A Family Affair Read online

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  Contents

  Janet Tanner

  Dedication

  Acknowledgment

  Book One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Book Two

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Book Three

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Janet Tanner

  A Family Affair

  Janet Tanner

  Janet Tanner is a prolific and well-loved author and has twice been shortlisted for RNA awards. Many of her novels are multi-generational sagas, and some – in particular the Hillsbridge Quartet – are based on her own working class background in a Somerset mining community. More recently, she has been writing historical and well-received Gothic novels for Severn House – a reviewer for Booklist, a trade publication in the United States, calls her “a master of the Gothic genre”.

  Besides publication in the UK and US, Janet’s books have also been translated into dozens of languages and published all over the world. Before turning to novels she was a prolific writer of short stories and serials, with hundreds of stories appearing in various magazines and publications worldwide.

  Janet Tanner lives in Radstock, Somerset.

  Dedication

  For the light of my life, my granddaughter, Tabitha Jane.

  Acknowledgment

  A special thank-you to Dr Margaret Randell, who fascinated me with her account of qualifying as a doctor in the days when it was still very much a male-dominated profession. I am very grateful for her help, and if I have made any errors, they are entirely my fault.

  Book One

  1951–1954

  Chapter One

  She was late.

  The van bearing the logo ‘SCC – School Meals Service’ – was already parked on the mud-crusted gravel outside the prefabricated hut that served as kitchen and dining hall for the Hillsbridge Church School. Carrie Simmons half-ran towards it, her worn fur-lined bootees squelching in the puddles because she did not have time to pick her way along the grass verge which separated the path from the wire-netted physical training yard.

  She was late – and Ivy Burden, the meals’supervisor, would at best give her the length of her tongue and at worst threaten her with the loss of her job. Not that Ivy could actually dismiss her – she didn’t have that much power, though to hear the way she talked to her staff you’d never guess it, Carrie thought aggrievedly. But she could have a word with Bill Denning, the headmaster, and he in turn could recommend to the governors that changes should be made. Carrie couldn’t afford to lose her job and even if it didn’t come to that, she could do without the hassle. Heaven only knew, she was getting enough of that at home without getting it from Ivy and Bill Denning as well.

  Hassle at home was the reason Carrie was late now, and her face burned with indignation as well as from running almost the entire half-mile to the school as fury and resentment bubbled up inside her again.

  She and Joe’s mother were always falling out these days and Carrie asked herself for the hundredth time how it was that such a seemingly pleasant woman could be so darned unreasonable. But she knew why, when she wasn’t so cross that she couldn’t think straight. ‘Two women in one kitchen will never hitch it,’ her own mother had said when Carrie had told her that she and the children were leaving their home in Bristol and moving out to Hillsbridge to live with Joe’s mother and father. ‘It won’t work, our Carrie. Mark my words, it’ll end in tears.’ But at the time it had seemed there was no choice. The war had been on, Bristol was being bombed, and Joe was away serving in the Royal Navy.

  There had been other reasons, too, reasons Carrie didn’t care to think about any more. A desperate situation had called for desperate measures, and she, Heather, David and Jenny, who was just a baby then, had packed up their belongings and left war-torn Bristol for the comparative peace of Hillsbridge.

  It was just as well they had. Only a few weeks later their street – their house – had been bombed, so that all that remained of it was one exposed wall, still half-covered with peeling paper that she herself had hung and a window frame at which shreds of torn curtain flapped in the breeze. The next-door neighbours – sharp-tongued Lil Phelen and her husband, Harry, who had never done anyone any harm in his entire life – had been killed, buried in their beds beneath a mountain of bricks and roof timbers. Homeless, Carrie and her children had been left with no choice. Like it or not, they had to remain with Joe’s parents in Hillsbridge.

  Even when the war was over there had been nowhere to go. They couldn’t have afforded to buy a place of their own, and rented accommodation was scarce and expensive. Joe had been torpedoed by a German U-boat while his ship was escorting the conveys in the Mediterranean and after spending forty-eight hours in the water he was fit for nothing but light – and badly paid – work. He was an electrician’s mate now at the Royal Naval Stores at Copenacre in Wiltshire, making the hour-long journey there and back each day by working men’s coach, which stopped to pick him up and drop him outside the house in Westbury Hill. And as the months turned into years, there they stayed. Prisoners, Carrie thought grimly. Squatters without a home of their own.

  Wally Targett, who delivered the school meals from the central kitchen at South Compton, four miles away, was staggering up the concrete path towards the dining hall with a pile of aluminium trays. The aroma of boiled beef and cabbage wafted towards Carrie and she put on a fresh spurt, breath coming so fast that her chest felt tight and the flush burned hotter in her cheeks. She pushed open the door which had slammed shut behind Wally and burst into the kitchen where the other dinner ladies were already helping to unload the containers, unbuttoning her gaberdine raincoat as she went.

