Those Golden Days

by Sally Spencer

Genres: Family Life; World War I; Sagas; Small Town & Rural

Synopsis

Continuing the brilliant East End saga featuring Becky and her family, from the author of UP OUR STREET The shadow of war hangs over the village of Marston, and Becky worries that her hot-headed son Billy will enlist the army. Her daughter Michelle is another cause for concern - since her illness she has withdrawn into herself, and Becky fears she will never be able to find real happyness. And Becky is not even aware of the great danger which looms on the horizon in the shape of her wicked brother -in-law Richard Worrel, who is determined to use his own son to destroy Beck's family

Release date: July 26, 2012

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 448

Sample

PROLOGUE

Spring 1913

 

Michelle Worrell sat on her metal trunk, waiting for the taxi which would take her to the station – and wished she were dead. Was it only two and a half years earlier that she had first come to Oxford? she asked herself. Two and a half years since she’d reached the end of the rainbow and fulfilled her wildest dream?

She laughed – inwardly and bitterly. Oxford had been no dream. It had been a nightmare. And though she had fought back, even after her father’s … after her father’s …

She took a deep breath. There was no point in blaming anyone else, she thought. Nor could she put the blame on Fate, which had visited her family with tragedy. The failure was hers and hers alone.

‘I should have been stronger,’ she said.

She spoke only in a whisper, but her words seemed to echo round the archway. ‘Should have been stronger … stronger … ’

She glanced around her. Happy, confident students were everywhere – books under their arms and smiles on their faces. None of them looked at her. She was an embarrassment who, once removed, would soon be forgotten.

She did not want to stay in Oxford, but she did not want to go home, either. Back home, in Marston, were the people she had grown up amongst – people who remembered her as she’d once been. What would they think of her now, seeing her come home defeated, her tail between her legs?

Yet what choice did she have but to go home? Even if people did despise her? Or worse – pitied her?

Two porters appeared, one on either side of her. ‘Taxi’s just coming, Miss,’ said the senior of the pair.

Michelle looked up and saw the black cab. So this was it – the end.

The senior porter coughed, as if to hide an awkwardness. ‘So if you’ll just get up, Miss, we’ll load your trunk into it.’

‘Of course.’

They couldn’t wait to get rid of her, she thought as she rose to her feet. It wasn’t that they hated her. She just didn’t fit in. Why, oh why, had it taken her two and a half soul-destroying years to realise that?

The taxi drew up, the porters hefted the trunk into it. Michelle gazed, for the last time, on the City of Sleepy Spires. Then, with legs that felt as heavy as lead, she walked to the taxi.

‘Good luck, Miss,’ the senior porter called after her.

‘Thank you,’ Michelle replied.

The two men watched the cab drive away. The senior porter sighed. ‘Poor little bugger,’ he said. ‘I wonder if she’ll ever get over it.’

Chapter One

Marston had only three streets. The longest, Ollershaw Lane, pointed towards Warrington in one direction, Northwich in the other, and ran through the centre of the village. The other two streets, Cross Street and The Avenue, dissected the lane just beyond the mineral railway line.

The terraced red-brick houses groaned under the weight of heavy blue slate roofs. Each house had a front garden the size of a bed sheet, and a larger back yard where the wash-house and outside lavatory could be found.

All the dwellings had four rooms – two up and two down. The back room downstairs was the kitchen, where a fire burned all year round to heat the oven which stood next to it. The downstairs front room was used as a bedroom for growing families, but once the girls had gone into service and the boys had set up homes of their own, it quickly reverted to its rightful function – a parlour only used for weddings, funerals and Christmas.

No one pretended that Marston was a pretty village – it had been thrown up hurriedly to accommodate the workers in the saltmines and the brine works – but the villagers thought it suited them well enough, and most of them would never have considered living anywhere else.

Spudder Johnson stepped out of what had once been a front parlour – but was now his fish and chip shop – and looked up Ollershaw Lane to the hump-backed bridge over the canal. On his right was Worrell’s saltworks, with its two chimneys belching out thick black smoke and the steam from its brine evaporation pans floating almost lazily into the sky. On his left was the salt store, a huge, domed wooden building, which some people said resembled a beached whale. But Spudder had never seen a whale, let alone a beached one – whatever that was – so he had no way of knowing whether they were right or wrong.

He turned the other way. Apart from a few little kids playing hopscotch, the lane was as quiet as it ever got.

‘It won’t stay quiet for long,’ Spudder said to no one in particular. In a few minutes the hooters would sound at Worrell’s, and at the Adelaide mine on the other side of the bridge. Then the chip shop would start filling with hungry saltworkers who had put in a twelve-hour shift and wanted their pieces of haddock pretty damn quick.

