A Sister's Duty Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by June Francis

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  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 Ninteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  She will do what it takes, for the sake of the children . . .

  Rosie Kilshaw is only fifteen when her mother Violet is killed in a tragic accident, but as the oldest of her siblings, she vows to keep her family together, no matter what the sacrifice.

  But as distant family members begin to resurface into their lives, Rosie quickly realizes that there is a lot more to parenting than she first thought. And when her estranged aunt Amelia decides to take them in, she will have a difficult choice to make . . .

  About the Author

  June Francis was brought up in the port of Liverpool, UK. Although she started her novel writing career by writing medieval romances, it seemed natural to also write family sagas set in her home city due to its fascinating historical background, especially as she has several mariners in her family tree and her mother was in service. She has written twenty sagas set in Merseyside, as well as in the beautiful city of Chester and Lancashire countryside.

  Visit June Francis’s website at: www.junefrancis.com

  Also by June Francis:

  A Mother’s Duty

  A Daughter’s Choice

  Lily’s War

  Dedicated with love and gratitude to the memory of my mother May Milburn Nelson and Great Aunt Jane, who took Mum and her sister Flo in when their mother died.

  ‘Duty is the cement which fills in the cracks in a family and helps hold it together’

  – J.F.

  ‘Love, it is said, is blind;

  But love is not blind.

  It is an extra eye which shows us

  what is most worthy of regard’

  – J.M. Barrie

  Chapter One

  Where was she? She should have been in by now.

  Fifteen-year-old Rosie Kilshaw paced the kitchen floor, arms folded across her chest, thin fingers gripping the shabby wool of her coat. Her delicate face, all planes and angles in the gas light, was screwed into a ferocious scowl.

  ‘D’yer think she’s forgotten, Rosie?’ piped up Harry.

  ‘She better hadn’t have,’ said Rosie darkly, glancing down at her younger brother and sisters huddling as close as they could to the smoking fire struggling for life in the black-leaded grate.

  ‘She did promise,’ said Dotty, looking anxious as she knelt up on the rag rug.

  ‘She did. But she doesn’t always keep her promises,’ said Babs, the second in the family, flicking back the light brown plait which hung over her shoulder. ‘Where could she be? She’s always late in, lately.’

  ‘God only knows,’ muttered Rosie, impatience and concern forming a tight knot in her chest. It was going to be a big disappointment if they didn’t get to the pantomime this evening. A promise was a promise and although she accepted her mother had to work odd hours doing this extra war job she had taken on, Rosie wished she hadn’t accepted it. The trouble was her mother hated being at home and was blinking pigheaded into the bargain! Rosie could easily have left school and got herself a job by now. But no, Violet Veronica Kilshaw had insisted on her eldest daughter getting an education, which was stupid when they were so hard up.

  Rosie looked down at the three upturned faces framed by royal-blue woolly hats which still had a crinkly appearance, having been knitted from an unpicked pullover by their nextdoor neighbour, and felt a surge of anger. Not with her mother this time but with her maternal grandfather and aunts Amelia and Iris, who lived in the lap of luxury out West Derby way on the outskirts of Liverpool.

  It was more than five years since the row which had caused the newly widowed Violet to storm out of her father’s house, but Rosie, like her mother, had not forgotten or forgiven that day, which had left them both shocked and resentful for different reasons.

  They heard the noise of the front door opening and closing, the tap-tap of high heels on the linoleum, and the next moment Violet entered the kitchen, carrying two shopping bags. ‘Hi, sweethearts.’

  ‘You’re late. I hope you haven’t forgotten, Mam?’ said Rosie, relieving her of the shopping bags and eyeing her flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes with curiosity and relief. Her mother’s moods swung up and down like a yo-yo but this evening she looked particularly pleased with herself. ‘Where the heck have you been?’

