Still Waters
Contents
About the Author
Judith Saxton has lived for many years in the north-west. A compulsive writer, she started with short stories and articles and many of her early stories were broadcast on Radio Merseyside. She decided to write her Liverpool series after hearing the reminiscences of family members about life in the city in the early years of the twentieth century. For many years she has had to cope with ME but has continued to write. She also writes as Katie Flynn.
Also available by Katie Flynn
A Liverpool Lass The Girl from Penny Lane Liverpool Taffy The Mersey Girls Strawberry Fields Rainbow’s End
Rose of Tralee
No Silver Spoon Polly’s Angel
The Girl from Seaforth Sands The Liverpool Rose Poor Little Rich Girl The Bad Penny
Down Daisy Street A Kiss and a Promise Two Penn’orth of Sky A Long and Lonely Road The Cuckoo Child Darkest Before Dawn Orphans of the Storm Little Girl Lost Beyond the Blue Hills Forgotten Dreams Sunshine and Shadows Such Sweet Sorrow A Mother’s Hope In Time for Christmas Heading Home
A Mistletoe Kiss Lost Days of Summer Christmas Wishes The Runaway
A Sixpenny Christmas The Forget-Me-Not Summer A Christmas to Remember
Katie Flynn writing as Judith Saxton
You Are My Sunshine First Love, Last Love Someone Special
Still Waters
Katie Flynn writing as Judith Saxton
Dear Reader, When I am about to start a new book, I usually choose a setting, somewhere I know and like, and then a couple of characters whose lives (and loves) I mean to follow. Sometimes, however, the settings are not important but the characters are, and I settle down to get to know my people, so that if I ever met them I should recognise them immediately. Every time I begin to write I remind myself to keep it simple, to stick to my main characters – and settings – and to push subsidiary characters into the background, where they belong. But in this particular book the moment the Throwers came ‘on stage’ all my careful planning was thrown to the four winds. For a start, I love the Norfolk Broads, which are glorious indeed. The Throwers are a family I know well, even though they only exist in my imagination... there were Throwers all over Norfolk at that time, scraping a living, taking any job that paid a wage, however small, and yet behaving with great generosity to any child – or adult for that matter – who needed their warmth and interest. And once I’d stopped trying to bend the story to my will it seems, now, that it pretty well wrote itself. And this feeling was enhanced when I was lucky enough to have six weeks in Australia and to actually visit many of the settings which I used in
Still Waters
, and as I talked to people and visited museums and so on, the story grew.
Originally, the only love interest for my heroine was to be the young Australian pilot, but that was my idea, and was soon cancelled out by Ashley, who insisted on falling heavily for Tess... and here comes another lovely setting! During my teenage years I lived in the Norfolk village of Blofield, and loved to wander through the churchyard and to attend the ‘wool church’ on Sundays. I had a crush on the head choir boy, and he took me up the winding steps of the tower past the bells to the roof where we had an excellent view of the surrounding countryside. I leaned on the parapet and looked down – a dizzying distance – and saw that some of the graves on the periphery of the graveyard were almost hidden by long grass and tree branches... I could almost hear Ashley’s tactless, foolish voice.
And so it goes. I think I’m writing one story and it turns into another and sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d been firm with my cast of characters. But that isn’t the way it works, or not for me, at any rate. Now, looking back, I can’t imagine that the story would turn out better, or worse, or even different. Tess, Mal and Ashley would have seen to that!
All best wishes, Katie Flynn
For my cousin Gloria and her
husband, Alan Collinson, who made
our stay in Melbourne so
memorable – see you soon!
Acknowledgements
My thanks go once again to all the people who helped me to sort out both ends of the story, in particular the library staff of the Great Yarmouth Branch, who sorted out all the material available on Barton, both Broad and villages, in the twenties and thirties, and particularly to Cassie Turner, whose father fished Barton Broad at weekends – her memories of the beauty and richness of the Broad then made it all come to life for me.
The staff of the Castle Museum, Norwich, were very helpful in finding me details of the war years, and Angela Wootton, of the Imperial War Museum, helped me out over Rhodesia and the training camps for Air Force personnel in the early forties.
And many thanks to Tony Winser of Buxton, Norfolk, who I met quite by chance and saw that he was wearing a Lancaster bomber tie – he very kindly answered all my questions, gave me a delightful wartime song much sung in the mess, and explained the complexities of the aircraft which I needed for my story. As usual any mistakes are mine, but the bits I got right are his!
And in Australia, Gloria and Alan Collinson took me all over Melbourne and told me where to find old street plans and the sort of information I needed, my son Tony Turner did the same for Sydney, and Cass Gardiner, the Cairns librarian, was absolutely invaluable – without her wonderful book list I should have been sunk indeed when it came to Queensland in the twenties.
And as always, many thanks to the staff of the International Library in Liverpool, who found the books that I couldn’t buy in Australia, and to Marina Thomas and the staff of the Wrexham Branch Library, who did likewise.
Prologue
Melbourne, November 1918
IT WAS A
hot night. High in the dark sky above Melbourne the stars twinkled down on the motley crowds surging back and forth across streets and pavements, but Malcolm Chandler, clutching his mother’s skirt, never even looked up, though a few months before his mother had told him about the stars and pointed out the Southern Cross blazing above them, explaining that he was lucky to be able to see it at all.