How long had he been living in the village? Spudder wondered. He had first come to Marston in the summer of 1893, and now it was 1914, so that made it … He shook his head defeatedly. He’d never been very good at doing figures.

He saw Michelle Worrell come out of the alley which ran along the side of her house. He’d known her since she was a little girl, and she always called him Uncle Spudder, though he wasn’t her uncle really. He’d missed her, those three years she’d been away down south. He’d been surprised, too, when she returned home at the end of her studies, because he was almost sure that her mam – Mrs Becky – had told him that she was going to stay on and become a doctor of something or other. Still, he often got things wrong, so maybe Mrs Becky hadn’t said that at all.

One thing he was sure of was that Michelle wasn’t the same girl who’d gone away. She been so chirpy and confident before she’d left the village. Now she almost seemed afraid of her own shadow.

‘Time to start fryin’, Spudder!’ called Aggie Spratt, the huge woman who helped him to run both his chip shop and the boarding house.

‘Be with you in a minute,’ Spudder replied, watching Michelle make her way down the lane, and wondering again what had happened to the girl he’d once known.

As Michelle hurried down the lane, she cursed herself for her own forgetfulness. She had known she would need Lightfoot’s account books in the afternoon, so what had ever possessed her to leave them in her bedroom when she set out that morning? Now she’d wasted an hour – an hour she could never replace – and she’d have to spend the rest of the week trying to catch up on herself.

She heard the sound of horses’ hooves coming towards her, but she didn’t look up to see who it was, because she knew that only one man rode a horse through Marston. Gerald Worrell – her cousin Gerald! The son of the man who had seduced her mother, then tried to ruin her father – his own brother. The two branches of the family hadn’t spoken to each other since before she and Gerald were born.

The hoofbeats grew nearer, and Michelle kept her eyes fixed on the ground, as if she were afraid of tripping. ‘Think of something else!’ she ordered herself.

Though she couldn’t see her cousin, she could picture him in her mind’s eye – his shining black hair, his strong nose, his wide mouth with lips that … Her heart was beating at a gallop and she suddenly felt hot. She gripped the account books more tightly in her hands, as if that would help to control her trembling.

Rider and horse were past her. Now she lifted her head and looked over her shoulder. It was only a second’s glance, but it was enough to take in the proud carriage, broad back and powerful thighs. Michelle shifted the account books to a more comfortable position and tried to plan her afternoon’s work.

Becky Worrell gazed down at the black marble gravestone and read the words she knew off by heart, the words she had composed herself:

‘Michael Worrell 1865–1911He left the world a better place than he found it.’

She sighed.

‘How long has he been gone now?’ asked her older brother Jack, sympathetically.

Becky sighed again. ‘Three years, two months and six days.’

‘An’ you still miss ’im a lot, don’t you?’ Jack said, then, looking as if he could have bitten out his own tongue, he added, ‘Now that was a bloody stupid thing for me to say, wasn’t it? Of course you still miss him.’

Becky didn’t reply. Instead she looked across the road at the school, erected thanks to voluntary subscription some fifty years before. It was a large building, with three slate-covered gables which seemed to frown down disapprovingly at the children in the playground. The playground itself had once been as level as anyone could wish, but the land under Marston was honeycombed with saltmine workings, and that had caused subsidence. Now, it was possible to place a glass marble on the ground at the top end of the playground, and chase it as it rolled, faster and faster, towards the bottom.

Becky watched the children running around, letting out all their pent-up energy in furious games and loud shrieking.

How quickly time passes, she thought. It seemed like only five minutes since she’d been in that playground herself. Yet she hadn’t been what they called a scholar for over thirty years. Almost without realising it, she had grown up, got married, given birth to one child, adopted another, opened her bakery – and lost her beloved husband to a tropical disease the doctors didn’t even have a name for.

‘I always knew that Michael would die young,’ she said to her brother. ‘The risks he took, it was bound to happen. But that was my husband for you. He thought he could put all of the wrongs of the world right by himself, and once he’d got an idea in his head, there was no holding him.’

And she wouldn’t have had it any other way, she thought. It was that fire – that drive – in her Michael which had made her fall in love with him in the first place. And which kept her loving him even now he was gone.

Jack coughed uncomfortably, and Becky turned to look at the man who, even in his early fifties, had still not lost the appearance of a wild-eyed gypsy boy. ‘You’ve got somethin’ on your mind, haven’t you?’ she asked.

