Leah Fleming - The Girl From World’s End

It was after eight before she sat down to the basket of mending by the half-finished peg rug. No rest for the wicked, she smiled, and then remembered the letter in her pocket.

‘There’s summat come from Keighley Shall I open it or you?’ she asked, seeing Joe was half asleep in his big leather chair. He grunted as she opened the page, then opened his eyes when there was silence from across the table.

‘What’s to do? Give it here…’

She shoved the letter across the table. ‘You’d better read this,’ she muttered.

He fumbled for his spectacles and gave it the once-over, paused and then searched the flickering flames as if looking for a reply. ‘By heck, that’s a turn-up. I shall have to get on my knees to the Lord about this. Poor lass…and just before Christmas, but it’s too much for us to take on at our age.’ His eyes were pleading with her to agree.

Adey read the letter then she too searched the flames, trying to blot out the image of Ellie’s likeness that lay face down in her dressing table drawer. This was their own flesh and blood they were assigning to an orphanage, their only grandchild, named after their own famous kin, Miriam of the Dale, who had rescued children in a blizzard at great cost to herself.

If only it weren’t Christmas, with stories of wandering strangers and no room at the inn. How could you turn your back on a bairn at such a season and look your neighbours in the eye?

Joe stood up and stomped around the room. ‘The daft happorth! Crossing the line in the dark, getting torn to pieces by an express. It don’t bear thinking about. I’ve seen what engines can do to a dog trapped on a rail. Railway sidings are no place for a kiddy.’

‘It was good enough for two of ours, Joseph Yewell.’

‘And look where it landed them. Ellie and Wesley are backsliders and town dwellers,’ he argued, not looking his wife in the face; not wanting to see her anguish.

‘We were hard on Ellie. Miriam’s not to blame for her parents, now is she? Do we turn our backs on her? What good reason is there for that? Answer me?’

‘We don’t know anything about her,’ Joe snapped.

‘Would you turn out one of yer own stock for running with a tup in the wrong field?’

‘That’s just an animal.’

‘We’re animals too when it comes to looking after our own. Whether we like it or not, she’s one of us: a Yewell with yer own mother’s name. What sort of life will she have if we say no to their request? Can you live with that ’cos I can’t, not now, knowing what we do…’ Adey flushed with heat and began to snivel.

‘I shall have to pray over it. It may not be the Lord’s will.’

‘I don’t know where you dreamed that one up, preacher man. Doesn’t the Good Book say, “Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not”? If it’s good enough for the Master then happen it’ll be good enough for us too.’

‘Adeline, you’ve no idea what you’re taking on…she’s someone else’s child.’

‘Our daughter’s child, mind; a motherless lamb. How many of them have we mothered on in our time?’

‘Let’s sleep on it and see how it feels in the morning. I’m off to check the byres,’ Joe said, anxious to be out of the room, far away from this unexpected request.

Neither of them slept much that night, tossing and turning, pulling the bedclothes this way and that. In the morning the slaughterman would be about his killing business. There’d be no time for private discussions until late.

Adey rose and lit a candle, opening her private drawer, the one that held stuff that was women’s business: douches, sponges, pads and belts. Soon she would be at the end of all that palaver, but to start again with a kiddy and a stranger to a farmhouse? Whose fault was that? It was too much to ask of them.

But as she lifted Ellie’s portrait, those Yewell eyes pierced her through like a spear straight into her heart. ‘Don’t abandon my child,’ they cried out.

She closed the drawer and dressed ready to face this bloody day.

Miriam sat in the railway carriage, stunned with the suddenness of being torn away from everything and everyone she knew. Dad was barely laid in the hard ground and already his face was fading from behind her eyes. Now she was going to live with strangers in a foreign land like Ruth in the bible story. The lawyer said she was a lucky girl to get this change of sky but his words weren’t sinking in.

Her new relation was sitting across from her, bolt upright, staring out of the window, but every so often Mirren caught her snatching glances at her face as if she had snot on her nose end.

Grandma Yewell had appeared in the lawyer’s office when Granny Simms packed a little parcel of clothes and took her down to Keighley on the tram.

‘Now you be good for yer new gran. She’s come a long way to fetch you. Remember your Ps and Qs and don’t fidget,’ she whispered as they sat in the corridor waiting for the door to open to the old man’s office.

‘Now, Miriam,’ he said, when they were admitted, pointing to the lady in the seat. ‘I want to introduce you to Mrs Yewell, mother of the late Ellen Miriam Gilchrist, who’s your grandmamma now. She’s kindly agreed to take you back to the family’s farm for a little holiday in Windebank.’

Mirren bobbed a curtsy like they did to the managers of the school when they came visiting. Her tongue stuck to her teeth.

‘She’s tall for a seven-year-old,’ muttered the woman before her, in a thick tweed coat, brown felt hat and with a dead fox round her neck. She eyed Mirren up carefully.

‘I’m eight and a half,’ Mirren piped back.

‘And sharp with it!’ said the woman.

‘You’re a very lucky girl that your grandparents are offering to take full responsibility for your welfare. Needless to say I hope you will repay them with good behaviour, diligent service.’

‘But I don’t know them,’ Mirren cried suddenly, realising that she must leave with this lady, and clinging to Granny Simms.

‘Now none of that, young lady,’ the old man with the whiskers down the sides of his face continued. ‘You have a whole train journey to get acquainted…It’s as much a burden for them to have to take you in as it is for you to make minor adjustments to your change of circumstances. You were not left in any position to support yourself, my dear. If these kind folk hadn’t offered—’

The lady cut his words off, saying, ‘Come along, lass. We’ve a train to catch or your grandfather will be left standing at the station. It doesn’t do to keep a farmer waiting.’ She smiled with her eyes and Mirren picked up her parcel, knowing there was no other way. She hugged Granny Simms, who wiped tears from her eyes.

‘You’ve got a good ’un there and wick as a weasel, just like her mam, a real lady…’ Granny Simms told Mrs Yewell. Then she was gone.

Why had her gran and granddad never visited her before? There was a big bust-up, Mirren knew, a falling-out over her dad, long before she was born. She knew nothing about farms except that they were smelly places full of cow muck and horse dung. They once went on a Sunday school trip to one up on Howarth Moor, which was a right wild place where some lady had written a story called Withering Hats.

She smiled now, looking at Mrs Yewell’s hat. It was withering at the edges, all floppy with feathers that looked faded and frayed. It must be windy at Windebank. How would she live up in the wilds? She stared out of the window, trying not to snivel as her eyes filled with tears.

There was nothing but green fields and stone walls flashing past the window, walls running in all directions, making strange patterns over the hills: squares, oblongs, triangles and curves, and in the middle were dotted sheep like balls of cotton wool.