A Brighter Tomorrow Read online

  A Brighter Tomorrow

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Publisher’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Cornish Clay Sagas

  Copyright

  This book contains views and language on nationality, sexual politics, ethnicity, and society which are a product of the time in which the book is set. The publisher does not endorse or support these views. They have been retained in order to preserve the integrity of the text.

  Chapter One

  Celia Pengelly shivered as she stood on the chilly Cornish railway station, awaiting the arrival of the train from London. According to her sister, still determined to go on living in the capital despite the threat of being bombed at any time, the river Thames had frozen over for the first time in more than fifty years, and it was cold enough to freeze the proverbial brass monkeys.

  Celia smiled faintly, recognising the kind of slangy terms Wenna had picked up. She was practically a Londoner by now, and far more worldly-wise than the family had ever expected her to be. But Celia conceded that it went with the job. Singing in a nightclub all these years, and being the star attraction, no less, was bound to have an effect on her.

  It was only when she came home to Cornwall that she resumed her proper place in the family – her younger sister’s place, Celia thought with a grin.

  ‘Here it comes, Miss Pengelly,’ she heard the voice of the billeting officer saying. ‘Get ready for the onslaught.’

  Celia hitched the carrying strap of her gas mask more firmly onto her shoulder. She had faced this day with mixed feelings. Her mother was insisting that it would be marvellous to have children in the house again, and that the empty rooms of New World cried out for them. But these children would be strangers, coming from a different environment, and they would be frightened and bewildered.

  ‘Not nervous, are you, Pengelly?’ the more strident of the billeting officers asked her. ‘They’re only children, and you must be sure to discipline them as instructed.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Celia muttered, resisting the wild desire to snap her heels together and give a Heil Hitler salute. It would be the most disastrous thing imaginable in the circumstances, when they were all here to welcome the latest wave of these little evacuees from London and take them into their Cornish hearts.

  Though, to be honest, the names of the four they had been allocated didn’t fill her with enthusiasm. She glanced again at her list, even though she knew them by heart. Tommy and Mary Lunn, aged eight and four; Daphne Hollis, aged seven; and Butch Butcher, aged eleven.

  It was this last name that had Celia wary of the whole thing. He sounded a real thug – even though she was well aware that it was wrong to judge him and expect the worst before he had even arrived.

  But the train was snorting and steaming into the station now, and there was no more time to speculate. Nor had there been any chance of refusing the children. They had been allocated with the names and that was that. In wartime everybody had to do their bit and the Pengellys were no exception. They had plenty of room to take four, and four was what they would get.

  ‘I’m not complaining,’ her mother had said cheerfully. ‘It will be just darling to hear the sound of children’s laughter in the house again.’

  ‘I doubt that laughter’s the first thing you’re going to hear,’ the billeting officer had warned her, her eyebrows raised as usual at Skye Pengelly’s quaint American way of speaking. ‘There may well be problems at first, but we all have to cope with them as best we can. The children will be far from home, and the younger ones will be tearful, while others will be resentful at what they see as their parents’ betrayal in sending them away.’

  And that was what Celia fully expected from the eleven-year-old Butch Butcher…

  As the train squealed to a halt and the carriage doors flew open, it seemed as though a great mass of chattering humanity was descending on to the small Cornish platform at once. The billeting officers and local teachers took charge, trying to form the children into some kind of order, shouting out names from their lists and inspecting the labels hung around the necks of those who were too frightened to respond at all.

  Celia’s heart went out to them. Poor little devils, she thought. They were clearly petrified by these bossy people with the strange accents ordering them about, even though it was the only way to organise the huge undertaking.

  Moments later, she found herself looking into the faces of a brother and sister, the tiny girl clutching the boy’s hand as if terrified of losing him. They each carried a brown paper parcel tied with string, which presumably contained their entire wardrobe, as well as the gas masks slung around their shoulders. These two, then, were Tommy and Mary Lunn.

  Celia knelt down to their level, and looked into Mary’s scared brown eyes.

  ‘Hello, sweetie,’ she said, smiling encouragingly. ‘My name’s Celia and you’re going to come and live with me and my family for a while.’

  To Celia’s horror, the girl immediately began wailing, and Tommy put his arms around her protectively.

  ‘She don’t want to come and live wiv you, missis. She wants to go home. She don’t like the country. They say there’s cows and fings and we don’t like ’em.’

  ‘We don’t have cows and fings – things,’ Celia repeated, parrot fashion. ‘We have a nice big house near the sea—’

  ‘We don’t like the sea. We ain’t never seen it and we don’t want to,’ Tommy Lunn said at once.

  Celia recognised his determination not to like anything at all. She had expected trouble from Butch Butcher, not from these two. She had thought a small brother and sister would be tolerably happy to stay together, but she realised she had been wrong to anticipate anything.

  As Mary continued snivelling, a dark patch crept down her spindly legs in their dark wool stockings. Celia turned with relief when the billeting officer called her.