  Violet laid a finger against her nose. ‘We all have our little secrets. But – hell, I’m sorry I’m late, kids! Look at you, all ready and raring to go.’ Her scarlet-painted mouth widened in a beaming smile as she took in their coats and wellies. ‘But I’m late for a reason. I had to go and get my birthday boy his present.’ She bent and kissed five-year-old Harry on the top of his balaclava-clad head and took a box from one of the shopping bags Rosie had placed on the chenille tablecloth. The boy took it from her hands, tearing eagerly at the brown paper.

  ‘Tea’s in the other bag,’ said Violet, seating herself on the easy chair to the side of the fireplace and kicking off her high heels. She rested her curly dark head against the back of the chair and began to hum to herself.

  ‘You have remembered you’re supposed to be taking us to the pantomime?’ said Rosie, undoing the newspaper-wrapped package. Babs, almost fourteen, pounced on the parcel. ‘Is it fish and chips?’ she asked eagerly.

  ‘Of course it’s fish and chips,’ said Dot, her junior by a year. Her delicate nostrils quivered in her lovely face as her head turned in the direction of the table, eyes damaged by a bout of measles unable to focus on her sister.

  ‘Lovely!’ said Babs. ‘I’m starving. We’ve only had jam butties, Mam.’

  ‘Well, Mam?’ said Rosie, knowing Babs’s greed and shoving her aside to open the vinegar-soaked newspaper herself. ‘You haven’t answered. Can’t you afford to take us now?’

  ‘I’ll keep my promise, don’t you worry, but let me have a rest first.’ Violet half closed her eyes, stretching sheer nylon-clad legs towards the fire. ‘There’s a second house, isn’t there?’

  ‘Yes. But that’s at eight o’clock and there’ll be a queue. And can we afford the tram fare to get there on time?’

  ‘Mmmm. I got a bonus tonight,’ said Violet, opening her velvety brown eyes briefly before closing them again and smiling to herself.

  ‘That’s great! But nobody else I know’s mother goes out to work like you do. Let me leave school, Mam? Let me get a job?’ pleaded Rosie.

  ‘No.’ Violet’s expression hardened. ‘You have your paper round and that’s help enough. I want you to do well at school. I want you to get qualifications that’ll help you to get a better job than I’ve ever been able to have. I want you to be able to cock a snook at our Amelia and say: “Look at me! I’ve done it without any help from you Needhams.” Besides, your dad really wanted this for you. They hated him, you know that. They hated him, my two ugly sisters,’ she said vehemen
tly. ‘Dead jealous of me they were – so you’ve got to show them.’

  Rosie had heard all this before, expressed one way or another, and each time it fuelled her own rage because she could not understand anyone hating her father, Joe. He had been so good and kind and funny. Never would she forget the day his body had been brought home, all broken and bruised. Her mother had been expecting Harry’s birth, and after she had recovered from the initial shock had rushed with her three daughters to her father’s house to ask for financial help. None had been forthcoming.

  ‘This is just what I wanted, Mam.’ Harry was on his feet, chubby face alight with pleasure, clutching a red-painted wooden engine to his chest. He leant against her knees, throwing back his head and smiling up at her.

  Violet kissed his rosy mouth. ‘Aren’t I a clever mam? I wasn’t able to get it for Christmas but your birthday’s a much better day, isn’t it, sweetheart?’

  ‘How much was your bonus, Mam?’ mumbled Babs, her mouth full of chips. ‘It must have been a few pounds to be able to keep us, buy Harry that train and take us to the pantomime as well.’

  ‘Don’t be nosy,’ Violet reproved, a frown clouding her brow. ‘Now pass us some chips before you scoff the lot, greedy guts.’

  ‘What is this work, Mam?’ said Rosie, sawing at a loaf. Her lovely, long-lashed eyes, so like Violet’s own, were watchful. It was not the first time she had asked.

  Violet clicked her tongue against her teeth. ‘All these bloody questions! It’s secret war work, if you must know, so don’t ask again. Now make us a cup of tea, there’s a love, before we have to go out into the cold, cold snow.’ She shivered expressively, winking at Harry as Rosie handed her a folded slice of bread with chips inside.

