THE GREAT WAR SAGAS: Box set of 2 passionate and inspiring stories: A Crimson Dawn and No Greater Love

by Janet MacLeod Trotter

  ‘When are you going to tell me the story?’ Christabel’s eyes shone with impatience.

  ‘When we get to Hibbs’ Farm.’

  ‘Tell me now Mam.’

  ‘We’re nearly there.’

  Christabel liked nothing better than one of Maggie’s tales about real life. This way Maggie had told her about the brave suffragettes and Emily Davison, and going to prison but winning in the end. Just as Granny Beaton had not shied from telling the hard truth of the world to a young Maggie, she would teach her daughter about life through stories.

  Maggie’s heart pounded as they made their way uphill. Today Christabel would hear the story of her real father.

  ‘Once upon a time,’ Christabel prompted impatiently.

  Maggie squeezed her hand. As they climbed above the smoke of the town she began. ‘Once upon a time there was a man with dark hair and kind eyes called George Gordon.’ She spoke of a strong man who could row boats faster than Londoners; a brave, passionate man who loved poems and music and fought to make things fairer for ordinary working people.

  ‘Was he your friend Mam?’

  Maggie’s throat watered. ‘Yes, he was a special friend.’

  ‘Did he help you escape from prison Mam? Like Uncle John?’

  ‘Aye, he did. And we came to live at Hibbs’ Farm.’

  She paused to catch her breath and pointed up to the cottage in the distance.

  ‘Just you and George?’

  Maggie nodded. ‘Just me and George.’

  ‘Not Millie?’

  ‘No, but Granny Beaton came to live with us – and Uncle Jimmy for a while – before he went off to war.’

  ‘Did George go away too?’

  Maggie nodded, tears welling in her eyes as she remembered. ‘But before he went, he gave Mam something very special; a baby.’

  Christabel frowned. ‘A baby? But you don’t have a baby.’

  ‘My baby was taken away from me and given to other parents,’ Maggie said gently, squatting down and facing her. ‘But she grew into a bonny little lass and thanks to Aunt Alice I got my bairn back.’

  Christabel gazed at her with intent grey eyes. For a long time she said nothing, then, ‘Is it me?’

  ‘Aye,’ Maggie said, reaching out to brush wayward curls from her daughter’s face. ‘You’re my bairn and I’m your Mam. And George Gordon was your Dad.’

  ‘Can I see him?’

  Maggie shook her head. ‘He sailed away on a big boat to a faraway land called Canada. If he’d known that you would come back to me, I think he would have stayed.’

  The girl reached out and put her arms around Maggie’s neck. Maggie hugged her, smothering a sob.

  ‘Can we go to Canada one day?’

  ‘Maybes.’ Maggie stood up, keeping an arm about her daughter. ‘Haway, let’s go and have a peek at the house, eh?’

  As they gained the brow, Maggie saw smoke billowing from the chimney. It didn’t look as unkempt as the previous year. Someone had fixed the fencing and the boarded up window had been replaced. Maggie’s heart sank; Jimmy had been wrong. It looked as if it had already been sold or leased out.

  ‘There’s someone in the garden,’ Christabel said, shaking off her hold.

  ‘Wait–’

  The girl ran ahead. Maggie panted after her. Christabel stopped at the fence. Maggie squinted into the glare of the pearly sky, trying to make out the man in the garden. He left his spade and walked towards her daughter. She was asking him something. He pushed back his cap as he answered. Maggie’s heart began to thump. He walked out of the gate and up to the girl, hunkering down to speak to her.

  Maggie stared, her breath trapped in her chest. Then the man stood again and turned towards her. She forced herself to keep moving, not trusting her own eyes.

  As she reached them, she knew. Christabel slipped to her side, suddenly shy.

  ‘Geordie?’ she trembled. ‘How is it possible?’

  He gazed at her, struggling to find his words.

  ‘I got as far as Tilbury Docks. I couldn’t stay away Maggie – couldn’t live me life half a world away from you –’ His voice cracked. ‘Or the bairn.’

  She looked into his dark eyes, his look both fierce and tender. A sob rose in her throat.

  ‘I thought I’d never see you again. And here of all places. Jimmy said –’

  ‘Jimmy’s the only one who knows I’m here working for Hibbs’. He brings me news.’