Jack grinned ruefully. ‘You allus could read me like a book, our Becky.’

Becky put her hands on her hips, a sign of exasperation she had unconsciously copied from her late mother. ‘Well, out with it, then,’ she said.

Jack shrugged his shoulders. ‘I was just wonderin’ if you’d looked in the mirror lately,’ he muttered.

‘Well, of course I have. I look in it every day, first thing in the morning when I brush me hair.’

‘I mean really looked,’ Jack persisted.

Becky shook her head. ‘You’re a right funny ’ap’orth, an’ no mistake, our Jack,’ she told her brother. ‘I’ve known you all me life, an’ yet there’s times when I still don’t understand what the heck you’re talkin’ about’

Jack stepped back so he could get a better view of her. His sister was no longer a young girl, as the faint lines around her eyes showed. But the eyes themselves were as deep a blue as they’d ever been, and her long hair – tucked in now, under her demure, broad-brimmed hat – was as golden as the day she’d married Michael Worrell. Add to that her long, straight nose with only the slightest suggestion of a tilt at its end, her wide, generous mouth, and a chin which was firm without being aggressive, and Becky still presented a very striking picture. In some ways, Jack realised, age had actually improved his sister. There was a grace about Becky which only comes with time. Yes, she might be what some folk would call past the first flush of girlhood, but there was no doubt that she could still turn any number of heads on the street.

‘Is your inspection over yet, our Jack?’ Becky asked, though not unkindly.

Jack jumped slightly, startled out of his musings. On the oil rivers of West Africa, where there was little to do for most of the time but think, he had thought a great deal about Becky. However much she had loved Michael, widowhood was not a natural state for his sister, he had decided, and during this brief visit to Britain, he had planned to steer Becky away from it as skilfully as he steered his steamer between the sand bars and up the narrow creeks.

That had been the plan. But somehow when he was actually with Becky, all his plans came to pieces, and now he blurted out, ‘Have you ever thought of getting married again?’

‘Now where did that idea come from?’

It was ridiculous to feel so embarrassed, but nevertheless Jack did. Still, he had started, so he might as well go on. ‘You’re a beautiful woman, still in your prime,’ he said. ‘I know you loved Michael, but you can’t go on mournin’ him for ever.’

Becky smiled sadly. ‘I don’t mourn him. When I think of him, it’s more like I’m celebratin’ the time we had together.’ She blushed. ‘Now that’s just the kind of fanciful thing Michael would have said if I’d been the one who’d gone first.’

‘You’re right there,’ Jack agreed.

‘But just because it’s fanciful doesn’t make it any less true,’ Becky said fiercely.

‘No, it doesn’t,’ Jack replied awkwardly, ‘but you can’t afford to spend all your time lookin’ back. You have to consider the future. Now I know a couple of fellers in Liverpool – decent, honest chaps with their own business – who’d consider it a real privilege to take you out once in a while. It doesn’t have to lead to anythin’ if you don’t want it to, but … ’ He trailed off.

Becky was no longer listening to him, but had turned her head and was looking at the school yard again. ‘Where does the time go?’ she asked herself for a second time.

Half a lifetime, over in a click of the fingers. Maybe Jack was right and she should try to grab a little happiness while she still had the chance. Michael wouldn’t mind, she thought. If there really was a heaven, he would be up there now, urging her on. But how could she ever settle for anything less than what she’d had? And how could she ever hope to find a man who could replace Michael?

One of the monitors appeared in the playground, staggering under the weight of the great brass handbell which for generations had been used to summon the children back into their classrooms.

With an effort, the boy swung the bell, and the sound of its harsh tone drifted across to the quiet graveyard. The kids, as terrified of their teachers as Becky had been of hers, stopped their skipping and jumping and began to make their way reluctantly to their separate entrances – one for boys, one for girls.

The sound of Jack’s voice drifted into her consciousness. ‘Just think about what I been sayin’,’ he implored her.

Becky surreptitiously wiped a tear from her eye. ‘You’re a good big brother, our Jack,’ she said. ‘You always were. But you’re wastin’ your time with this one. I’ll never marry again.’

‘Won’t you at least give it a try?’ Jack suggested. ‘Meetin’ other men, I mean.’

Becky shook her head. ‘It’s time I got back to the bakery,’ she said. ‘They’ll be needin’ me.’

The sun was low in the sky, and in a few minutes it would begin to sink into the horizon, drenching the grounds of Peak House – only a couple of miles from Marston, but a world apart from it – in glowing red light.

