The Little Terrace by the Sea

by Elizabeth Gill

Genres: Family Life; Sagas; Holiday Romance

Synopsis

From the bestselling author of Miss Appleby's Academy and Far From My Father's House comes a tale of love and sacrifice perfect for fans of Nadine Dorries, Anna Jacobs and Dilly Court.

Jenna Duncan's only ambition is to marry the boy she loves and have a little terraced house away from her parents and her dull job. Ruari Gallacher has other ideas. Ruari is determined to break away from the little seaside town where his father died down the pit and make all his dreams come true as a professional footballer.

But when Rauri lets Jenna down one too many times she becomes involved with another man, and by the time Ruari asks her to escape with him, it's far too late. Will Rauri succeed in capturing his dream, and has he scarified the love of the one person who can ever make him truly happy?

Release date: March 3, 2016

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 185

Sample

April 1967, North-East England

It was Saturday and already noon. Jenna Duncan was standing in the queue in McConachie’s fish shop, taking in the reek of chip fat and wishing Mr McConachie could hurry things up. Her mam would be cross if she was late but what could she do? She only got an hour for her dinner and was using up precious time standing there.

Finally, her turn came but the fish that had already been fried had been taken by Mrs Emerson in front who had a big family so Jenna had to wait again because the fish that were in the fryer were not ready. They were better just fried her mam always said but she had been a good quarter of an hour now and her mam would complain when she got back even though there was nothing she could do.

The fish were finally ready. Mr McConachie, who was so skinny that Jenna was convinced he never ate any of his fish and chips which she thought you wouldn’t when you fried them day in and day out, wrapped up the fish carefully in case they should break, put the chips into bags and laid it all neatly together before expertly dabbing a moistened finger to separate the sheets of ready torn-up newspaper then wrapped it diamond-shaped from the corner, folded in both sides and ended up with a neat parcel. He did the same thing a second time. Nobody who bought fish and chips at McConachie’s ever got home with a cold dinner.

Jenna paid and thanked him. They were good fish and chips, which they should have been, the town being by the sea and the cod sold fresh not far away. She put them into her mother’s shopping bag and then she ran around the corner and across the street and down the side and into the unmade back lane.

Ruari Gallacher, her boyfriend, was there. He loved fish and chips and would beg chips from her. She always ended up stopping and unwrapping one of the parcels and he knew that she had had salt and vinegar put on them in the shop and he would eat the biggest and fattest of her chips before she complained.

Ruari spent his life in the back lane with a football when he was not at work, kicking a ball off the back gate or dribbling it endlessly up and down, banging the ball off the walls and outside buildings. He worked as an apprentice electrician in one of the Sunderland shipyards and played football for the apprentices’ works team but even so he practised every minute he got.

Ruari was good with a football, that was what everybody said. Jenna couldn’t see it really. All the lads were good. There wasn’t much else to do when they weren’t at work. They took it seriously. Football was a serious business here in the north-east where there was nothing for working-class lads to do other than the pits or the shipyards and a lot of the pits were worked up. The chance of becoming a professional footballer was the big dream, either that or to start a group and become famous like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones and Ruari had no interest in such things.

He dribbled the football all the way down the road but when he turned around he saw her as she had known he would and he abandoned the football and raced up the back lane so that she unwrapped the chips and gave him a whole bag. Ruari’s eyes widened.

‘Are these all for me?’

‘I thought it would be easier buying another bag and then you wouldn’t eat mine,’ she said though her mam would question her about the money.

Ruari grinned in appreciation. He was a nice-looking lad, she thought warmly, feeling proud. He had lovely black hair and cool blue eyes like the sea in July and he was taller than she was but it was not that she liked best, she liked that he liked her, that it was unsaid.

He started in on the chips as though he hadn’t eaten in a week, licking the salt off greasy fingers until she was too hungry herself to wait any longer. That and the fact that her parcel was fast getting cold propelled her away from him at top speed.

She heard his ‘Ta, Jenna,’ following her on the cool wind.

She didn’t have far to go, they lived next door to one another. She ran up the back yard and in by the door, past the pantry and took a step down into the kitchen. She didn’t think how cold it was outside until she got inside and her mam said,

‘Wherever have you been? You could’ve been to Seahouses for those, the time you took.’

Her mam always said something like that, as though Seahouses wasn’t way up the coast and took ages to get to. She knew because they went there for a fortnight in the summer and the fish and chips were even better than McConachie’s.

