A Stepney Girl's Christmas (eBook)
90 Seiten
Corvus (Verlag)
978-1-83895-764-3 (ISBN)
I was born within the sound of Bow Bells in Whitechapel and my family have lived in East London since the 1820s. Until Nov 2015 I was a qualified district nurse with a BSc in Community Nursing and a MSC in Teaching and Leadership. I am also a member of the Queen's Nurses' Institute and spent my entire nursing career in East London. In 2006, when I won the Harry Bowling prize I signed my first contract with Orion for my East London post-war nurses series. I moved to Atlantic in 2016, who re-published my East London Nolan Family Victorian sagas and my best-selling WW2 Ration Book series, featuring the boisterous East London Brogan family. I have a total of nineteen published novels and a non-fiction autobiography of growing up in the East End during the 50s, 60s and early 70s. I now live in Bedford with my very own Hero@Home who is a rector in the Church of England. I have three daughters and eight grandchildren plus an elderly, very affectionate cat. When I'm not tapping at my key board I enjoy travelling, walks in the country and socialising with friends and family.
Jean Fullerton was born within the sound of Bow Bells in Whitechapel and has lived in East London since the 1820s. Until Nov 2015 she was a qualified district nurse with a BSc in Community Nursing and a MSC in Teaching and Leadership. She is also a member of the Queen's Nurses' Institute and spent her entire nursing career in East London. In 2006, when she won the Harry Bowling prize she signed her first contract with Orion for her East London post-war nurses series. She moved to Atlantic in 2016, who re-published her East London Nolan Family Victorian sagas and her best-selling WW2 Ration Book series, featuring the boisterous East London Brogan family. She has a total of nineteen published novels and a non-fiction autobiography of growing up in the East End during the 50s, 60s and early 70s. She now lives in Bedford with her very own Hero@Home who is a rector in the Church of England. She has three daughters and eight grandchildren plus an elderly, very affectionate cat. When she's not tapping at her key board she enjoys travelling, walks in the country and socialising with friends and family.
Chapter One
With the cream-coloured hearth tiles biting into her knees, Eleanor Jolly, Ella to her friends, leaned forward and brushed the soot that had fallen down the chimney overnight on to the hand shovel and threw it back into the empty grate.
It was the last Friday in November, just after five in the morning and just over three weeks before Christmas Day. After his early-morning bottle, her six-month-old son James was asleep in the pram tucked in the corner, so Ella was doing what she had done every morning since the day she got married back in February: lighting the ancient black-lead range in her mother-in-law’s kitchen.
Returning the fire utensils to the battered tin at the side of the stove, Ella breathed over her hands then rubbed them together vigorously to restore the circulation. A sheen of ice had sparkled on the pavement puddles as she’d made her way home from the shelter an hour earlier. She’d even caught the faint whiff of snow in the air, although this could have been wishful thinking. After three months of nightly visits from the Luftwaffe, even a blanket of Christmas snow wouldn’t turn the bombed and burnt-out streets of Stepney festive.
Turning her attention back to the task at hand, Ella grabbed a couple of sheets of last week’s Daily Mirror and scrunched them up. Placing them evenly in the stove’s firebox, she added the handful of kindling she’d carried in with the coal scuttle in the back yard. Rummaging in the pocket of her wraparound apron that was probably older than she was, Ella pulled out a box of matches. Lighting one, she thrust it into the crumpled paper. It flared in an instant. Ella added a couple of small nuggets of coal then, after a moment, a couple of larger ones. Satisfied that the fire was established, she shut the cast-iron door.
Rocking on to the balls of her feet, she stood up as the cellar door handle rattled, warning of her mother-in-law’s imminent arrival.
Mindful that she would need enough water for a pot of tea and her in-laws’ morning ablutions, Ella took the kettle from the top of the stove. She put it under tap just as the door burst open. With her greasy, grey hair hanging in rats’ tails around her face, a cigarette dangling from her lips and her well-worn slippers scuffing the lino, Ruby Jolly, Ella’s mother-in-law, lumbered in.
Just shy of her fifty-second birthday, Ruby Jolly described herself as big boned; in truth, being four foot ten and weighing in at twelve stone, she gave the appearance of being as wide as she was tall. With forearms that would be the envy of any wrestler and a temper like a firework, Ruby ruled her husband and the costermongers who traded in the Waste Market, where the Jollys had their fruit and veg stall, in much the same way that a lion tamer commanded their beasts.
‘Is that water ’ot yet?’ she asked, the front of her stained dressing gown flapping open to reveal her crumpled flannelette nightdress and unstockinged bloated white calves.
‘Almost,’ said Ella, setting the kettle back on top of the stove.
‘Well, I ’ope it is because my Ernie’s expecting us on the stall in an hour,’ said Ruby, lowering herself on to one of the kitchen chairs.
Ruby was often heard to remark that she and her husband Ernest had never had a cross word in over thirty years of married life. Ella could believe it.
Except for Sunday, Ernie rose every morning at three o’clock and went to Spitalfields to fetch crates of fruit and veg for the stall. Ruby and her sister Pearl took over at six, after which Ernie came home and went to bed, getting up just as the Little Star public house around the corner opened for lunchtime drinkers. Having drunk solidly for two and a half hours, Ella’s father-in-law would return home to spend the afternoon snoring in the armchair. Ruby and Pearl trudged through the front door at about six thirty, by which time Ernie was on his way back to the pub. After wolfing down their supper, Ruby and Pearl put their hats and coats back on and followed him to the Little Star. They sat in a quiet place in the corner while Ernie propped up the bar until nine, when he returned to the house for a few hours’ sleep. Clearly the success of their marriage was due less to compatibility and more to the fact that they barely saw each other.