From his study window, Richard Worrell watched his son, Gerald, putting his new horse, a chestnut mare, through its paces in the grounds outside.

‘The boy’s a natural horseman,’ he told himself proudly for probably the thousandth time. Although perhaps it was wrong to think of Gerald as a boy at all. He had already celebrated his twenty-second birthday, was six foot two inches tall, and as strong and handsome a young man as you could hope to find in the county.

‘He takes after his father,’ Richard murmured with considerable satisfaction. It was no idle boast. Years of hard drinking might have taken their toll on Richard Worrell, but he still cut a fine figure.

There were other ways in which Gerald took after him, too – his love of horses, for example. And his love of – or perhaps his lust for – women. Gerald had been just sixteen when Richard took him to his first brothel, and the lad had settled into it as quickly as he’d taken to the other kind of riding. All part of the plan, Richard thought.

Richard had always been a planner, and patience was his greatest – if not his only – virtue. The way he’d dealt with Becky Taylor had been a good example. He could have had her that night at the fairground, when she was only thirteen, but he had waited – savouring the thought of what was to come – until she was nineteen. Only then, when she had ripened into full womanhood, had he seduced her.

‘You could still have been mine, Becky,’ he growled to the empty room. She should have been his. Marrying her had been out of the question – a saltminer’s daughter was no proper match for the saltworks owner – but he had offered to set her up as his mistress, and that should have been enough for her.

Yet she had had the nerve to turn him down. Then, as if to add insult to injury, she had married his brother Michael.

There were other scores, besides that, which he had to settle with Becky. Like the part she had played in getting his wife, Hortense, released from the lunatic asylum he had confined her to after she had given birth to her second child – her second, not his. What a deal of trouble Hortense’s release had caused him! What legal battles he’d been forced to fight for custody of Gerald.

‘Let your wife have the boy,’ Richard’s lawyer, Horace Crimp, had advised him.

‘Never!’

‘With respect, I really don’t think you’ve thought this through carefully enough, Mr Worrell. If the case goes to court, then it is bound to come out that … ’

‘That what?’

‘Well, that your wife has … ’

‘Cuckolded me with one of my own servants?’

‘Something like that.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘You’ll be a laughing stock.’

‘I told you, I don’t care. As long as I can keep my son, I’m willing to tolerate anything.’

It had come out in court and, as Crimp had predicted, there had been much sniggering behind Richard’s back. He had been willing to pay the price for Gerald’s sake, but he had never forgotten that without Becky’s interference there would have been no price at all.

But perhaps the worst of all the wrongs Becky had done him had been to insist – while Hortense was still in the asylum – on adopting the child of his wife’s shame. So that now, every time Richard drove up Ollershaw Lane to the saltworks, he ran the risk of catching sight of Billy Worrell – and of being reminded of his own humiliation.

Oh yes, Becky had a great deal to account for, but soon – very soon – he would have his revenge for all she had done to him.

The door to the study swung open, and Gerald walked in. How handsome he was, with his broad shoulders, jet-black hair, dark eyes and a mouth which could seem cruel, but had an appeal few women could resist.

‘Are we planning to go out “visiting” tonight, Father?’ the young man asked.

Richard took a reflective sip of his malt whisky. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘I’m told there’s a new house opened in Liverpool which is supposed to have some very interesting young girls on offer. Would you like to go there?’

Gerald smiled. ‘Do you know, I think that I would like that very much indeed.’

Darkness settled over Rudheath, but though the bakers and deliverymen had long since gone home, a light still burned in the converted barn which was now the shiny-clean home of Worrell’s Famous Cakes and Bread.

At the big table, which was situated near the main door, Michelle Worrell was poring over the columns of figures in a huge, leather-bound ledger. This had once been her mam’s job, but ever since she’d left Oxford, Michelle had taken over the task herself.

She didn’t work exclusively for her mother. A number of other businesses in Northwich had soon come to appreciate the advantages of employing a quick-minded young woman like Michelle, and though she’d only been back home for a little more than a year, she already had more work than she could really handle.

‘I’ll turn down the next person who asks me if I’ve got any free time,’ she promised herself. But she knew she wouldn’t, because it was good to keep busy.

She had never imagined she’d end up a kind of glorified book-keeper, she thought as she scanned another column. When she’d set off for university she’d had other plans. She was going to get her degree as a first step, and then, if she was good enough, a university teaching post. Even before she left Marston, she could already see herself lecturing to enthralled young students, filling them with the same enthusiasm she felt, inspiring them to go on and make great discoveries.