‘And where’s my change?’

Jenna handed the change, watched her mother scrutinize it and then her mother shot her a straight look as she put the parcel into the oven to warm it back up.

‘Have you been buying chips for that lad again? I’ve told you …’

Finally her father said, ‘It was a bag of chips, Vera, let it go,’ because he had heard it all before as well and no doubt he was tired of it. ‘I just want my dinner in peace.’

He had to get back to work in a few minutes so because Jenna had been late with them he would have to shovel them down and dash back. She felt slightly guilty about that.

Her mother sat down and shut up and ate because as she said Jenna’s dad was head of the household and he worked at the Store, in the grocery department. When they had finished eating he sat back in his chair and smoked his dinner-time Capstan and then he said,

‘I’ve been promoted. I’ve been made head of the department.’

Nothing, Jenna thought, could have pleased her mother more.

‘You should have told me when you came in,’ her mother said.

‘I wanted Jenna to hear it too.’

‘Oh, Wilf,’ she said, ‘now we can move.’

‘Move?’ Jenna said and her parents looked at one another. Obviously this had been discussed when she was not there.

‘It’s been on the cards for a while,’ her dad said, ‘and I promised your mother that we would have a better house if it happened.’

‘There’s a lovely house for rent in Wesley Road,’ her mother said and her eyes shone.

Jenna couldn’t believe it. She didn’t like to say that she didn’t want to leave Back Church Street, that she couldn’t leave Ruari. Wesley Road was in the posh end of town.

‘Shall I see if we can go and have a look at it?’ her mam offered.

‘Aye, why don’t you?’ her dad said.

Jenna had to rush to get back to the drapery department of the Store where she worked in one of the big main streets, Durham Road. It was just beyond her dad’s workplace, both were part of the Co-operative Society and he had got her the job there. She wished very much that she could work in a boutique but her mother wouldn’t hear of it. She would have to travel into Newcastle or Sunderland for that, there would be buses to pay for and her dinner and her mother liked her to go home for dinner. Jenna comforted herself by thinking that at least she saw all the new clothes which came into the department and her mother let her buy pretty things. She had just this week bought a short flowery dress and new long white boots to go with it and had her fringe cut and the ends of her long blonde hair. She thought she looked really good.

All I need now, she thought, is somewhere to go, somewhere to wear it and she wished for the umpteenth time that Ruari had some money. She wanted to go out, she wanted to go dancing. She wanted excitement.

More than anything she would have liked a trip to London, to Carnaby Street, to the famous boutiques there. She dreamed of buying clothes at Biba and being very fashionable, she knew that she had the figure for it, not as skinny as Twiggy and not as glamorous of course but she was tall and slender and fitted into fashionable clothes.

The town was busy. The big local football team, Dunelm North End, were playing Arsenal that day so the streets were full of fans from both sides and the pubs were open. There was singing in the streets and there were a lot of policemen about just in case there should be any trouble.

By mid-afternoon when the kick-off began the streets would be empty of men and boys, and the women would come out to do their shopping in peace and even in the drapery department of the Co-op you would be able to hear the roar of the crowd, especially when the home team won. The sound of the cheers when one of their strikers scored echoed through the little alleyways and across the long wide beaches and even further over to the dockyards, the sound would travel for miles, Jenna thought.

Jenna wasn’t interested in football but like everybody else in the place she was glad when the team scored and wanted them to win, as much out of pride as anything else. Today, however, she listened in vain for the roar of the local crowd and she had the feeling men would be drowning their sorrows after the match and there would be fighting and somebody’s shop window would get broken and several people would end up spending the night in jail.

Her dad resented that he had to work on Saturday afternoons and usually when the team played at home he would finish at six and be in the pub with everybody else soon afterwards but he would have to come straight home tonight, she knew, because her mother would have arranged for them to view the house and he had promised her they would look at it and her dad did not go back on his promises. He said it was just to keep the peace.

Ruari and his friends would be at the match, they never missed especially since it was almost the end of the season but later on she and Ruari would get together and go for a walk on the beach or maybe to the pictures if they had enough money. Saturday nights were sacred that way.

When she finished at tea time her mam dragged them to Wesley Road. It was several streets away, through the centre of the town, past Church Street where the parish church was, just in front of where they lived and through Chapel Street where the Wesleyan chapel was and then further up where the Bethel Chapel was and past the main streets where both Jenna and her father worked and where the schools were and the library and the station and the car-sale showrooms and the garages and small business premises and warehouses.