  ‘Here are your other two, Miss Pengelly. Someone will be calling on you in a week’s time to check that all is well.’

  And with that, the woman moved away, leaving Celia to face an engaging little girl with the name Daphne Hollis pinned to her chest, and an overweight boy with ginger hair and freckles, whom she knew instantly had to be Butch Butcher.

  She found herself full of anger at the inefficiency of the billeting people. Didn’t they ever have the gumption to match the children? What the dickens did these four have in common, except having been brought to safety away from the dangers that London held for them now?

  ‘She’s wet herself,’ Tommy said, pointing at Mary’s legs.

  ‘Me sister used to do that all the time,’ Daphne piped up. ‘I’ll see to ’er if you like, missis.’

  ‘Will you?’ Celia said faintly, before mentally shaking herself, and steering the four of them out of the heaving station towards her waiting car. So far Butch had said nothing, but to her surprise Daphne caught hold of Mary’s other hand and began pulling the small girl towards her, while Tommy tugged her the other way.

  ‘I want to go wiv her,’ Mary suddenly screamed, kicking out viciously at Tommy’s shins. Her little boots were old and scuffed, but the kick was hard enough to make her brother howl with rage and
give her a slap around the head, which made her scream still more.

  ‘Good Lord, stop this at once, will you?’ Celia said, appalled. ‘That’s no way to behave. We all have to learn to get along together.’

  ‘I hate her,’ Tommy yelled, though minutes before he had been Mary’s champion, ‘and she’s welcome to her.’

  He pushed his sister towards the other girl, and before Celia knew what was happening, Butch had got hold of him by his collar. It was just as she had feared, she thought, her heart sinking. This one was a bully of the first order.

  ‘You behave yourself, half-pint, and do what the lady tells yer, or I’ll give you what for, see?’

  Butch looked at Celia as Tommy subsided with a scowl. ‘Ain’t that right, missis?’

  ‘Yes. Well yes, I guess so. And you can call me Celia,’ she said, when nothing else came to mind.

  This whole situation was getting very strange, she thought, and who was in charge here, anyway? But the minute she directed them all to her car and debated about where Mary was to sit, considering her wet knickers, she heard Tommy’s awed voice.

  ‘Cor, are we going to have a ride in that car?’

  She resumed her composure at once.

  ‘Yes, you are. Butch will sit in front with me, and you other three can sit in the back. There’s an old newspaper in the back for Mary to sit on for the time being, until we get her tidied up.’

  ‘So how old is your sister, Daphne?’ she went on, just to keep them occupied while they all piled into the car.

  ‘Oh, she ain’t nothing no more.’

  ‘What do you mean, nothing? A person can’t be nothing,’ Celia said, abandoning any thought of grammar for the moment.

  ‘They can when they’re dead,’ Daphne said cheerfully.

  Celia’s heart jolted. The country had been at war for nearly five months now, and bombs had been falling, but she had never met anyone who had been personally affected by the German air raids. She felt emotionally drawn to this little girl with the perky face who looked as if she had already seen far too much in her seven years.

  ‘What happened, Daphne?’ she asked quietly, as she began to drive home. She knew it was a bad thing to question her with the other children in the car, but she had to know…

  ‘She ’ad the diphtheria like me brothers. They was all sick and they all died one after the other, and me Ma said I was a bleedin’ miracle, ’cos I never got it,’ she said, as proud as if she had won a trophy.

  ‘Oh!’ Celia said, too stunned by the enormity of such a tragedy to censure her for her language. In fact, apart from the way the child was revealing it so matter-of-factly, she couldn’t help hearing the ghost of another voice from long ago, using the same words, in the same East End accent.

  The very first time she and her sister Wenna had met her mother’s acquaintance from the war that was supposed to end all wars, Fanny Webb had both shocked and charmed the Cornish children by her frequent use of the words “bleedin’ ’ell”.

  ‘Blimey, is that the sea?’ Butch said suddenly.

  All the children craned their necks as Celia said that indeed it was.

  ‘Don’t it end nowhere?’ Tommy said nervously.

  ‘It goes from here all the way to America, where my mother was born,’ Celia told him, glad to give them something else to think about other than the deaths of Daphne’s sister and brothers from diphtheria. ‘In fact, I lived in America myself for about a year until last spring.’

  Daphne spoke up again. ‘Me Ma says all Yanks are film stars. Did you meet any of ’em, missis?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Celia said with a laugh. ‘Film stars all live in a place called Hollywood, but I worked for a family in New Jersey, picking apples—’

  ‘You don’t pick apples,’ Tommy said scornfully. ‘You buy ’em down the market.’

  Celia gave up. Clearly, they all had a lot to learn about one another, and life was never going to be the same again.

  They had known that long before Mr Chamberlain’s solemn announcement on the third of September last year, in the many months preceding the event, when everyone had been preparing not only for war, but for the heartaches and separations of friends and lovers.

