Unspoken: A story of secrets, love and revenge T. Belshaw (good books to read for beginners txt) 📖

the pair chatted about Jess’s new article for a few minutes. She was just getting to the heart of what she would be trying to achieve with the piece when she heard a light snoring, emanating from the pillows. She kissed Alice on the cheek, walked to the sofa and stretched out with the memoir opened to the final chapter.

Chapter 82

December 1938

On the sixteenth of December, Michael led his small team of men into the yard where four of our own lads were already waiting. He sent them out with shovels and barrows to dig a small trench around the marked off area. When they had finished, a diesel-powered, mechanical shovel, arrived and began moving the earth from inside the marked-out area. The shovel dumped the earth onto the back of both our own and Michael’s trucks and they took the soil to the fields where it would be ploughed in later. Nothing was wasted on a farm.

By the end of the third day we had a four-foot pit dug, and the shovel was idle while lorry after lorry arrived to empty tons of hardcore and gravel around the sides of the pit. Snowy weather stopped work for a few days, but during Christmas week the shovel was at work again, dumping the hardcore into the pit. When the level of ballast reached around a foot from the top of the huge trench, the hired shovel was loaded onto the back of a huge lorry and was driven away.

We hit a cold spell during Christmas week and Michael was loath to start mixing concrete to finish the base slab until the temperature had risen a little, so he put off the work until after the festivities.

That morning, Miriam received a letter from her son, Harry, who lived about thirty miles away, inviting her to stay with him for Christmas. She was overjoyed at the news and hardly stopped crying for two days. There was a telephone number in the letter which meant that she could now keep in touch with at least one part of her family. She had never met any of her grandchildren and had never found out why she had been ostracised by her family, after all she had been through whilst bringing them up. After a quick call it was decided that her son, who was now also a car owner, would come to pick her up on the morning of Christmas Eve, and bring her back again on Boxing Day.

Miriam was concerned about Martha, but I told her that I would manage, even though there was a Christmas party to organise. Her absence would mean we were a woman down on Christmas Eve as we prepared for the workers’ get together, but the wives and girlfriends of the workforce would be on hand to help out in the kitchen anyway. The only problem I could envisage was the last feed of the day, where Martha could sometimes kick up a fuss.

Amy would be at the party, as usual, but this year she had promised to sleep over until Christmas morning, so she could give both me and Martha our presents. I had bought her Artie Shaw’s Begin the Beguine, which had been a hit in America in the summer. It was difficult to get hold of it in Britain, but Amy’s uncle somehow managed to get me a copy. I was really looking forward to seeing her face when I gave her the record, she had only ever heard the song on the radio.

Christmas Day was going to be so much better than the previous year, which had been the first without my mother. It was also my father’s first, and last, Christmas spent in a whisky enhanced, stupor. I was three months’ pregnant and spent the bulk of the day, completely alone.

We woke up to a thin covering of snow on Christmas Eve morning but I knew that wouldn’t deter the revellers. We would just light a fire in the middle of the yard and use it as a Yuletide centrepiece. Only heavy rain could really bring a halt to our outdoor festivities, and even then, we just moved the adults inside and let the kids run riot in the barn.

Miriam’s son, Harry, was only a few minutes late. He was a nice man who gave Miriam a hug while holding back tears. He apologised profusely for not being in touch over the years, but there had been serious trouble within the family, and he had now divorced. To Miriam’s delight, he had the addresses of two more of her children, who had always blamed Miriam for the separation of their parents. Since then, they had seen a far nastier, greedier, side to their father, and they were now keen to make a fresh start with Miriam.

I waved her off with a tear in my own eye. I had always been an emotional person, the first to cry at a reunion scene at the end of a movie, but my tear duct leakage had reached new heights recently. I’d sob at anything, remotely emotionally challenging and I didn’t understand why. Perhaps my hormones hadn’t recovered from having Martha yet or maybe it was a permanent change, brought on by childbirth. Whatever the reason, I was getting through more hankies than knickers.

Barney’s wife turned up early, as she always did. Grace was a stout woman with rosy cheeks and arms that could hug a polar bear to death. She arrived with Benny’s fiancée, who I had never met, and Amy, who had caught up with them on the lane. The rest would arrive in dribs and drabs over the course of the morning, carrying baskets of sandwiches, mince pies, bottles of lemonade and handfuls of Christmas cards addressed to their recipients, even though they would never see the inside of a letterbox.

As usual, I had ordered up a barrel of ale, plus a few bottles of gin for the women who didn’t drink