Jenna hated it straight away. The house looked so posh, too big for its boots, with a little front garden and at the back there was another garden, a piece of grass surrounded by flower beds and there were trees and hedges and it was quiet as though the whole of the people there had died.

The man who owned it was to show them around. It had a dining room, something they didn’t have now and her dad probably wouldn’t like, he was keen on having his tea by the kitchen fire with the telly on and his chair turned sideways to it though her mam thought everybody should put their chairs right to the table and make conversation.

The kitchen here was tiny, just somewhere to cook and wash up, and there was a big front room beyond the dining room, a lounge her mother called it, so that was two rooms they would never use. There was also a bathroom upstairs. The bathroom they had at their house was on the end of the kitchen and had been built as an afterthought because the houses in their street had had outside lavatories a few years back. Here was a huge spider in the bath so Jenna ran out again and left her mother admiring the fittings.

It seemed daft to Jenna to pay so much more money so that they could have more space when they didn’t use what they had already and she wasn’t convinced she would like going upstairs at night on her own when it was so much bigger – there were three bedrooms and though they never had anybody to stay her mother had been so enthusiastic about having another bedroom and had gone in and looked admiringly about it and Jenna knew that she was deciding what colour she would have it and how the furnishings would be and it just all seemed so silly somehow, and the house was a long way from the sea.

The bedroom that she would have looked out over the little back garden and the road behind so she was no better off because that was what her bedroom did now and she spent so little time there, she wasn’t like a lot of girls who spent their lives upstairs, having secrets and making plans with their best friends and talking about boys.

Ruari had always been her best friend. She knew the girls at school had thought it odd that she went home to spend her evenings with a boy when they were younger but she didn’t really think about it, it had just always been so. Ruari was the most important thing in her life and now she felt, stupidly because it wasn’t far away, as though she was leaving him.

She was convinced you couldn’t lie in bed there on summer nights when it never got dark in June and listen to the tiny waves barely breaking on the warm sand and imagine the flowers in the sand dunes, green, yellow and white. She listened hard when she was left in the bedroom alone but all she could hear was the distant sound of traffic and the shouts of some children playing in the road.

She didn’t want to be away from the beach, it seemed ungrateful somehow, as though you had forsaken it, the foghorn which went off when the weather was bad and the lights which flashed from the lighthouse and sometimes you saw seals in the water when you were on the beach, they were so friendly, like big dogs. And people walked their whippets and Labradors and spaniels and threw sticks and children built sandcastles with moats. She couldn’t leave all that and most important of all she couldn’t leave Ruari.

And then she saw her mother’s face and it was shiny with pleasure so she couldn’t say anything. She tried to make the right noises and all the way as they walked back home her mother talked about how she would redecorate and where each piece of furniture would go and how nice it would be to live in such a place and she thought, this was her mothers dream and it was such a small dream that she couldn’t bear to be the one to break it.

Her dad saw how she felt. When they got back to the house he squeezed her hand and he said, ‘Do it for your mam, there’s a good lass,’ and she knew that he didn’t want to go either.

‘And you needn’t think that boy’s coming to visit neither,’ her mother said as they went into the house. ‘Him and his mucky boots.’

‘They’re football boots, Mam,’ Jenna objected, ‘and they aren’t mucky either.’

She knew that his mam had saved hard to buy Ruari football boots for his birthday and he treasured them. Ruari would have given up anything for them and looked after them really well. They were never mucky, he would have been horrified to hear her mam saying that.

An hour later Ruari came to the yard gate for her. He didn’t often come up the yard, he knew that her mam didn’t like him. Jenna thought it was one of the reasons her mam wanted to move. She thought Ruari was common and his family of course. He kissed her briefly and they walked away hand in hand from the house.

Ruari couldn’t afford fashionable clothes and Jenna thought it was a shame because he had a really nice figure, a good shape. She thought he was beautiful and though she wouldn’t have told him for the world she thought he had the perfect bottom which didn’t show to advantage because he couldn’t afford tight hipsters with T-shirts and boots like other lads wore on Saturday nights in town. Or nice suits, she loved a nice suit.

