Anne Bennett - A Strong Hand to Hold

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published by HarperCollins Publishers 2014

Copyright © Anne Bennett 1999

First published in paperback in 1999 by HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING

Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2014

Cover photographs © Gordon Crabb/Alison Eldred (woman); Doreen Kilfeatner/Trevillion Images (girl); Mary Evans Picture Library (houses); Shutterstock.com(airplanes, hand)

Anne Bennett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007547760

Ebook Edition © July 2014 ISBN: 9780007547777

Version: 2017-09-08

This book publishes in August 2014, the same month that my youngest daughter, Tamsin, gets married, so this book is dedicated with much love to Tamsin and Mark. xxx

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

‘Now are you all right, Mother?’ Jenny O’Leary asked, placing the breakfast tray with the pot of tea and toast spread with the last of the jam ration across her mother’s knees as she sat before the fire.

Norah looked at her daughter with a pained expression – the one Jenny was well used to. The older woman’s furrowed brow caused deep lines to run down her face; the bun into which she had made Jenny scrape her grey hair appeared tighter than ever; and her mouth was set in a thin line. Ignoring the question, she whined, ‘The house is perishing. Put some more coal on the fire.’

Jenny suppressed a sigh, knowing she’d be late for work if she didn’t get going soon. ‘It won’t help to put more coal on, Mother,’ she said, tucking the blanket around Norah’s legs as she spoke. ‘What’s there will burn up in a minute and warm the place, and you know we have to be careful with it.’

She knew her mother wouldn’t believe her. The war was now fourteen months old, and despite Norah having four sons and a son-in-law in the fighting line, she still seemed to think a world war shouldn’t affect her life at all. Before Norah was able to make a reply, Jenny’s grandmother Eileen Gillespie came in from the kitchen.

‘Shouldn’t you be on your way?’ she snapped at Jenny. ‘Go on, I’ll see to your mother.’

But suddenly there was a knock on the door. Jenny raised her eyes to the ceiling. Who on earth would call at this hour? They weren’t expecting any parcels.

When Jenny saw the telegraph boy with the buff telegram in his outstretched hand, for a moment she couldn’t move. Her head swam and she fought against the nausea that rose in her throat. She had the urge to thrust it back at the boy, refuse to accept it, as if not to read that one of her brothers was killed or missing would mean it was untrue – a mistake.

Instead, she found herself not only taking it from him, but thanking him before she shut the door. She stood with the thing in her hand, shaking so much she couldn’t open it. Her grandmother, coming into the hall to see who’d knocked, found Jenny sitting on the stairs, arms around her legs while shudders ran through her whole body.

Eileen’s face blanched white at the sight of the crumpled telegram in Jenny’s hand and she grasped the door jamb for support as she said, almost in a whisper, ‘Who?’

Jenny shook her head mutely and Eileen grabbed the telegram from her and ripped it open. ‘Dear God!’ she wailed. ‘It’s Anthony!’

‘Missing?’ Jenny asked, and she silently cried out to the Almighty to give her some vestige of hope.

But her grandmother shook her head and went into the living room to break the news to her daughter. A howl of agony escaped from Jenny. A hard knot settled in her heart and sent spasms of pain through every part of her body; and although she cried out at the acuteness of it, her eyes stayed dry and she wondered, bleakly, how she’d get through the rest of her life without her beloved brother.

She hardly felt the cold of the hall seeping into her as she sat on the stairs, hugging her knees and listening to her mother’s sobs from the living room and trying to come to terms with the devastating news. Anthony had been in the RAF for just five months, as he’d joined on his eighteenth birthday in mid-June. By then, the true cost of lives lost in Dunkirk was common knowledge and most people knew that just a small stretch of water separated the UK from German armies, and for the first time in many years, the British faced the possibility of invasion and subsequent defeat.

Anthony had been desperate to join up. Knowing the fight to protect Britain would come from the air, he’d soon tired of the Home Guard which he’d joined when war was declared, and where he’d trained with broomsticks, with just a black armband to show he was in any official capacity at all.

Jenny remembered it so well, the day he’d got his wish; he’d stood before her in Air Force blue, his hat at a jaunty angle and the light of excitement dancing in his eyes. And though Jenny was bursting with pride, her stomach had contracted in fear for his safety.

For just a few short weeks, all the time the RAF could spare to train their fighter pilots, Anthony was stationed with the 605 Squadron in Castle Bromwich, not so far away. Meanwhile ‘The Battle of Britain’ had raged in the skies. Jenny read all the news reports. The papers used the number of enemy planes lost in comparison to the British as if it were a score at rugby. Nineteen to four, or fifteen to seven, they’d claim. She doubted the accuracy of the British losses and presumed it was done to boost morale, which she found distasteful. War was no game and every pilot lost belonged to someone.

And far, far too soon, Anthony had become a part of it, stationed in a unspecified airfield in the South. Now Jenny began to pray in earnest for her youngest brother, for while she worried and prayed about the rest of her family, she knew that her younger brother in particular faced mortal danger on a daily basis.