‘Your grandparents, in England, have never seen those special stars,’ she had said. ‘They have the Plough, instead. It’s – it’s kind o’ small, made out of small little stars, but then England’s quite small, too.’
It was odd, Mal had thought, how when Mammy said England was kind of small she sounded wistful, as though in her book small was best. But when his father said the same thing, the words held a sneer. Small is rotten, his voice said. Small is measly, something to despise and look down on. And Mal suspected that Bill Chandler really did think small was rotten, because Mal was small himself and sometimes Mal caught Bill looking at him with dislike, as though he wished him far away. And to be so regarded is frightening, especially when you are only five and the person who dislikes you is a grown man, and your father into the bargain.
‘You all right, son?’
Kath’s voice brought Mal’s thoughts back to the present, but though he tried to pause, to look up and answer Kath properly, he was unable to do so. Even as she spoke they rounded the corner of Queen Street and burst on to Little Collins Street and the noise and the crowds were such that Mal found himself being pulled away from his mother by the press of people. He whimpered, tugged desperately at her skirt, and Kath stopped, stuck a sharp elbow into the face of a man who had somehow managed to get between them, then kicked out in a manner which Mal knew she would consider unladylike later, when she thought about it, and forced her way back to her small son.
The man who had been elbowed yelped but shouldered his way past them and Kath bent and picked Mal up, settling him firmly on her left hip.
‘Hang on, son, this is no time to be separated and I can see something going on ahead . . . Oh my word!’
An explosion, accompanied by a thousand brilliantly coloured stars, split the night. Mal, from his higher position, saw that someone was letting off firecrackers. Right near them a small shop, its shutters erected, a barricade of stout wooden planks nailed across them, seemed to be swaying as though it was about to fall . . . he had no idea what was happening but a skinny young man with a shock of black, frizzy hair, turned and grinned at him.
‘The bloody chinks nailed their shutters up but we’ve broke into them any old how,’ he shouted above the din. ‘Them’s firecrackers a-goin’ off, what the chinks save for their New Year. Jeez, how the old feller’s screechin’!’
The movement of the crowd now surged Kath and Mal up on to the pavement and within a couple of feet of the small Chinese shops and Mal found himself with a ringside seat at the lively proceedings. He could see a tall Chinese in a long robe with a funny little silk cap on his head, trying to drive people away from the front of his shop. He had a long stick with a silver knob on the end and he was using it to good effect, but even so the shutters had given way at one end and people were shoving and wriggling through the gap and coming out with their arms laden with gaily coloured cylinders, things which looked like blue and orange wheels, other things shaped like cones . . . and one man had what looked like a sack laden with something heavy over one shoulder.
‘Look, Mammy!’ Mal squeaked. ‘The chinky whacked that feller’s head,
wham, wham,
but he didn’t drop nothing, he didn’t even blink! Crikey, there’s a lady with a stick too.’
A tiny Chinese woman, laughing and shouting, was hitting out at the crowd with a large umbrella. Her hair had come down from the tight little bun on top of her head and hung in feathery strands round her face and her skin, more ivory than yellow, gleamed in the gaslight’s glow. Mal thought she was very pretty and waved to her, but she was too busy whacking with her umbrella to wave back, though she acknowledged him with a tight little smile.
‘My God . . . that isn’t just high spirits and celebrations, that feller’s looting,’ Kath shouted, her eyes following her son’s pointing finger. ‘That’s thieving, that’s not just taking a few firecrackers to make a good loud noise. Where’s the police? Someone’s going to get hurt . . . Hang on, Mal, we’d best get out o’ this.’
But even Mal could see that getting out was now impossible. In the relative quiet of Queen Street they could have gone their own way but here, packed into the crowd as sardines are packed into a tin, choice was denied them. They would be carried forward at the crowd’s whim whether they would or no.
Kath tried to turn and realised at once that it was not going to be possible. She sighed and hugged Mal tight, then bent her head and spoke into his ear.
‘Sorry, feller, we’re going up to Swanston Street whether we want to or not! Just hold tight!’
Mal would have liked to remind his mother that they had been heading for Swanston Street anyway, that they had promised Bill they would meet him outside the Town Hall at ten, but he realised it wasn’t the moment. She would never hear him, and besides, he was getting caught up in the excitement of the crowd and had no wish to go tamely home. Someone near him was starting up a chorus and he raised his small, piping voice in the same tune, though the words he knew didn’t seem to be quite the same as the men were singing.
I don’t want to be a soldier,
I don’t want to go to war,
I’d rather stay at home,
Around the streets to roam,
And live on the earnings of a high-born whore . . .
Another firecracker went off, turning the sky above them momentarily incandescent, and Kath squeaked and then laughed.
‘Well, this is a night you’ll never forget, Mal! The war’s over, your daddy’s home, and all Melbourne is celebrating – all Australia, very like. Any moment now we’ll be on Swanston Street, and then I bet we’ll see a lot of folk all giving thanks for the Armistice.’
Mal wanted to say he couldn’t imagine more people than there were here, but whilst he was struggling to make himself heard, the crowd surged out of the confines of Little Collins Street and on to Swanston, almost opposite the Town Hall, which was decorated with enough bunting to hide its normally solid stone façade.
The street was wide here, and Kath managed to cross it, still with Mal on her hip, and to take up her station on the broad pavement right outside the Town Hall. There, she stood Mal down and rubbed her arms ruefully.