  ‘Sorry … sorry …’

  Ivy Burden glanced meaningfully at the bland-faced clock above the row of sinks.

  ‘What happened to you, then?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Carrie repeated.

  She didn’t want to say there’d been trouble again with her mother-in-law, didn’t want to have to talk about the row, though every angry word spoken was going round and round in her head together with all the things she could have said if only she’d thought of them at the time.

  Such a stupid row, Carrie thought, stuffing her arms into the sleeves of her overall and buttoning it around a body that a forties-style corselet turned into a plump tube shape. A row that had started over next to nothing, as they always seemed to, and escalated with sharp words and unspoken resentments.

&nb
sp; This morning it had been the scorched airing that had provided the spark to light the fuse. Not as petty as some of the catalysts, it was true – relatively serious, really, since some of the underwear that had been drying in front of the fire was almost new, bought at the Co-op drapery store only a few weeks before when winter had begun to set in.

  It had rained almost incessantly for a week now and the only way to be sure the washing was properly dried and aired was by putting it on the clothes’horse in front of the living-room fire. This morning, when they had cleared away the breakfast dishes, Carrie had draped the still-damp vests, knickers and underpants and Jenny’s fleecy liberty bodice over the rails and propped the clothes’ horse up against the brass fender. It had been perfectly safe – as long as the coal didn’t start spitting – and she had gone to make the beds and dust down the stairs without giving it a second thought.

  Halfway down the stairs Carrie had smelled burning. It took a moment for it to register, then she propelled herself off her knees and ran along the hall, duster in hand.

  The clothes’horse had toppled over, saved only from falling into the flames because one corner had wedged against the maroon-coloured tiles that surrounded the fireplace beneath the broad dark wood mantelpiece. Carrie made a dive for it, jerking it upright so violently that a vest fell off into the coal box which, when the top was down, formed a little fireside seat. It was open now. When she had triggered up the clothes’ horse it had been closed.

  Carrie swore, not very seriously – she didn’t use what she called strong language – but loudly and with feeling, and Glad Simmons, Joe’s mother, appeared in the doorway leading to the kitchen.

  ‘Whatever is going on?’

  ‘The washing’s in the fire. Couldn’t you smell it?’

  ‘I’ve been out in the lav. With the door shut.’

  ‘Just look at it!’ Carrie held out the scorched liberty bodice for her to see. ‘It’s ruined! Did you touch the clothes’horse? Before you went to the lav?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t!’ Gladys was a big woman in her early sixties who had once been handsome. Now her concertina of chins trembled with indignation. ‘You couldn’t have left it safe.’

  ‘It was perfectly safe when I left it,’ Carrie stormed. ‘But you’ve been putting coal on the fire, haven’t you? I know you have because you left the box open. You must have touched the airer and knocked it over then.’

  ‘I put a bit of coal on the fire, yes, but I didn’t touch your washing.’

  Carrie looked at the liberty bodice again, and at Joe’s vest, almost new, which now had a great dark banana-shaped scorch right down the front, and wanted to weep with frustration.

  He’d worn his old vest until it was threadbare under the arms and still said it was all right, that Jenny needed new shoes more than he needed a new vest. When Carrie had insisted he must have one – what if he was knocked down by a bus – she knew he’d gone without his Woodbines and the pint of beer he liked to have of an evening in the Working Men’s Club to pay for it. Now it was ruined. Even if he wore it like this it would go in a hole next time she washed it.

  ‘What did you want to put coal on the fire for anyway?’ she asked crossly. ‘There was no need.’

  Glad’s chins wobbled even more aggressively and she folded her arms across the wrap-around overall she wore to cover her working dress.

  ‘I’ll put coal on the fire if I want to! It’s come to something if I can’t put coal on the fire in my own house!’

  That was the crux of it, of course. ‘My own house.’ The all-too-familiar feeling of being trapped began to bubble up inside Carrie, worse even than the frustration of the scorched clothes. The clothes could eventually be replaced – at a price. There would be no more Woodbines or beer for Joe for a bit, no new stockings for herself, and certainly not the jumper she’d seen in Hooper’s window and hoped to save up for.