  ‘Has it really started snowing?’ he asked, his eyes shining.

  She shook her head. ‘But Jack Frost is about and the pavements are bloody slippy. I don’t know how I didn’t break my leg getting here.’ She cocked her dark head on one side and grimaced. ‘You are all sure you want to go to the pantomime? It’s freezing out. We could stoke up the fire and put on the wireless?’

  Their faces fell, uncertain whether she meant it. ‘But you promised!’ wailed Dotty. ‘And it is Harry’s birthday.’

  ‘I know, I know. Keep your hair on,’ said Violet, biting into the chip butty. ‘You don’t all have to look like a wet weekend. I was only joking.’

  ‘Thanks, Mam,’ said Harry, looking relieved.

  ‘You’re a good lad.’ She ruffled his hair. ‘The spitting image of your dad.’

  And he was, too, thought Rosie, biting into a chip butty herself. Family likeness – you couldn’t get away from it. He had Joe’s flaxen hair, blue eyes and easygoing nature. She loved the bones of him. His birth had brought the colour back into their lives after months of Violet’s dark moods and living hand to mouth. Had it not been for the goodness of their neighbours, she did not know how they would have survived. He had been an adorable baby, capturing her heart from the moment he was born. His presence had gone a long way to filling the gap left by her father’s death. Joe and Rosie had been close and he would have loved tonight. He would have said what were chilblains and frozen noses and them being broke for the rest of the month when it came to seeing Mother Goose at the Shakie? Like his four children, he would have walked through a blizzard for such escapist delight on this dark freezing evening of January 1945.

  Their breath formed clouds of vapour as the children raced the tram to the stop. Violet shouted at them to slow down, slithering on the ice in a flat pair of shoes with well-worn soles.

  They jumped aboard. Harry and Babs sat next to Rosie, nudging each other in their high spirits and demanding to know if there would be a beautiful princess in Mother Goose.

  ‘I don’t know. But it’ll be fun, I know that!’ Her eyes were bright with anticipation, remembering the last pantomime she had seen. It had been The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe with Old Mother Riley before the war, and had been her last trip out with Joe.

  Her father had been a carter, and according to Violet, Grandfather Needham had considered Joe not good enough for her. Yet Grandfather Needham himself had pulled himself up by his boot straps to become a pharmacist. Perhaps he was ashamed of his beginnings and that was why he hung on to his money despite having his own shop and a four-bedroomed semi-detached house. Snobs of the first order, Violet had called him and her sister Amelia, and Rosie could only agree.

  ‘What’s with the face?’ said her mother now, startling Rosie.

  ‘I was thinking of Grandfather and the ugly sisters,’ she blurted out without thinking.

  ‘Well, don’t!’ Violet twinkled. ‘It’s not Cinderella we’re going to see, you know. We’re going to have fun this evening, so fix your face.’

  Rosie smiled and committed her relatives to oblivion.

  The tram rattled on down London Road, approaching the Paramount cinema which was across the road from Fraser Street where the Shakespeare Theatre was situated. They all stood up, Rosie holding Babs and Harry by the hand, Violet with Dotty in front. To their surprise and dismay, the tram went rattling past the stop.

  ‘Hey, mate, where yer goin’?’ demanded a youth standing at the bottom of the stairway. ‘I wanted that stop!’

  ‘So did we!’ chorused the children.

  The driver ignored them, pulling desperately on the brake handle as the tram hurtled like a rocket towards William Brown Street, screeching as it went, and straight on past the bomb-damaged Liverpool Museum. Dotty screamed, clinging to her mother’s arm. ‘It’s going too fast!’

  ‘Of course it bloody is,’ muttered Violet as they all swayed and pitched with the tram as it thundered towards Dale Street.

  ‘It’s getting away from him,’ shouted the youth.

  ‘Let’s jump!’ said his mate. ‘I don’t bloody like this.’

  ‘Sweet Jesu!’ The words were torn from Violet as the tram leapt the points where Dale Street met Byrom Street.

