The Legacy: Trouble Comes Disguised As Family (Unspoken Book 2) T. Belshaw (management books to read .txt) 📖

spare room at the farm. I had rented it out to one of Amy’s friends for a couple of months earlier in the year, and I had hoped to use it as bait when attempting to snare a temporary worker for the farm until our own lads came back from the war. As it was, the remaining workers could easily manage the reduced workload during the winter months, but come spring, with only eight men remaining, I would be in desperate need of more hands.

In mid-November, I received a call from my old schoolteacher asking me if I could find the room for a couple of ten-year-old kids who, she said, had been placed in haste and were in urgent need of rehoming. She had been offered places for them but it would have meant splitting them up, and she was very concerned about that.

I shouted Miriam in from the kitchen and we had a ten second chat before agreeing to take them. The teacher said she’d drop them off that very afternoon.

Many of the children who turned up on that train had gone back home again because the expected bombing raids hadn’t materialised, but these two kids had been unlucky. The same afternoon they arrived at Spinton their London home had been destroyed in a blast caused by a gas leak. Their parents, whilst unharmed, had to split up and live with relatives in a different part of the capital and there was, at the moment, no room for the children. The Council had told them they would be rehoused, but warned them that, because of the call up, the housing department had been left woefully short of manpower, and it might be months before a house in their area could be found.

The kids were called Stephen and Harriet. They arrived looking dishevelled, underfed and uncared for. They climbed out of the car at the front of the farm, each carrying a battered little case, looking frightened and anxious. To say their clothes had seen better days was a massive understatement. People used better quality clothes to cut up for rags.

Mother Hen, Miriam, immediately took charge of the situation and leaving me to sign their temporary placement papers, she threw an arm around each of the poor little mites and led them through the back door, into the kitchen. By the time I got there, carrying two tiny cases containing a change of clothes that were in an even worse state than the ones they were currently wearing, they were sitting in front of our big pot-bellied stove, holding mugs of warm milk and hungrily eyeing up the sandwiches that Miriam had prepared for them earlier in the afternoon.

I took Martha out of her cot and sat her on my knee, she was fascinated by the new arrivals who took an almost equal interest in her.

‘This is Stephen and this is Harriet,’ I told her.

‘Ste-un an ‘arret,’ Martha repeated.

I looked at her in amazement. For a toddler that struggled, or stubbornly refused, to utter the word Mama, their names fairly tripped off her tongue.

After they finished eating their sandwiches, Miriam ran a hot bath and taking the pair by the hand, led them through the parlour to the bathroom I’d had installed the previous year. When they came out, wrapped in fluffy, white towels, their faces pink and sweating, blonde hair stuck to their heads, I sat them in front of the pot-bellied stove, and as their thin little bodies dried off, I brought out a book from under the stairs that my father had bought me when I was about their age. Sitting between them, so they could both see the wonderful E. H. Shepard illustrations, I read them the story of Winnie the Pooh and his friends from the hundred-acre wood. I had always felt an affinity with Pooh, as I lived on a one-hundred-acre farm, and in summer, I used to sit in the copse of maples just below Bessie’s stable and pretend that Pooh, Piglet and Kanga, were my friends, not Christopher Robin’s.

At nine, I gave them both a hug and a kiss on the forehead, and Miriam took them up to the spare room. Martha, who should have been fast asleep by that time, but stubbornly refused to close her eyes, waved her hand to them as they went up. ‘Ni-night,’ she said.

The next day, we made what was to them, a wildly exciting trip into town in my rickety old truck, to buy new clothes from Woolworths. We also dropped into the thrift shop and picked up a couple of good quality, second hand dresses, a pair of knee length shorts, a few thick, winter jumpers and two pairs of wellingtons for them to wear when playing in the farm yard, which wasn’t the cleanest of places at the best of times.

After lunch, I introduced them to the pigs and let them use the stiff yard brush to scratch the backs of my prize boars, Horace and Hector. Martha, who loved the boars as much as I did, giggled as they snorted and stuck their wet snouts through the bars of the pen.

That evening, Mr Starcher, who worked for the local council, dropped by to see how the children had settled in. They both hid under the table when they saw him walk into the kitchen. I coaxed them out with the promise of a slice of Miriam’s famous jam sponge and the pair stood together holding hands, looking as though the bottom had just fallen out of their world.

‘Don’t let him take us away again, Auntie Alice,’ said a sobbing Harriet.

I assured them that Mr Starcher wasn’t about to do any such thing, and rubbing her eyes with her fist, she backed away towards Miriam, who swept them both up in her comforting arms.

Mr Starcher, it turned out, had reluctantly allowed a couple from Upper Middle Street to take the siblings home on the night that they had first arrived in the