War Orphans Read Online Free

knows where they takes them,’ he said, his accent as careless as usual. ‘How about I go there and see about gettin’ her back? I mean, she’s yer cat, not yer stepmother’s.’
    Joanna managed to stifle a sob. Her eyes were wide with pleading.
    ‘Could you really do that? Do you really know where she is?’
    Paul had only an inkling of where Lottie might be but he was desperate to help. ‘Leave it with me. I’m like a cat meself, you know. Can climb and go anywhere I please without anyone noticing.’
    Paul’s father was ‘away’, as neighbours whispered to each other, and not in the army. Rumour was that he was a cat burglar, so to Joanna it followed as only natural that Paul should be following in his father’s footsteps and rescuing a cat.
    Despite the sorrow still gripping her heart, Joanna smiled through her tears. Paul had given her hope.

CHAPTER THREE
    Victoria Park Junior School had been built at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was a red-brick building surrounded by a large playground segregated into infants, junior boys and a separate school and playground for junior girls. Boys and girls were segregated once they reached eight years old.
    The infants entered through the gate on Raymond Road. The entrance to the girls’ junior school was on St John’s Lane and the boy’s entrance was further along.
    Miss Sally Hadley had only been at the school for two years, but to her it was like coming home. She’d grown up around here and attended both the infants and junior schools before winning a scholarship to Colston’s Girls’ School. Having obtained a degree in English at Bristol University, followed by a teaching course at St Matthias Teacher Training College, she had completed a few student teacher assignments before acquiring the situation at her old school.
    In some ways the school had remained the same as it had when Miss Hadley went there, and so had the children attending it. Some were very badly off and lived in the old Victorian terraces close by, some in the bay villas surrounding Victoria Park. The remainder lived in red-brick council houses built in the twenties and thirties on what had been a green hill.
    It had been a long hard day in a long hard week, and although she firmly believed in keeping her worries at home separate from those in school, she didn’t always succeed.
    Worrying about her father was like a toothache, throbbing and untreatable. When would he be his old self again? Why couldn’t he see how much she worried about him? She sighed. No matter how much she’d tried to help him, he just would not be helped. He would not adjust to life as it was now.
    Her mother had died sixteen months ago. Grace Hadley had been a fine figure of a woman, very typical of the late Victorian and early Edwardian age in which she’d come to womanhood. And yet, her fine physique didn’t stop her from collapsing on the street one day when she was out doing her shopping. It was instant, the doctors told Sally and her father, she would have been dead before she had even hit the ground.
    She missed her mother a great deal, but had steeled herself to get on with life. Unfortunately, her father was still in deep mourning for his beloved wife. He barely spoke, ate little and sat staring into the distance, an unlit pipe in his mouth.
    No matter what Sally did, she could not get him to snap out of his despair and get on with his life. He was retired and had no interests, nothing to fill his days.
    Before her mother died he’d loved his garden and a piece of allotment down near the railway line. Seb and Grace Hadley had gardened together, growing the most beautiful flowers, enjoying the exercise and the effort, and working side by side.
    He still went down to the shed down there. She’d assumed he would resume his gardening, looking after it as well as he had done so when her mother was still alive. Hoping it would be so, and keen to encourage him, she’d taken him some sandwiches and a