. The brew had long since grown tepid, but Edie kept her hands wrapped around it, trying to absorb the last bit of heat. It was so hard to get warm these days, with coal in such short supply.
‘Well, how do I look?’ Susan asked, twirling for her.
She was kitted out in her new uniform: the khaki skirt and jacket of the ATS, with the brass badge on her cap polished to a high shine. It wasn’t the most fetching of the women’s auxiliary services uniforms, but the tightly belted jacket clung flatteringly to Susan’s Hedy Lamarr curves and Edie reflected that her best friend would manage to look like a film star even dressed in an old potato sack. Whereas her own scrawny frame bore so much resemblance to a bag of bones, it was a wonder no one had tried to claim her for salvage.
‘Like the Third Reich’s worst nightmare,’ she said, summoning a smile. ‘Old Adolf won’t know what’s hit him.’
Susan laughed as she took a seat. ‘Edie, I’m going to work as a despatch rider in Hull; I’m not getting dropped in the heart of Germany.’ She watched as her friend absently stirred her now undrinkable tea. ‘Are you all right? You look unhappy.’
‘Not unhappy exactly. Just … reflective. I can’t help dwelling on the fact that after Alfie ships out tomorrow, you and I will be the last of our little set left. And in a few more weeks I’ll be losing you too. That’s one of the worst things about this war – I mean, apart from all the fighting. The way it breaks up families.’ Edie flushed. ‘I’ve always felt we were family, you know. At any rate, the closest I have to one.’
‘I always hoped I might have you for a real-life sister one day,’ Susan said with a small smile.
‘Well, and so you do, in love if not in law.’ Edie reached out to squeeze her hand. ‘I’ll miss you to blazes, Sue.’
‘I’ll write you all the time. Twice every week, I cross my heart.’
‘You better had. I only wish I was coming with you.’
‘When are you going for your examination with Dr Grant?’
‘Tomorrow.’ Edie held up her crossed fingers. ‘Wish me luck.’
‘All the luck in the world, darling.’ Susan frowned as Edie took out her handkerchief to cover her mouth while she let out a hollow cough. ‘But do take care, won’t you? Don’t push yourself to do more than you’re capable of.’
‘It’s just the dust. All these damn raids.’ The bell over the café door jingled and Edie waved to the young soldier who entered. ‘Aha, here he is. The man who’s going to have this thing all sewn up by Easter.’
The two women got to their feet. Susan saluted as Edie mimed playing ‘Hail the Conquering Hero’ on an invisible trombone.
Alfie laughed as he tossed his cap on to the table. ‘At ease, ladies.’
He greeted them both with a kiss and took a seat.
‘Well, Alfie, what will you have for your goodbye supper?’ Susan asked. ‘Anything you want, our treat. At least, anything as long as it’s fish and chips because that’s all they’ve got.’
‘Fish and chips it is then,’ he said, smiling. ‘You know, Sue, you never offered to buy your big brother fish and chips before he was going to war. What would you call this, the condemned man’s last meal?’
Edie shuddered. ‘Alf, I wish you wouldn’t joke about that. It’s bad luck.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about me, sweetheart. It’ll take more than that Charlie Chaplin impersonator in Berlin to beat this soldier.’
‘Three cod and chips, please,’ Susan said to the waitress who approached their table.
The woman shook her head. ‘No cod here, darlin’, nor nowhere else in London at the moment, neither. We got snoek fishcakes, rock salmon or the door.’
Edie pulled a face. ‘Snoek and chips. Doesn’t sound right, does it?’
Alfie shrugged. ‘Well, there’s war for you. No one ever said it was going to be tasty.’ He shot the waitress a smile. ‘That’s fine, love. Three lots of fishcakes and chips.’
‘On leave?’ the waitress asked him as she scribbled their order in her notepad.
‘Yes, embarkation leave. I’m being posted overseas.’
‘Where to?’
‘Oughtn’t to say really, ought I? Careless talk and all that.’ He smiled at the woman’s raised eyebrows. ‘Let’s just say it’s somewhere hot.’
She looked interested. ‘My old man was in the Suez.’
‘Oh, really? Is he still there?’
‘No, my Stan ain’t nowhere much these days.’ She bowed h
er head. ‘I mean, nowhere on this earth.’
Alfie looked up at the woman with sympathy in his green eyes – and, Edie thought, a hint of fear too.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly.