  People screamed and yelled as all the lights went out and the tram toppled over. Rosie lost her grip on Babs and Harry and was flung against a seat before rolling over and vanishing between two of them as the tram went skidding along the ground with a noise reminiscent of a knife scraping a tin plate. The next moment, they hit something, making a horrible grinding noise. Rosie clung to one of the seat supports, praying the tram would stop, but it carried on sliding. Then the tram hit something else before shuddering to a halt.

  For a moment, she dared not move and could only think how quiet and still everything had gone. Then, just as the first chirp of a lone bird signals the dawn chorus, came the tinkling of falling glass and shifting bricks, followed by the moans and groans of the injured.

  ‘Rosie!’ screamed Dotty. ‘Mam’s gone!’

  Gone where? she thought, stupefied but beginning to think about moving. The trouble was the floor was not where it should be. But she managed to drag herself painfully upright and took several deep breaths. ‘Harry! Babs!’ she yelled.

  They both answered. Using the seats for support, she was able to move in the direction of their voices. Her gloved fingers touched a bare leg. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Me. Wasn’t that fun?’ Harry’s teeth were chattering as he clung to her arm. ‘Are we upside-down?’

  ‘Something like,’ she said, hugging him.

  He trembled in her arms and she could just about make out his face. ‘Where’s Mam?’

  ‘Here somewhere.’ She tried to sound cheerful, subduing her own anxiety. Carefully, she put him down, ordering him to stay put.

  ‘Don’t want to,’ he said, clinging to her coat.

  ‘You have to while I find Mam and the others,’ she said, coaxingly. ‘Now do as you’re told, please.’

  ‘What a bloody mess!’ said a woman somewhere behind. ‘I’ve been cut.’

  Rosie touched her own forehead where it hurt and the discovery that she was bleeding too made her feel sick, but at least she was walking wounded, she thought. Ho
w would it be with those who weren’t?

  ‘Rosie, help me,’ shrieked Dotty. ‘I can’t get up.’

  ‘Coming.’

  ‘I’m stuck,’ came Babs’s calm voice somewhere to Rosie’s left. ‘One of me plaits is caught on something and it doesn’t half hurt when I pull.’

  Stretching her arm in the direction of the voice, Rosie touched a face. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Babs rubbed her cheek against Rosie’s hand. ‘Can you get me out?’

  Dotty sobbed, ‘Rosie, Rosie!’

  The same female voice which had spoken before said, ‘You go and see to her, luv. I’ll deal with these two.’

  Rosie thanked the woman and made her way to the front by dint of dragging herself from seat to seat. She found Dot wedged under the stairwell by the groaning, prone body of the youth she took to be the one who had been standing at the foot of the stairs. He was barely conscious but she managed to drag him out of the way, realising by the look of the mess about her that the tram had ploughed into a shop window. Her heart began to thump heavily as she wondered if her mother was under all that rubble.

  Dotty’s fingers searched Rosie’s face. ‘It is you but your face is all wet!’ she said, voice trembling with relief.

  ‘It’s blood, but I’m OK. Can you get up?’ Rosie touched her sister’s arm but withdrew her hand swiftly, aware of shards of glass penetrating the wool of her glove. Ordering Dotty to lean on her, she levered her sister upright.

  Suddenly, Rosie was blinded by the glare of headlights as a vehicle squealed to a stop. There was the sound of male voices.

  ‘Here comes the cavalry,’ drawled the woman who had offered to take care of Babs and Harry. ‘The Yanks, by the sound of it.’

  A cheer went up and a voice said, ‘A bit of light on the subject. That’s a relief.’

  ‘I want me mam,’ wailed Dotty. ‘I want me mam!’

  ‘Shut up!’ said Rosie fiercely. ‘Don’t be such a baby. You’re thirteen and you’re making a show of us.’

  ‘But Mam’s gone! She nearly yanked my arm off,’ whimpered Dotty, breath catching on a sob.