Far From Home: The sisters of Street Child. Berlie Doherty

      

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2015

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      Far From Home

      Text copyright © Berlie Doherty, 2015

      Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers 2015

      Berlie Doherty asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      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: 9780007578825

      Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007578696

      Version: 2014-11-19

      Praise for Street Child, the companion novel to Far From Home:

       ‘A terrific adventure story, heart-warmingly poignant and a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit. A magnificent story.’

       Daily Mail

       ‘Berlie Doherty has magic in her’

       Junior Bookshelf

       For Tommy, Hannah, Kasia, Anna-Merryn, Eda, Leo and Tess

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Praise

       Dedication

      Tell Me Your Story, Emily and Lizzie

      1. Take Us With You, Ma

2. Safe Till Morning

3. The Two Dearies

4. Lame Betsy

5. Where You Go, I Go

6. Snatched in the Night

7. No Charity Children Here

8. Alone

9. Mrs Cleggins

10. We’re Going to a Mansion, Remember?

       11. Bleakdale Mill

       12. What Kind of Life?

       13. A Pattern of Sundays

       14. Winter

       15. Miss Blackthorn

       16. I Knew Your Ma

       17. Cruel Crick

       18. Sunshine

       19. I Can Buy Our Freedom

       20. Buxford Fair

       21. Clog Dancing

       22. Bess

       23. The Lost Children

       24. The Terrible Accident

       25. No News for Emily

       26. Where Am I?

       27. Robin’s Plan

       28. The Sheen

       29. Revenge

       30. I Can’t Remember

       31. After the Fire

       32. A letter from Dr Barnardo

       33. Plans

       34. One Last Thing

       Acknowledgements

       About the Author

       By the same author

       About the Publisher

      

      We’re Emily and Lizzie Jarvis. We’re sitting by the window in our room. Outside, we can hear a soft kind of sighing, like the wind in the trees, though we know it isn’t that really. It’s a comforting sound, and it’s lulling us to sleep. But we can’t sleep yet. There’s so much to think about first, so much to talk about. So much remembering to do.

      Would you like to know our story?

      There used to be five of us in our family, and now there’s only two. After Pa died we had to move into a room in a big, crowded tenement house with Ma and our little brother, Jim, and we just managed to keep going because Ma got a job as cook in a Big House. But then she fell ill and she had to stop working. There was no money left to live on, no money for the rent. She gave her last coin to Jim and told him to buy a nice pie for us all, full of meat and gravy. He was so excited. He was too young to understand that Ma thought it was the last good meal we would ever have. But she couldn’t eat it, she was too ill.

      And then the owner of the room came for the rent, and when he saw Ma’s empty purse, and her too sick to earn anything, he turned us out on the streets. Where was there to go? Ma took us to the Big House, down the steps to the kitchen, and she begged her friend Rosie to look after us. And then she told us we must stay there, without her. She must take Jim with her, and she must leave us behind. It broke her heart to tell us that, we knew. It breaks our hearts to think about it. But we must think about it. We must tell our story, every bit of it, so we never forget what it was like for us before we came here.

      This is our story.

      

      “Take us with you, Ma! Don’t leave us here!” Lizzie begged.

      “I can’t,” her mother said. She didn’t turn round. “Bless