Someone Special
Contents
About the Book On 21st April 1926, three baby girls are born. In North Wales, Hester Coburn, a farm labourer’s wife, gives birth to Nell, whilst in Norwich, in an exclusive nursing home, Anna is born to rich and pampered Constance Radwell. And in London, Elizabeth, Duchess of York, has her first child, Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary.
The future looks straightforward for all three girls, yet before Nell is eight, she and Hester are forced to leave home, finding work with a travelling fair. Anna’s happy security is threatened by her father’s infidelities and her mother’s jealousy, and the Princess’s life is irrevocably altered by her uncle’s abdication.
Set in the hills of Wales and the rolling Norfolk countryside, the story follows Nell and Anna through their wartime adolescence into young womanhood as they struggle to overcome their problems, whilst watching ‘their’ Princess move towards her great destiny. Only when they finally meet to the two girls understand that each of them is ‘someone special’.
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 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 The Lost Days of Summer Christmas Wishes The Runaway
A Sixpenny Christmas The Forget-Me-Not-Summer
Katie Flynn writing as Judith Saxton
First Love, Last Love You Are my Sunshine We’ll Meet Again The Pride
The Glory
The Splendour
Full Circle
Sophie
Jenny Alone
Chasing Rainbows Family Feeling All My Fortunes A Family Affair Nobody’s Children This Royal Breed The Blue and Distant Hills
Dear Reader,
As with all my books, something I have seen or heard has triggered a desire to put it into a story and
Someone Special
is no exception.
It came about after we’d sold our house in Rhyl, but hadn’t entered the children in a new school, since we were not sure where we would end up living. In the interim we borrowed a holiday cottage outside Abergele, so every day I drove along the coast road from Abergele to Rhyl, dropped the children at school and returned to the cottage. With each journey I became more familiar with the scenery along the route, which included the magical Gwrych Castle, just outside Abergele. It was a magnificent, crumbling pile, set against a backdrop of tree-covered mountains, and the road passed close by one of the lodges, which was a small, stone built building, green streaked and neglected, set amidst tall trees.
Every day there was a row of sad looking washing, mostly nappies, dripping on the line. It rained a lot and because of the trees, I wondered how the occupant of the lodge ever managed to get anything dry. I only saw her twice; a thin, bedraggled young creature, despondently reaching up to the line, whilst at her feet a decrepit old basket held yet more uninspiring laundry. On the second occasion she was running down the road with a baby in her arms, splashing from puddle to puddle, chasing a local bus, whilst some way behind her, a heavily built man pursued.
In my imagination, that girl became Hester Coburn, mother of Nell, one of the three girls who were born on the 26
th
April, 1926, the day that the Duchess of York
gave birth to Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary. The third girl was Constance, mother of Anna, whose beautiful home was on the edge of the Norfolk Broads.
So that was how my story started, with a scrawny young girl hanging out washing beneath dripping trees on a wet and deserted road, with Gwrych castle in the background. And the man became Matthew …
Now read on!
All Best Wishes,
Katie Flynn
For Tony Turner, my Australian offspring, who is someone special himself.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Firstly, I should like to thank Marjorie Howe of Rhyl for telling me about Rhyl in the twenties and thirties and for her excellent books on local history, all of which I perused closely to get ‘Pengarth’ the way I wanted it to be. And thanks, too, go to Bert Mather, for telling me about Aden during the war – and about the monkeys! Then, as I pursued my characters across country the staff of the King’s Lynn Folk Museum found me information about their town in the years before and during the second world war. Cassie Turner remembered the small village fairs which toured Norfolk after the first world war, and Dorothy Saxton recalled with great vividness the impact made by the abdication on a whole generation.
Research is like a detective story, however, and librarians are the Hercule Poirot of my research, particularly John Thomas of the Wrexham Branch library, who, upon hearing the word ‘Fairs’ uttered in despairing accents, promptly remembered a small article in a copy of a wonderful little publication –
The Fairground Mercury
– which had been lodged in the reference library by a Mr A. Plinston. I read Mr Plinston’s article, then got in touch with Mr Graham Downie, the editor of the
Fairground Mercury
, who put me in touch with Chris Gibson, whose marvellous article about life on the gaff had already been of immense help. Chris sent me more copies of the magazine and Frances Brown’s fascinating book,
Fairfield Folk
– many thanks to all these people, without whose unstinting and generous help I would never have managed to find out about the rich, tough life of the fairgrounds of Britain.
1
May 1926
IT WAS RAINING
cats and dogs and blowing a gale by the time Hester got out of the hospital, although it had been brilliantly sunny when she left home earlier that morning. She was later than she had expected to be, too, so she just tucked the baby inside her coat and scuttled. She made it to the bus station in time to join the other wet people shuffling aboard the green omnibus, most of them laden with shopping, for people mainly came into Rhyl from the outlying villages to stock up their food supplies at the larger shops.