  Maggie cried, ‘Where you ever going to let me know?’

  ‘I knew you were in mourning. I was prepared to wait but your brother wanted to push things along.’ George smiled at last. Her heart soared.

  ‘Jimmy always looked up to you,’ Maggie said, her vision blurring with tears. ‘Hold me, so I know I’m not dreamin’.’

  George pulled her into his arms and gripped her tight. ‘I love you lass!’

  ‘Oh Geordie, we must never be parted again – me heart won’t stand it.’

  ‘Never,’ he promised.

  Maggie felt Christabel pulling on her skirt. The girl was staring up at them. She put an arm around her daughter.

  ‘Christabel; this is George, the man in the story. This is your dad.’

  ‘You’ve told her about me?’ George asked in amazement, quite overcome.

  Maggie nodded.

  Christabel stared at him with large curious eyes. ‘Will you live with us too?’ she asked.

  ‘Aye, lass.’ He ruffled her hair. ‘Do you want to look inside?’

  The girl nodded.

  He held out his hand to her. She hesitated; looked up at her mother. Maggie nodded in encouragement. Christabel put her hand into George’s. Maggie’s heart was so full she couldn’t speak, and she saw the same emotion reflected in George’s loving expression.

  Either side of their daughter, they walked towards their home, together.

  ~**~

  If you have enjoyed THE GREAT WAR SAGAS, you might like to read one of THE TYNESIDE SAGAS – A HANDFUL OF STARS: an enthralling story of poverty, passion and survival

  It’s 1931 and the Depression has brought Tyneside to its knees. Young, pretty Clara Magee is devastated when her father commits suicide leaving secrets behind him and the family is forced to sell their fancy-goods shop to a German couple. Despite her mother Patience’s disapproval, Clara befriends their daughter Rennie and hot-headed son Benny, but her heart lies with their dashing elder brother Frank. Patience thinks businessman Vinnie Craven, who runs the local boxing hall, a far better catch for Clara. When Frank leaves abruptly for Germany, Vinnie single-mindedly pursues the vivacious Clara, determined to make her his wife. Tempted by the glamorous life-style Vinnie is offering and security for her family, Clara buries her feelings for Frank. But she hadn’t bargained for Vinnie’s ruthless nature or growing fascination for Mosley’s Fascist Party. Yet the greatest shock is still to come ...

  Set against the momentous backdrop of rising fascism in the 1930s, A Handful of Stars is an enthralling story of poverty, passion and survival with a captivating young heroine.

  Extract from the beginning of A HANDFUL OF STARS

  Chapter 1

  1928

  Clara woke abruptly. There was a muffled explosion and a cry. She was halfway out of bed, one foot on the wool rug, when she realised what it was. It came again, this time with a loud shout of satisfaction. She sank back, amusement overtaking her fear. Her father was sneezing in the shop downstairs. Harry Magee would be up, shaved, dressed and having his first snort of Prince Royal snuff with his early morning pot of tea.

  ‘Helps the sun come up over the yardarm,’ he always declared, still stuck in the idiom of his Navy days. She waited for the third sneeze, stretching and yawning in the dawn light that spilled round the edges of the brown velvet curtains in her narrow bedroom.

  Brown and beige: her mother’s favourite colours. The doors, floors and window sills of their flat were painted chocolate brown, while the wallpapers were various shades of cream. The parlo
ur furniture was upholstered in tan brocade or faux leather and the kitchen linoleum was the colour of toffee. The tea set was ivory, the teapot mahogany, the table linen off-white fringed with cream lace. Patience Magee adored the new Bakelite switches and fittings, installed when the street had been electrified.

  ‘The colour of Fry’s chocolate,’ she sighed. ‘Don’t you just want to eat it?’

  Clara and her younger brother, Jimmy, liked to tease her. They danced around the kitchen when they should have been washing up the dishes.

  ‘Look at the colour of Dad’s snuff,’ Clara would swoon.

  ‘Don’t you just want to eat it!’ Jimmy would shout and double over laughing.

  ‘You’ve got no sense of fashion.’ Patience would waft a hand at them with a jangle of bracelets, trying not to smile. ‘And no taste.’

  Patience frequently told her children how she had acquired ‘taste’ while working as a cashier in a children’s clothing department in Newcastle by observing the style of the well-to-do women who shopped there.