‘Never mind about that. Just you watch out for yourself, that’s all, sonny.’ She called over her shoulder to a woman who could be seen frying fish through the kitchen hatch, a cigarette balanced expertly on the edge of her lips while she hummed along with Reggie Dixon on the wireless. ‘Ethel! Three snoek and chips. No charge for this young gent’s.’ With a brief nod to Alfie, she bustled off in a businesslike ruffle of starch.
Edie shook her head at Susan. ‘Oh, to be a boy in uniform. Flash a woman a smile and you’re up to your ears in free chips.’
Alfie took Edie’s hand and pressed it to his lips. ‘You know you only have to say the word, Edie Cartwright, and my endearing young charms can be yours alone.’
‘Now, don’t start all that nonsense. I’m not sure I can bring myself to turn you down in khaki.’
‘Did you ever consider that perhaps that was my plan all along?’ he said, grinning.
His playful teasing was interrupted by the too-familiar wail of the air-raid sirens piercing through the other sounds of the bustling city street outside.
Alfie groaned. ‘The blighter never lets up, does he?’
‘For goodness’ sake, not again,’ Susan muttered. ‘I’m starved.’
‘If my chips go cold then Hitler’s really going to be for it.’ Alfie got to his feet. ‘Come along, girls. Piccadilly’s nearest. We’ll shelter there until Jerry goes back to bed.’
‘Wait there a second,’ Ethel called through the kitchen hatch. ‘Let me wrap these up and you can take them down with you. Gawd knows but it might be morning by the time we get the all-clear.’
When they each had a newspaper-wrapped packet of fishcake and chips tucked into their pockets, Alfie offered an arm to each of the women and they made their way through the plumes of blushing smoke to the nearest Underground station. After months of constant bombing raids, walking calmly through hell had become second nature to Edie and her fellow Londoners.
The ash that hung in the air got into Edie’s lungs, making her cough. An incendiary bomb must have dropped somewhere nearby. White-hot flames licked the air in the distance, and the bark of efficient voices echoed along the street as a couple of ARP wardens with sandbags in their arms organised a chain to extinguish the fire. The skies vibrated with the moan of the sirens and the ack-ack of the anti-aircraft guns; and, above it all, the terrifying hum of the German planes.
Edie slipped her hand into her pocket, finding the soft, warm mass of her chips – slightly damp where the vinegar had soaked into the paper – oddly comforting. Fish and chips were such an ordinary, everyday thing; almost a promise that the world would, one day, be calm and peaceful once again.
‘Don’t fret too much about me when I’m gone, will you, Edie?’ Alfie whispered as they joined a queue of people heading in the same direction.
‘I can’t help it, Alf.’
‘Oh, I’ll be all right. But, sweetheart … remember me in your prayers, eh?’
‘I’m sorry, Edie,’ Dr Grant said when he’d finished examining her in his rooms the following afternoon. ‘I’m unable to tell you anything different from what I said before: it just isn’t possible.’
‘I can’t accept that. I won’t.’
‘My dear, you don’t have any choice,’ he said firmly. ‘If you go before the WRNS assessment panel they’ll give you exactly the same answer, I’m afraid. In your state of health, it isn’t safe for you to be in active service.’
‘Dr Grant, please! I can do this. I’m as fit and healthy as you are.’
The old man gave a hoarse laugh. ‘Oh, you’re not in such poor shape as that, I hope.’
‘I’m really so much better; better than I ever have been,’ Edie said, a note of desperation creeping into her voice. ‘I hardly cough at all any more, honestly I don’t.’
Dr Grant sighed and took a seat opposite her.
‘Edie, please don’t lie to me. I may be an old man but I’m not quite a dotard yet.’
‘Well, there is still a little coughing, perhaps,’ she admitted. ‘But that’s only from all this dust and smoke. Outside of London, I’d be perfectly all right.’
‘Now, that’s the most sensible thing I’ve heard you say.’ He leaned forward to take her hands. ‘You get out of London, my girl. Join your aunt in the country. That’s the best thing you could do for those poor scarred lungs of yours, and I must confess, I’d feel better for knowing you were out of Herr Hitler’s reach.’
The unmarried aunt who had brought Edie up after her father’s death, Aunt Caroline, had taken herself off to family in the Cotswolds in the early days of the war, but Edie had resisted the invitation to join her, opting to stay behind in the small terraced house the two of them shared. She hadn’t wanted to leave her friends, or her job teaching the infant class at Brick Street School, and anyhow, the war had seemed so very far away, then. In those first few months, it hadn’t really felt like there was a war on at all. Life had gone on much as it had before for those on the Home Front – with a few new hardships, true, but as autumn became winter and then melted into spring, the days had passed in exactly the same quiet, safe, familiar way they always had.