  She let the children chatter on for a moment or two, remembering Stefan, as she did every night when she gazed up the brightest star in the sky. It was their star, he had told her during their last idyllic time together, before she had to return to Cornwall and he to Germany. And as long as that star shone, his love for her would remain just as constant and everlasting, however long their two countries were at war.

  It was a lovely and noble sentiment, but it did nothing to ease the anxiety she felt when there had been no further news of him since then. Correspondence had dwindled to nothing, and the needs of lovers were very far down the pecking order of what was important now and what was not.

  ‘What are those things?’ she heard Daphne ask now. ‘Are they mountains? I ain’t never seen snow like that before.’

  Celia dragged her thoughts back to the present and followed the child’s gaze away from the coast to where the soaring spoil heaps of china clay glinted on the skyline on the moors high above St Austell on that cold January day.

  ‘I don’t like them,’ Mary whimpered, starting to cry.

  It was clear that Mary and Tommy were not prepared to like anything at all, and she spoke in a cheerful voice.

  ‘It’s not snow, Daphne. It’s the waste material from something called china clay, which is a substance that helps to make plates and cups and saucers as well as other things like newspaper print, and even medicines.’

  From their faces, she realised that this was too complicated for them to take in, and she changed tactics.

  ‘They’re not real mountains, of course, and my mother always called them the sky-tips, because it seemed as if they would reach the sky. It made my mother very happy to call them that. Can you guess why?’

  When they didn’t answer, she went on talking, starting to feel very foolish. She wasn’t a teacher, and she didn’t quite know how to handle this motley crowd of children. If they were all the same age, it might have been easier. As it was, she knew she was talking down to most of them, except for the infant Mary.

  Tommy was older than his years, and Daphne already knew it all, Celia suspected. But she went on doggedly.

  ‘My mother’s name is Skye, and she liked to think the china clay heaps were called sky-tips just for her.’

  She heard Tommy hoot with derisive laughter.

  ‘Skye ain’t a proper name! I ain’t never heard of nothing so daft, and I ain’t going to call nobody Skye!’

  ‘I should think not,’ Celia said evenly. ‘You’ll call her Mrs Pengelly.’

  Mary started to wail again. ‘I can’t say that. I want to go home. I want me Ma—’

  ‘Well, perhaps you could call her Mrs Pen. How about that? Would that be easier? Why don’t you all think about it?’ she said desperately, and was never more thankful to see New World come into sight as the four of them debated and squabbled over whether or not this was an easy thing to do.

  She only prayed that her mother would take to the four of them. Celia was becoming increasingly sure now that she could not.

  Mary was only a baby, and maybe Daphne could be handled in time, but as for the boys… Tommy was obviously what they called a loose cannon, and she simply couldn’t make up her mind about Butch at all. Either he was a thug waiting to burst out, or he was a big softie, hiding behind a nickname he’d simply been given because of his surname. She just didn’t know, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to find out.

  She had committed herself to staying on at New World to help her mother with these evacuees for a time, but she was itching to do some war work, the same as her cousin Seb who had joined the army the minute he was called up, and her cousin Justin, giving up his medical training temporarily to go straight into an army medical unit for what he called practical experience.

  She envi
ed them both. And even Wenna, under her stage name of Penny Wood, was saying that she fully intended joining a concert party to entertain the troops if Fanny Rosenbloom, née Webb, decided to close the nightclub for the duration.

  Personally, Celia didn’t think Fanny would ever close the Flamingo Club, but in any case Wenna wouldn’t be prepared to stay there for ever. Her young man had immediately joined up as a war correspondent, and was already at some unknown destination. Wenna declared she would feel closer to him by doing her bit, as they all called it now.

  Wenna was the lucky one, Celia thought, with a burst of misery. There was no way in this world she could be close to Stefan except in spirit. She and her lover were on opposite sides of a conflict that had nothing to do with them…

  ‘Is that your house, missis?’ Daphne said in awe.

  Celia said that it was, and gave up the idea of persuading them to call her by name for the present. Presumably it would come in time, and meanwhile it was a relief to get them all out of the car, where the smell of Mary’s wet knickers was starting to become vinegary.

  She gave herself a mental reminder to scrub the back seats the minute she got the chance, and immediately felt ashamed of her uncharitable thoughts as she saw the child’s pinched white face.

  ‘Come on, sweetheart, let’s go inside and see your new room, shall we?’

  She saw Daphne scratching herself, and felt an urge to do the same. To her horror she suddenly recalled the instructions they had all been given at the last billeting committee meeting.

  ‘Many of the children come from the slums. They will have scabies or lice, and will need to be de-loused immediately with disinfectant. This must be diluted to prevent sores, of course, but remember that all the children will be regularly inspected on arrival at school, so attention to hygiene is vital if our own children are not to be infected.’

  Such a distinction had seemed mean and degrading at the time, but that feeling changed for Celia now, and with rising hysteria she suspected that the little beasts in her car had already infected her too.

  And she didn’t distinguish in her mind which little beasts she was thinking about.