  ‘When I worked at Lawson’s …’ or ‘Before your father swept me off my stockinged feet. . .’ were household phrases that preceded words of wisdom about fashion or commerce. Clara and Jimmy only half listened to their mother’s dreamy words but their father would pull at his greying moustache and nod with vigour.

  ‘Never a truer word, bonny lass. You’ve the brains and the beauty,’ he would declare, catching her round the waist and squeezing her to him.

  Clara’s mother thought no one matched up to her strict aesthetics, least of all their customers and neighbours in Byfell-on-Tyne. That was why their millinery and fancy goods shop was stuffed with the gaudiest of trinkets: green and gold sugar bowls, rose-covered china pots for the dressing table, figurines dressed in blue and purple, ribbons of red and yellow, turquoise hatpins and orange frosted-glass tumblers and jugs.

  Clara had learned from her mother how to flatter their clients, ask about their families, discuss changes in fashions and encourage them to buy the bright treasures of Magee’s to adorn the mantelpieces and dressers of their modest terraced houses.

  From below, the third sneeze came, gentler, followed by a long sigh. Clara padded over to the dressing table and poured chilly water into the china washbowl. Although they had a proper bathroom of which her parents were immensely proud (Prudence had had to compromise on black tiles), Clara liked to throw back the curtains, splash her face and hands in cold water and gaze at the sun coming up over the rooftops and cranes of the shipyards, the River Tyne briefly polished with golden light.

  But the day was grey and drizzly with hardly enough light to dress by, despite its being August. Clara felt a pang of disappointment. The day after tomorrow was the bank holiday and for once her parents were going to shut the shop, for they were invited to the wedding of a local boxer. Clara had hoped to go to Whitley Bay with her best friend Reenie Lewis, and even though they had been landed with taking Jimmy along they planned a great day out at the beach.

  Clara glanced at herself in the mirror. She looked older than her fourteen years, even when her slanted dark blue eyes were puffy with sleep, her long hair tangled. She pulled her fingers through it. ‘Like dark honey,’ Patience often murmured when she brushed her daughter’s hair at night. Her mother loved to brush Clara’s hair and still insisted on doing a hundred strokes before bedtime, even though her daughter had left school.

  ‘My mouth’s too big,’ Clara complained to her reflection, wishing she had a neat button mouth like Reenie’s. Reenie also had a new permanent wave in her soft blonde hair, which made her look like a young starlet. But then Reenie was a year older and her family ran a barber’s-cum-hairdresser’s in the next street and her mother, Marta, had done it.

  Once a week, Patience deigned to have her hair washed and dried by Marta Lewis, and every two months she had it bleached. Yet, despite this intimate relationship, Clara’s mother could not hide her dislike of the other woman.

  ‘You would think after all these years here,’ she often complained, ‘Mrs Leizmann would’ve lost her Kraut accent. She doesn’t even seem to try.’

  Patience still insisted on referring to the Lewises as the Leizmanns, even though Oscar and Marta had changed their name after the Great War when anti-German sentiment was still riding high.

  ‘Call them Lewis, my bonny,’ Clara’s father would chide good-naturedly. ‘We must be neighbourly.’

  ‘Well I knew them before the war and names stick,’ Patience would sniff. ‘Strange lot, if you ask me. Communist posters in the windows and gingham checks.’ She shuddered. ‘Too much red!’

  When Clara jumped to the defence of her best friend, Patience reluctantly conceded, ‘Maybe Reenie’s not so bad. But then she’s been mixing with the likes of us — good manners rub off. Not like those wild lads.’

  Wild lads. Clara caught herself smiling. Reenie’s noisy brother Benny was three years older but with half the sense of his sister. He had his mother’s dark looks, was too impatient to be a good barber and idolised their eldest brother, Frank.

  Frank; a man at twenty-one with a flop of fair hair that fell across his forehead when he played his violin. Clara always wanted to reach up and push aside the wayward strands so she could see the intensity of his blue eyes. When he was making music raw passion showed in his handsome face and Clara had a terrible crush on him. On Monday, Frank would be playing at the Cafe Cairo on the promenade and maybe she and Reenie would get to dance. In the mirror, Clara saw her fair skin darken in a blush. She ducked quickly and plunged her face in cold water as if she could numb her thoughts of Frank Lewis. Besides in his eyes, she was just his little sister Reenie’s chatterbox friend.