  What wouldn’t change was the situation. Unless they could get one of the new council houses that were being put up. They’d had their name down on the list for years, and Carrie lived in hope that it would come to the top when the new development at Westbury Hill got underway. Work had started on it, she knew. She and Joe had walked up and looked at the foundations, great concrete scars on what had once been fields and farmland. But they weren’t the only ones on the list by a long chalk, and a lot of other families were worse off than they were, living in rat-infested houses that had been condemned, where the walls ran with water and there were no indoor toilet facilities. In moments of depression like this one Carrie couldn’t imagine how they could ever be lucky enough to be allocated one of the new houses. At least Glad’s house had four bedrooms, even if two of them were very small. With their family grown up, she and Walt, Joe’s father, would rattle around like peas on a rump of beef, and Carrie couldn’t see how they could be treated as a special case. The council wouldn’t care that she and Joe had their three-quarter-size bed squashed into the little front bedroom that had only ever been meant to take a single, or that Jenny had to share with Heather, who was now twenty-three and ought to have a room of her own. They certainly weren’t going to take into account the fact that Carrie spent most of her life feeling like a lodger or a skivvy or both, with no real rights, a daughter-in-law taken on sufferance, supposed to be grateful to Joe’s mother and father for putting a roof over their heads.

  ‘I know it’s your home,’ she said now. ‘I know that. There’s no need to rub it in.’

  ‘Yes. Well.’ Glad was blustering now, still annoyed at being blamed for the catastrophe but wishing she hadn’t defended herself in quite those terms. ‘Let’s have a look, see what the damage is.’ She pulled the remaining clothes off the horse, examining them. ‘Oh, it’s not so bad. It could have been worse.’

  Glad’s apparent belittling of the damage infuriated Carrie again.

  ‘It needn’t have happened at all!’ she snapped. ‘We can’t afford to lose stuff like this. We’re not made of money, even if you are. You ought to have been more careful.’

  ‘Don’t you speak to me like that!’ Glad retaliated. ‘And don’t you tell me what to do, either. I’m old enough to be your mother, just you remember that, and treat me with a bit more respect.’

  And so it had gone on, both of them saying things that would have been better left unsaid and which neither of them really meant.

  If we didn’t have to be under one another’s feet we’d get on all right, Carrie thought now, jamming the thick wedge of greying curly hair under her white uniform cap.

  In the beginning, when she’d first met Joe, a handsome rating, and he had brought her home to Hillsbridge to introduce her to Gladys and Walt, she had thought how lucky he was to have such nice parents. Her own mother could be a bit of a shrew and she had never known her father, who had run off with a younger and prettier woman when Carrie was just a baby. By contrast, Glad had seemed warm and welcoming, a plump and comfortable woman who quickly put the nervous Carrie at her ease, and Walt was everything she might have hoped her own father would be. He was an engine driver by profession, a quiet, serene man who liked his pipe and his News Chronicle, voted Liberal rather than Labour as most people in Hillsbridge did, and hated rows, drunken behaviour and having to leave his home for any reason whatever – even refusing to join Glad and his children on holiday at Weston-super-Mare or Seaton. From the moment she met him, Carrie adored Walt.

  The house, too, which now seemed so claustrophobic, had seemed spacious to the point of luxury. The kitchen was large and square with a huge stone sink, electric light and an old gas mantle, and it looked out on to a small sunny yard from which a flight of steps led up to a strip of garden almost a hundred yards long. There was a living room and also a front room with a piano which Walt had bought when he and Glad were married and which he still played sometimes on a Sunday evening whilst the others gathered round to sing Sankey hymns. A long hall, overseen by a large oak-framed print of a pencil portrait of John Bunyan led to a walk-in pantr
y. Most impressive of all, there was an indoor bathroom beyond the kitchen. It didn’t boast a washbasin or running hot water. That had to be heated in the huge copper boiler and bailed out by means of saucepans or the dipper. But it did have a white enamel bath on legs and a flush lavatory and proper Izal toilet paper – though Walt still liked to keep a wad of torn-up pages from the News Chronicle tied on to a length of string on a nail in the wall for his own use. Altogether the house, the end one of a terrace of four, with its own roofed-over side passage and wedges of snow-on-the-mountain hanging pendulously over the wall that enclosed the back yard had seemed the height of luxury to Carrie.

  Even when she had married Joe and they had moved into their own little rented terraced house in Bristol, Carrie had still liked visiting the house in Hillsbridge, where life always seemed more leisured, more sunny. Joe had left the Navy and taken a job in the docks and she had been kept busy bringing up their children. Then, when Heather was fourteen and David eight, the war had come and everything had changed. Joe had rejoined the Navy and she had been left with the children and the bombing. She had come to Hillsbridge as a refuge, but now it had become a prison. And her relationship with Glad had gradually deteriorated into a war zone of its own.

  ‘I’ll make a start laying the tables, Ivy,’ Carrie said.

  She grabbed a tray of cutlery, went through the hatch into the main hall and began setting out knives, forks and spoons. The sharp rattle they made as she banged them down on to the long Formica-topped tables reflected all the frustration and despair she was feeling.

  In the big square room in the main school building used by Junior Four, the last lesson before dinner was almost over. At the front of the class, Ron Heal perched his short plump frame on the edge of his table, removed his spectacles and jabbed them in the general direction of the thirty-odd pupils who sat in rows at the double desks facing him.