Hester, with the baby asleep and well out of sight, climbed on to the bus, shoulder to shoulder with a fat woman in black who smelled of fish, and a pert-faced girl whose lip-salve had been applied so generously and with such nonchalance that it even covered her large front teeth. Hester had thought, seeing the crowd ahead of her, that she would never get a window-seat, but she climbed the stairs to the top deck and at the last moment a man, settled against the pane, spotted a friend and stumbled to his feet, moving up a couple of seats. Hester hurriedly slid into the place he had vacated, turned to the window and rubbed herself a viewing port in the steam. Lovely; now she would really be able to enjoy the bus ride, especially if baby Helen continued to sleep.
Someone came and sat beside her; a sideways glance confirmed that it was a middle-aged woman in black, a cloche hat pulled well down over greying hair, cracked black leather shoes on her feet. Bunions, Hester diagnosed, seeing just where the shoes bulged. There had
been a teacher at her school in Liverpool, Miss Appleyard, who had bunions and several of the nuns at the orphanage had suffered from them, too; Miss Appleyard’s shoes had been cracked in just that fashion. The omnibus must be filling up fast, Hester concluded, since older people preferred not to have to climb the stairs, particularly if they suffered from bunions.
Rather pleased with her role as detective, Hester looked down the street towards the distant line of sea and the prom. The bus was due to depart at eleven and her glance took in the clock tower at the end of High Street and confirmed that it still lacked five minutes to the hour. She had caught this bus often enough to know that sometimes the driver started early, more often late, but this morning he was going to be on time; he sat in his seat, revving the engine impatiently now and then but remaining stationary while would-be passengers hurried across the pavement and climbed aboard.
Presently, the conductor came down the bus collecting fares and clipping tickets. Hester, being on her way home, handed over her ticket to be clipped, then shoved it back inside her coat pocket. The woman next to her paid her tuppence; she had probably come into town with someone but didn’t want to wait for a ride home, Hester decided, her lively imagination endowing the woman with a rich friend who had a motor car but no patience with slow and enjoyable shopping. Just as she was about to turn cautiously in her seat to see what purchases her neighbour had made the bus jolted into motion and her attention returned to the view outside.
At first, there was little to see apart from shops and raised umbrellas, but presently they began to jog along the residential roads and Hester’s attention, which had strayed back to her neighbour’s shopping, returned to her peephole.
It was the beginning of May but it had been a long,
cold spring and the weather was still typically April. Not so much as a leaf showed on the trees whose branches tossed wildly as the omnibus surged past them. In the gardens daffodils were finished, wallflowers were in rich, tawny flower and clumps of sweet-scented narcissus, white petalled, orange-eyed, gave their perfume to the wind. Hester, who loved flowers, noticed the pink of flowering currants, the strident yellow of forsythia, and told herself that the worst of the winter was over, that soon summer, with its milder climate, longer days, would arrive. Then what flowerings there would be, what burstings of buds and ripenings of fruit, even in Hester’s small, damp garden plot.
To own a garden, however poor, was wonderful to Hester. Children reared in orphanages, even such excellent ones as the Sister Servina, did not own gardens. Now her fingers itched to plant and prune, seed and sow. If she was successful … but she would be; she would grow rare and beautiful flowers and people would come from miles around to admire them. Perhaps one day she would own a glasshouse – she had seen such things – and would grow peaches, apricots, grapes until she was the envy of all her neighbours.
As the omnibus roared along the country roads, Hester concentrated on her peephole. She had been catching the bus into Rhyl on and off for several months, ever since she had married Matthew, but she never tired of the view. It was such a glorious change after fifteen years of Liverpool city streets, especially now that spring was so well advanced. She admired green upland meadows and stands of thin trees growing on the mountainside, clinging perilously to the almost sheer rocks. She saw a small stone cottage crouching against the side of the mountain, a stream tumbling down in a flurry of white falls, slowing when it reached the mountain’s foot. Presently, as the omnibus came out into a valley,
the stream ceased to hurry and began to meander around the rocks as though it had all the time in the world to reach its destination. They passed a farm, if you could call such a tiny place a farm, with scrawny hens scratching in the yard and geese paddling in the mud beside the pond. Hester saw a man carting muck, a sack around his shoulders and his cap well down over his brow, and wondered about his life; did he live in the farmhouse with a comfortable wife or was she a nag, a nuisance to him? Other people’s lives were so mysterious, so fascinating, particularly to someone who had lived, at best, a sheltered life.
Soon the bus left the valley and reached another stage of its journey. To Hester’s right was the plain leading down to the distant gun-metal grey of the sea, to her left the mountains, hump-shouldered beneath the lowering, rain-filled clouds. She could see Pengarth Castle from a good distance away, looking so much a part of the mountain that you could have imagined it just a series of extraordinary rock formations. It was huge, too, spreading right out along the side of the cliff, in places actually built into the rock. It was grand; Hester wondered idly about the owner. He was lucky of course, because it was such a romantic building, and he must be rich, because who could afford to inhabit such a gracious ancestral home without a great deal of money? But she knew nothing else about him, because Matthew, who worked at the castle, was a man of few words.