  Clara forced herself to think of the day ahead. She would be needed to open up the shop and keep an eye on Jimmy while her parents went to the warehouse to buy stock. Usually, they did this on a Monday, but with the bank holiday the warehouse would be shut. Climbing the steep back stairs to the long attic room, she went to wake her brother. He shared it with a neglected stack of boxes and crates full of ornaments and caps that Harry had once rashly acquired without consultation with his wife. They were cheap, he had enthused. They were for tinkers, she had laughed, pecking him on the cheek and consigning them to the loft. Jimmy was curled up like a hibernating mouse, taking up only a fraction of his bed. At twelve, her brother was still small and skinny and looked much younger. She teased him when he insisted he was going to be a boxer like their dad had been in the Navy. Jimmy liked nothing better than being taken down to Craven’s boxing hall, a converted warehouse by the river, to watch the men training.

  Clara called him awake, but when he did not stir she rummaged around in an open box, pulled out a huge grey flat cap and pulled it down over her eyes.

  ‘Roll up, roll up,’ she bellowed, ‘come and see the champion feather-featherweight of the world - Mr James Magee! Matched with Charlie Chaplin.’ She dived into another box and pulled out a bowler hat, quickly replacing the cap. She waddled across the room impersonating the silent movie star, pulled back the bed covers and started to tickle.

  ‘Gerroff!’ squealed Jimmy.

  ‘And Chaplin lands the first tickle with a long left,’ Clara laughed. ‘Magee’s putting up no resistance …’

  Jimmy rolled out of reach and swung a foot at his sister.

  Clara caught it and tickled the sole. He giggled and shouted, ’Stop it!’

  ‘Magee desperately tries to kick out, but is disqualified. Chaplin wins again,’ Clara declared, letting go the foot and holding up her arm in victory. Jimmy reared up and punched wildly, knocking the bowler hat off her head.

  ‘No he doesn’t,’ he cried, aiming another fist at her stomach.

  ‘Ouch!’ Clara stepped back, clutching her midriff. ‘That hurt.’

  Jimmy gave her a guilty look from under dark eyebrows, a miniature version of their father’s. ‘Divn’t start what you cannot finish,’ he muttered.

  Abruptly, Clara laughed.
‘Is that what Vincent Craven tells you? Sounds like something he’d say.’

  Jimmy could not help a smirk. ‘Maybe.’

  Clara sat down and gave him an affectionate hug. ‘You’ll be a boxer yet. Make Mr Craven lots of money, I bet.’

  Jimmy’s look was eager. ‘He doesn’t do it for the money, he does it for the fight, for the glory. Says there’s nowt better than seeing two men in their prime matched one against the other, giving it all they’ve got, till the best man wins.’

  Clara felt a small twist of unease. ‘Can’t see the attraction myself. I’d rather see you being a promoter or a matchmaker like Craven than scrapping in the ring.’

  Jimmy shrugged her off impatiently. ‘You can’t be one of them till you’ve proved yoursel’ a canny boxer first. And I’m ganin’ to be the best. Cannot wait to leave school.’

  ‘Don’t let Mam hear you,’ Clara snorted.

  ‘She’s let you leave at fourteen,’ Jimmy pointed out.

  ‘Aye, but they’ve always wanted me to help in the shop. Mam has grander ideas for you than being Mr Craven’s punchbag.’

  Jimmy pushed her away. ‘Nick off, I want to get dressed.’

  Clara descended the stairs to see her mother coming out of the bathroom draped in a silk kimono, her hair in pins. Patience yawned a good morning and disappeared into the spacious bedroom she shared with Harry, with its corner bay window overlooking both Tenter Terrace and the High Street.

  Down further, Clara found her father in the shop polishing the counters and singing ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’, out of tune.

  ‘What do you want for yer breakfast, my bonny?’ he beamed, stopping in mid-song. ‘Porridge or scrambled eggs?’

  ‘Both.’ Clara grinned and gave him a kiss on the cheek, knowing this was the right answer. Her father was an early riser and always cooked breakfast, taking a tray of tea and toast up to Patience in bed. On Saturdays and Sundays he always cooked eggs or bacon as well as the daily porridge, washed down with tea so strong it made the tongue tingle.