But that was before the Luftwaffe started paying their nightly visits to the capital, and the life Edie knew had ended for good. Before the nights spent underground in cold, damp shelters; before rubble and fires and bombed-out skeletons that hours earlier had been comfortable family homes. Before the high-explosive bombs that brought destruction and chaos wherever they landed, and the constant, mournful wail of the sirens. Before friends and neighbours who’d lost their health, their homes and in some cases their lives to the nightly horror of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg.
Now Edie’s few friends had all been stolen away by this evil thing: the boys called up into the armed forces, the girls doing various forms of war work around the country. Brick Street School was closed, its premises requisitioned by the ARP, and Edie’s former pupils evacuated to the safety of the countryside. Only she remained: desperate to do her bit for the war effort but thwarted at every turn by lungs weakened through the consumption that had blighted her early childhood.
‘I just want to help win this blasted thing, the same as everyone else,’ she told Dr Grant. ‘All my friends are doing something important. There are men out there getting shot at, people being blown to pieces, and I’m sitting at home knitting comforts for the troops like some elderly spinster. Please, you were my father’s dearest friend. You served in the trenches together. There must be something you can do.’
‘I am sorry, Edie,’ Dr Grant said in a gentle voice. ‘I understand, of course, but I really can’t in good conscience recommend you for service – either as your doctor or as an old family friend. You may feel healthy, and I hope and believe you have a long, happy life ahead of you, but your lungs will never be as strong as those of other people. That, I’m afraid, is just an inconvenient medical fact.’
‘Don’t tell me what I can’t do, tell me what I can do! There must be something you think it’s safe for me to volunteer for. If I can’t join the auxiliary services then there’s the ARP, or the Women’s Voluntary Service …’
‘Fresh air and open spaces are what you need – somewhere out of London, as I keep telling you.’
The cough Edie had been desperately trying to suppress throughout her examination now forced itself out and she hid her face in her handkerchief, feeling the sting of tears brought on by a combination of pain and mortification. Dr Grant waited patiently until the fit had subsided.
‘There must be something I can do,’ she repeated weakly.
‘Well …’ The doctor looked thoughtful. ‘If you absolutely refuse to evacuate for your own sake, then you might consider the Women’s Land Army.’
Edie blinked. ‘Farm work? You think I could do
that?’
‘Certainly. Eyes, ears and heart are all sound, and the country air would do all manner of good for those poor lungs of yours. Life in the countryside could be just the ticket, away from the soot and ash. And besides, you’d be safe there.’
‘I don’t care about being safe,’ Edie said, sticking out her chin. ‘Why should I be safe, when everyone else is fighting?’
‘Perhaps because you’ve lost so much already,’ Dr Grant said quietly. ‘As your family doctor, I can declare you physically fit for the Land Army without the need for a panel assessment. And they do good work – vital work. Think about it, Edie.’
Chapter 2
March 1941
It was early afternoon on an unseasonably balmy Saturday in mid-March and Edie was waiting for the most important train of her life: the train that would take her away from London towards a new existence.
A smell of roasted chestnuts drifted to her from somewhere nearby, the scent blending in her nostrils with fresh-blooming lilacs, cigarette smoke, hot bodies. It was the sort of incongruous but oddly delicious mix you could only find in the big city. She’d miss that, when she was gone.
All was serene. It was hard to believe that tonight the air would be thick with smoke and sirens as the German planes returned for yet another assault on the capital, bathing the London skyline in fire. After six months of continuous bombing raids, the Luftwaffe were showing no signs of getting bored. But for now the city was quiet, only the barrage balloons dotting the sky serving to remind Edie that this coming spring would not be like any that had gone before.
A dog – a stray, judging by his protruding ribs and mangy fur – had approached to sniff at one of her suitcases. Edie bent down to give the poor fellow a stroke.
‘Hungry?’ she whispered. The dog looked up at her with sad brown eyes and Edie rummaged among her possessions for some food.
‘Here you are,’ she said, slipping the dog an arrowroot biscuit from the meal she’d packed. ‘Make it last, now. There’s not a lot of it around at the moment.’
The train pulled in, spewing out steam like a huge, angry teakettle, and Edie watched the dog slink off with his bounty.
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