She wished they could go to town and she could wear her new dress. Ruari liked her clothes, probably, she thought, because most of her dresses were very short and showed off her long slender legs. He liked it when she wore boots. Her legs, Jenna thought, were her best feature but the rest of her wasn’t bad either. She thought her nose was a bit big and maybe her thighs were a trifle heavy but other than that she was happy when she looked into her mirror and saw her blonde blue-eyed looks. She was striking, she knew. Lads gazed at her in the street and she enjoyed it.

‘Do you want to go to the pictures?’ he enquired and she sensed he was about to tell her what was on so she said quickly,

‘No, I want to talk to you.’

He pulled a face.

Nobody said anything else until they got to the beach. What she loved best about their beach was that there was hardly anybody on it, even on a fine night like this, just the odd person walking a dog down by the shore. The tide was out, the rocks showed and the sand was warm because it had been a fine day.

The beach was black with coal where earlier that week there had been a big tide, flat strangely shaped pieces of it like broken roof slates glinted in the evening sunlight, like jet against the sand which was almost white in the spring evening. A cool wind came off the sea, lifting the sand in swirls and through a sky which was almost blue, small flakes of blossom from the trees in the gardens of the better houses drifted like pearls.

The spring tides had left other debris, small mountains of glistening brown seaweed in frills like some of the net curtains which hung in the windows of the pit houses which were too close together for any natural privacy. Mother-of-pearl hills of scallop-edged shells and blue-and-white mussel shells opened like butterflies to the pale cream sunshine which fell upon the beach of the pit town.

The wheels of the three pitheads which graced the blue sky like giants along the edge of the seashore dominated the area. Behind them, like poor relations, crouched the pit rows.

Jenna and Ruari took their shoes off and walked at the water’s edge where the waves were moving back and forth and were warmed by the sand and Jenna thought there was nothing better than this though she loved a storm in October when you could feel the sea spray on your face from well up the top of the beach. She loved its noise and movement, something you couldn’t control.

‘We’re moving,’ she said, ‘not far,’ she added hastily, in case he should think she meant another town or even another area, ‘to Wesley Road. My dad got promoted and we’ve been to look at the house tonight and my mam is ever so pleased.’

Ruari didn’t say anything. He never went into her house but she very often went into his so in a way she would be losing his house as well as hers because it wouldn’t be the same. You couldn’t drop in casually the way that she did almost every day and see his mam for a few minutes.

‘It’s not far,’ she said.

‘No,’ Ruari agreed but neither of them meant it, it was in a lot of respects a whole world away. ‘It’ll be nice,’ he said, ‘for your mam.’

And Jenna thought, yes, although he didn’t say it, her mam had never fitted into Back Church Street the way that she and her dad had, and her mam would be pleased about that, proud of it.

She kissed him, long and slowly on the mouth. He tasted wonderful. How could a boy taste that sweet? And his kisses were perfect. It had been one of the things she had liked best about him from when they were very young. Ruari’s kisses were to die for. She lingered and then he began to get the wrong idea and slide his hands up her legs when she still had something to say so she stopped and said,

‘I’m not like my mam. I don’t want to leave Back Church Street and I don’t want to leave you, ever.’

He smiled, she felt his lips curve under hers.

‘You’re not going anywhere,’ he said.

‘I shall never go anywhere really, you know, not without you.’

‘I’m not going no place,’ he said.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Aye, I’m quite certain,’ he said and then he kissed her and this time she didn’t stop him when he slid his hands up her thighs.

Together down on the dunes in the spiky grass there she had him all to herself and in the late evening when the darkness came down and hid them they could have each other and be close and there was never any problem about it. There was never any risk because he took care of it, like he took care of everything, Jenna thought. She looked up at the stars and was glad that he was hers and that he could make her feel like nobody else ever did or ever would or ever could.

She didn’t have to stifle her cries of pleasure here with nobody but the birds to notice. This was their place, the little town and the pitheads and the sea, the sounds of their childhood were just the same as now and somehow their relationship was like that, it was unsmirched, untouched, unspoiled. She loved him.

It frightened her in a way, how much she loved him, and then he would hold her and she would stop being frightened because she knew that he was hers and always would be. She just wished they had more time together.

She had the awful feeling that when she moved away she would see him less, she knew it was so, it would have to be planned, it could not be two or three casual meetings a day, waving to him in the back lane, knowing he was there, that he was sleeping just a few yards away, they would have to make sure that they saw one another and what with her job and his job and his football and her moth. . .