Lifting the lid from the saucepan of porridge she’d left soaking before she went to St Winifred’s shelter the night before, Ella gave it a stir then rested the sticky spoon in one of the bowls near by.
Ruby’s bloodshot eyes flickered on to the copy of A Christmas Carol Ella had borrowed from Bancroft Library the day before.
‘I suppose you’ll be sitting around here all day reading while me and Pearl are grafting on the stall,’ said her mother-in-law, as cigarette ash fluttered down on to the skirt of her nightdress.
‘No, I’ll be helping roll bandages and stitching slings for the Red Cross in the church hall this morning and then I’ll pick up tonight’s meat from the butcher’s and make supper,’ Ella replied, spooning tea into the brown earthenware pot.
The kettle started to whistle so Ella removed it from the heat and poured water over the leaves. Popping the knitted cosy over the pot, she took down three mugs. As she poured in the milk, her son gave a little cry.
Leaving the tea to brew, Ella went over to the deep-bodied pram where six-month-old James had wriggled himself up and had his head wedged into the corner of the Silver Cross’s body work.
Reaching in, she lifted out the sleeping baby.
‘Well, young man,’ she said, smoothing a tuft of dark brown hair very like her own. ‘You’ve got yourself into a right pickle, haven’t you?’
Rubbing his eyes with his little fist, her son yawned by way of reply.
‘’Ow many times do I ’ave to tell you to leave ’im be?’
Ella looked over the top of her son’s head at her mother-in-law, who was rolling one of her pendulous breasts back and forth as she scratched beneath it.
‘James has got ’imself wedged,’ Ella replied.
Ruby’s lips pulled tightly together. ‘You’ll spoil him if you keep picking ’im up.’
‘I think he’s still got some wind,’ said Ella, studying her son’s delicate, dark eyelashes and the soft curve of his cheek.
‘Perhaps if you’d weaned him off the tit sooner – as I told you to – he wouldn’t have,’ her mother-in-law said. ‘I had my Barry on a bottle by three months and he never had no wind. But what do I know? I only raised a strapping six-foot son that any woman would be glad to have called their own.’
Strictly speaking, ‘her’ Barry was actually Ella’s Barry and she had the certificate signed by St Winifred’s rector to prove it, but she didn’t argue the point.
It was traditional for newly married couples to move in with the bride's parents, but given she was all alone in the world, and with an expanding waistline by the time they hastily tied the knot, Ella was in no position to argue when Ruby insisted the newly-weds were to move in with her.
Ignoring her now, Ella laid her son’s head on her shoulder and hummed as she rocked him back and forth.
‘Santa Claus is coming to town …’ she sang at the end of the festive ditty.
‘Christmas!’ tutted Ruby. ‘Load of old cobblers.’
‘Well, not for James,’ said Ella, pressing her lips on her son’s forehead again. ‘I thought perhaps I’d put a few Christmas decorations up this afternoon. I know it’s a bit early but—’
‘Don’t bother,’ cut in her mother-in-law.
‘But it’s Christmas,’ persisted Ella. ‘I know you can’t get a tree for love nor money, but surely a few paper chains and a bit of tinsel wouldn’t hurt. And if we put our Christmas cards up on the mantelshelf, that would jolly the place—’
‘I’ll tell you where you can stick your Christmas cards,’ cut in Ruby. ‘The ruddy stove, that’s where.’
‘Well, everyone else is,’ said Ella. ‘And I thought it would be nice, that’s all. Especially for James, as it’s his first Christmas. I know he’s too young to understand but I thought I’d—’
Ruby thumped a beefy fist on the table. ‘This is my ’ouse and I say no.’
‘What’s all the noise?’ asked Pearl Tugman, Ruby’s unmarried sister, as she lumbered though the door.
Although two years Ruby’s junior, with the same bovine features and physique as her sister you’d be forgiven for thinking Pearl was her twin. Having never managed to find a man brave enough to take her on, Pearl had moved in with her sister some twenty years ago. Ella, who had shared a small terraced house with Pearl for the past nine months, thought mankind had had a lucky escape.
‘I was beginning to think you’d died in your sleep, Pearl,’ said Ruby, as her sister wedged her considerable rear into one of the captain-style chairs.
‘It’s that bloody sausage I ’ad off Mosher’s stall last night. Had me awake half the night with ’eart burn,’ her sister complained, taking a pack of ten Senior Service from her grimy dressing gown. ‘A mug of tea might ’elp settle it,’ she added,...
| Erscheint lt. Verlag | 2.11.2023 |
|---|---|
| Reihe/Serie | The Stepney Girls |
| Verlagsort | London |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Themenwelt | Literatur ► Historische Romane |
| Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror | |
| Literatur ► Märchen / Sagen | |
| Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen | |
| Schlagworte | a christmas wish for the land girls • a wrens wartime christmas • bestselling christmas sga • christmas for the shop girls • christmas hope for the steel girls • christmas to come carol rivers • christmas with the cornish girls • Christmas with the Ops Room Girls • free christmas ebooks • free christmas saga ebooks • jenny holmes • quick saga read • saga book deals • the evacuee christmas • the winter rose |
| ISBN-10 | 1-83895-764-2 / 1838957642 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-83895-764-3 / 9781838957643 |
| Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
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