The Orphans of Halfpenny Street. Cathy Sharp

caught her off guard and she had to fight to get her breath. She must not let her grief overpower her. She must face what had happened to her, face the fact that the man she’d adored was never coming back to her … face the knowledge that his body had been so badly mutilated that it was only his identity tags that convinced his CO it actually was John. Of course Angela should never have known the truth of his death. Her official letter had been brief, merely telling her that he had died in action and was a brave soldier.

      Angela should have accepted that but in her despair she’d cajoled her father into discovering more. He hadn’t wanted to tell her the truth, believing it would make her grief worse, but she’d wanted to know even though it had caused her unbearable pain. For some time she’d felt numb, and that had helped her to carry on at work as if nothing had happened. Perhaps she would have gone on like that if she hadn’t come home after the war ended, but her father had telephoned her, telling her that her mother had flu and was very depressed. She’d come home on a short visit and stayed on because her mother cried and begged her not to go back, and since the war was over there had seemed no reason to return. Angela had promised to stay for a while, and at first it hadn’t been too bad, but now that her mother had recovered she wouldn’t stop plotting and planning to get her married again.

      Mrs Hendry was determined that her daughter was going to enter the circles she had only ever watched from the edge. John’s family was landed gentry, and Mrs Hendry thought that Angela should use his parents to launch herself into society and make a second marriage. She would have had a brilliant social life if John had returned from the war, of course, because he was set to enter politics. They would have lived in London most of the time, enjoying a full life of children, a loving relationship, and entertaining their friends, but his death had left her with nothing and she felt so empty – and the one thing she didn’t want was the kind of marriage her mother craved for her.

      Angela might have stayed with John’s family had she wished, but they were busy people and though they tried to make her welcome she knew she didn’t fit into their world of hunting and shooting, high society. Had there not been a war on, Angela doubted that she and John would ever have met. He was home on leave from the Army some three years or so after the war had started, and would not normally have been in the district. Like Angela, he’d been invited to a dance by a friend and because he was at a loose end tagged along for something to do. The truth was, their worlds were far apart and only love had brought them together. She was just a well-educated, middle-class girl with faintly socialist ideas, pink rather than red, her father teased, and without John she was a fish out of water in his world.

      Mark had been the person who got through to her after she came home, becoming a frequent visitor. He’d taken her out to dinner a few times, telling her about some of the work he did with damaged and vulnerable children in a London clinic; he’d woken something in her with his stories of suffering. She’d never had cause to think of poverty, of people living on the edge, dying of terrible illnesses that were the result of dirty living conditions and poor diet. His words had made her aware of a desire to do something in return for all that she’d been given, all that she’d taken for granted until a cruel fate swept away the only thing that truly mattered. The feeling of numbness had left her, but that made her more conscious of what she’d lost – of the emptiness of her life. The kind of position Mark had outlined was perfect for her, almost as if it had been engineered for her sake.

      He wouldn’t do that, would he? She decided it was unlikely.

      Feeling a flicker of excitement at the prospect of a new job and a new life, Angela knew she had to keep it to herself. Mother wasn’t going to like it when she discovered that she was going to live in London and work in a slum area. Daddy would support her, of course; he was such a darling, but he didn’t like arguments in the house. Once Angela was sure of her ground she would fight her own battles. She wasn’t a child any longer.

      Walking into the highly polished hall of her parents’ house, Angela saw that her mother was just setting a bowl of the most beautiful roses on the half-moon table. An antique handed down through her father’s family, it was just one of the beautiful things in a house that was furnished in the best of taste, because Phyllis Hendry did everything well. Having set down the roses, she turned and saw her daughter enter, her brow furrowing in slight annoyance.

      ‘Where have you been all morning? Mrs Finch called to invite us to a dinner she is giving next week. Did you not promise that you would give her a cutting from our garden?’

      ‘Yes, I had forgotten. She wanted a piece of the white lilac, because she has the blue but particularly admired our white blossoms in the spring. I’ll take a few cuttings to her this afternoon. There are some other bits and pieces she might like …’

      ‘We have tea at the Robinsons’ this afternoon,’ her mother reminded her. ‘Really, Angela, can you not even remember our social engagements from one day to the next?’

      ‘I’m sorry, it had slipped my mind. Do I have to go? I have nothing in common with Mrs Robinson.’

      ‘You accepted her invitation. It would be rude to cry off now. Besides, you may take those cuttings to Mrs Finch in the morning, unless you have engagements of your own?’

      Angela shook her head, heading towards the stairs. Her mother took it for granted that she would resume the life she’d led before she married John, but she couldn’t. Angela found the whole idea tiresome. Endless tea parties, mindless chatter about unimportant matters, and women who thought that social position and money were everything, bored her. What her mother found shocking she often thought vaguely amusing, and when the last vicar’s wife had run away with her lover Angela had silently cheered her on, while all her mother’s friends tore her character to shreds. In fact she no longer fitted into the snug and comfortable world her mother had made for her family. She wasn’t the same person that had frittered her time away before her marriage, and she could only pray that soon she would have a chance to do something worthwhile with her life …

       THREE

      Sister Beatrice pushed the clutter of paper, pins, elastic bands and pens on her desk to one side with a sigh. She had never expected there to be quite so much accounting to do when she’d accepted the post as Warden of St Saviour’s. She felt it to be such a waste of time when the children and staff needed her. The home was understaffed as it was and she could not spare the time to write endless reports and keep the accounts, which, as a devout nun, she found distasteful. Having made her point clear at the last meeting of the Board, which she was forced to attend each month – another waste of time – she hoped that they would accept the admittedly skimpy report she’d written up in the early hours of that morning.

      She’d set aside the evening to do it, but three new inmates had been admitted; suddenly orphaned by the loss of their mother to some kind of violent poisoning, probably from food contaminated by flies or worse, the children had nowhere else to go. Had Nan been on duty she might have stuck to her plan, but the woman she trusted most in the world had gone down with a bout of influenza the previous day and was at home in bed. Sister Beatrice did not consider any of her nursing staff competent to admit three terrified children late at night. Sally, a dedicated young carer but with no nursing training, had washed them and put them to bed, but they had first to be examined to make certain they did not have any symptoms. If the illness that had taken their mother was not food poisoning, as she’d been informed by Constable Barker, but an infectious disease, it could have wreaked havoc amongst the other inmates. However, since the woman was a known prostitute and drank too much, it seemed likely that a nasty bout of food poisoning would be enough to kill her.

      Sister Beatrice had examined them all herself, and apart from some bruises to their arms and legs, a couple of untreated sores on the eldest boy’s leg, which needed bathing with antiseptic and the application of a soothing salve, and the fact that they all looked emaciated, she passed them as fit. No sign of disease, thank goodness; no lice either, which was quite often the case with children from the slums around Halfpenny Street. She’d asked if they were hungry, or if they’d eaten anything that made