Read Online Father Unknown by Lesley Pearse - Free Book Online Page B

was like that, they were asking for trouble.
    Josie was just climbing over the stile on the other side of the road as Ellen came along.
    ‘Why did you run out of school?’ she asked indignantly. ‘Mrs Palstow was very worried.’
    ‘Mind your own business,’ Ellen said. She knew if she told Josie why, she’d tell everyone at school the following day.
    ‘Mummy will be cross with you,’ Josie retorted.
    It was only then as they walked the rest of the way home together that a sudden thought struck Ellen. Mum always seemed to be cross with her, she expected her to look after Josie all the time, do chores and run messages. It had never crossed Ellen’s mind before that there might be a special reason for this, but in the light of what she’d found out today, it had to be because she didn’t like her as much as Josie.
    ‘Sally was talking rubbish, wasn’t she?’ Josie said suddenly, interrupting Ellen’s thoughts. ‘I am your sister, aren’t I?’
    Once again Ellen was thrown into confusion. She couldn’t repeat what her father had told her, he wouldn’t like it. ‘Ask Mummy if you want to know anything,’ she said sharply. ‘She knows everything and I don’t.’
    Violet Pengelly watched the girls coming down the path through the woods from the small kitchen window at the back of the house. But instead of feeling anxious about Ellen, she was furious with her.
    Anger seethed inside Violet constantly, a result of being overlooked and used too often, yet she rarely had any convenient outlet for this anger. She had now; she was convinced her stepchild had wilfully stirred up the events of seven years ago, and in doing so would bring down shame on her and her own daughter’s characters.
    Reason wasn’t in Violet’s nature. She was a bovine, unimaginative type, who never thought things through logically. It didn’t occur to her that it would be distressing for an eight-year-old to be told in a playground that the woman she called Mummy was not her true mother, and that her own mother had killed both herself and her baby. Violet felt that Ellen’s only reaction to hearing she had a stepmother should be gratitude.
    It wasn’t often that she dared voice what she thought to Albert, but the long-suppressed anger had spilt over when he told her what had happened at the school that day. To her shock and further hurt, he slapped her round the face and said she was inhuman. Was it inhuman to expect a child to be grateful to the woman who had stepped in to feed and care for her when there was no one else? And what had Violet herself got out of it? She was treated like a servant, slighted continually, and worst of all, she saw daily that Albert cared far more for Ellen than Josie.
    Josie was the only light in Violet’s life. Through her pretty child she had a small ray of hope that one day she might be released from digging potatoes, feeding chickens and milking cows. Had it not been for this hope, Violet might have been tempted to follow Clare Pengelly’s example and throw herself off a cliff too, and with greater reason. Clare had had everything that had been denied to Violet. She had been beautiful, from a rich family, well educated and on top of that loved and adored by Albert. Violet hated the woman, even though she had never met her, for if she had been given one-tenth of what Clare had, she certainly wouldn’t be living in a tumbledown cottage, working herself into an early grave for such a cold-hearted man as Albert.
    Violet was born in Helston, the eldest of six children. Their father had been a tin miner, but the mine closed soon after Violet’s birth and he was never in regular work again. Life in Cornwall was bleak for all working-class people during the Twenties and Thirties, but for the tin miners it was especially bad, with many families being forced into the workhouse. Violet’s father managed to keep them from that, but her mother was a weak, humourless woman who whined continually, and each time a