Dreams! Dreams which had crumbled around her. Yet it wasn’t her studies which had defeated her. It had been Oxford – or rather, the people she had met in Oxford.

She remembered the first social event she had attended – a gathering in the Junior Common Room, where all the new ‘young ladies’ were expected to get to know one another. The problem was, from Michelle’s point of view, that many of the young ladies seemed to know each other already. She had stood alone in the centre of the room, watching groups of old friends catch up on the gossip, and never felt lonelier. Finally, she had plucked up the courage to approach a slightly haughty girl who was standing by herself, impatiently consulting her watch every few seconds.

‘Hello, I’m Michelle Worrell,’ she said hesitantly.

The haughty girl looked her up and down, the expression clearly saying that she did not really consider Michelle passed muster. ‘One of the Hampshire Worrells?’ she asked.

Michelle laughed awkwardly. ‘No. One of the Marston Worrells, actually.’

The haughty girl raised an eyebrow. ‘And where on earth is that, may I ask?’

‘Near Northwich.’

‘I’m none the wiser.’

‘Have you heard of Warrington?’

‘Vaguely. I think.’

‘Well, it’s near there an’ all.’

The girl had grimaced at ‘an’ all’, and Michelle, who was always considered to talk posh by most people in the village, realised that her accent must sound very common to this well-bred young lady.

‘Isn’t all that area very … well … industrial?’ the haughty girl asked, as if she was giving Michelle an opportunity to correct her misapprehensions.

‘There’s a lot of saltmines an’ brine works around there,’ Michelle admitted.

The haughty girl had put her hands up to her face in mock horror. ‘Oh, my dear, how awful for you! I imagine it was a great relief for you to go away to school.’

‘I didn’t go away to school.’

The haughty girl looked like she could hardly believe her ears. ‘Then where did you receive your education?’

‘At Marston School until I was fourteen, an’ then at the technical college in Northwich. You see, me mam – my mother – didn’t want me goin’ away from home.’

The haughty girl sighed as if she had finally given up. ‘Well, I’m sure you’ll have a wonderful time here after the technical college in … Northwich, was it?’ A new group of chattering young women entered the room, and the relief was evident on her face. ‘And now if you’ll excuse me,’ she said to Michelle, ‘there are some people I simply have to talk to.’

Michelle soon learned that the other students fitted neatly into two categories: there were the country set, who regarded Oxford as little more than a finishing school, and there were the professional types, the daughters of big city solicitors and doctors, who were more serious, but no less at ease in their new surroundings.

Michelle, a baker’s daughter – a tradesman’s daughter – fitted in with neither group. Conversations, when she had them, were awkward, and she was always conscious of the girls looking out of the corners of their eyes, as if what they wanted most in the world was to get away from her. And so, since they didn’t seem to want to talk to her, she stopped trying to talk to them.

She fell into a routine, once her lectures were over, of cycling straight back to her lodgings in Brewers Street, a pile of books in her bicycle basket to keep her occupied during the long night.

A couple of weeks into the term, she started to hear whispered references to someone called ‘the mouse’, references which were usually followed by giggles, and it did not take her long to work out the mouse in question was her.

She threw herself even deeper into her studies. While the other girls went to dances, drove out to the country in young men’s cars, or had riverside picnics, Michelle pored over books on the binomial theory.

It was like being trapped in an unreal world, where time passed, but she was not allowed to grow. She had her nineteenth birthday, and then her twentieth – both spent alone in her room – and she felt no more like an adult than she had at eighteen. If anything, she felt even less like one, because she was losing the knack of talking about anything but her work.

She lasted for two and a half years before she finally cracked. The college doctor said it was a mild nervous breakdown brought about by worry over her studies, and the death of her father. But it wasn’t. The work had been going well, and though Michael’s death had shocked her, she could have survived that. No, it wasn’t either of those things. It was the loneliness and isolation which she could no longer take.

‘You’ll wear your eyes out with all that studyin’,’ said a voice from the doorway of the bakery.

Michelle looked up into the grinning face of her brother Billy, who was the head baker. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked. ‘You should have gone home hours ago.’

‘I did,’ Billy admitted, ‘but then Mam told me that you’d be workin’ late tonight, so I thought I’d drop in an’ make sure that you were all right.’

Michelle smiled fondly at her brother. He was nearly two years younger than she was, but they had always been close, and as he had grown older, Billy had become more and more protective of her.

Michelle remembered when Mam had rescued him from the dirty old coal barge which had been his foster home. He’d been such a pathetic little thing with barely more meat on him than a half-starved rabbit. He hadn’t been able to speak a word and had crawled round the. . .