Across the Mersey - Annie Groves [141]
The edges of his wound, which had had to be reopened to remove the second piece of shrapnel, were very badly swollen and inflamed.
Mr Leonard did his round escorted by Sister and Staff, and stopped for a long time in the small side ward, but of course Grace, as a lowly first-year nurse, wasn’t able to hang around in the hope of learning how Seb was.
Instead she had to do a locker round, and then go for her lunch, where she was dismayed to have to listen to Lillian going on about how wonderful her doctor boyfriend thought she was.
Poor Luke was better off without her, even though he himself couldn’t recognise that as yet, Grace thought as she ignored both Lillian and her own sisterly desire to remind her of how much she had hurt her brother.
It was late in the afternoon before Grace was finally and almost disbelievingly able to look at the thermometer and see that Seb’s temperature was finally dropping. She was so worried that she might be wrong that she took it again, ignoring Seb’s irritated protests.
Her hand shook slightly as she wrote down the new temperature and then went to inform Sister.
They had given their first show at one of the munitions factories in Liverpool, and Francine was suffering from the normal tiredness that always hit her after a first public appearance in a new show as she opened the gate to the small front garden to Jean and Sam’s house, and then stopped when she saw that the back gate was open.
Only the family used the back gate so she assumed that someone must already be in, and headed automatically for the back door instead, coming to a halt as she rounded the corner of the house and saw a small shabbily dressed boy curled up asleep on the back step.
She recognised him instantly and her heart turned over.
Going to him, she kneeled down beside him and put her arm around him, saying gently, ‘Jack?’
He was awake immediately, fear tensing his body. His face was grubby and he had obviously been crying.
‘It’s all right,’ Francine reassured him. ‘You’re Jack, aren’t you? I’m your … I’m your Auntie Francine …’
He still looked apprehensive.
‘Have you been here long?’ Francine asked him. ‘Only I expect you’re feeling a bit hungry, aren’t you? I know I am. Why don’t we go inside and have something to eat whilst we wait for your Auntie Jean to come home.’
The sound of Jean’s name had an immediate and relaxing effect on him, and although he didn’t say anything he stood up readily enough whilst Francine unlocked the back door, keeping one arm around him whilst she did so. He was so thin, it tore at her heart. She could feel his bones through his shabby blazer and shirt – too thin, surely, for a boy his age.
* * *
Half an hour later, she’d made him a ham sandwich, which he’d eaten as though he was starving.
He’d run away, he’d admitted after she had patiently coaxed him into telling her what had happened. He’d run away because the couple he was living with had told him that the Government had stopped sending them money to pay for his keep and that his parents didn’t want him any more.
The couple, who ran a smallholding of some sort, from what Francine could gather, had had three boys living with them, and all of them had been expected to work on the smallholding after school and at the weekends, but two of them had been taken home by their mother, and Jack had been forced to do their work as well as his own. He’d been kept short of food and threatened with beatings if he complained to anyone. The final straw had been when he had accidentally broken a plate and the woman had locked him in the cellar all night as punishment and then sent him off to school without any breakfast.
Instead of going back to the smallholding after school he had decided to run away and come home. He had walked to the local station and managed to get on to a train to Liverpool without anyone seeing him.
His