Constance Street by Charlie Connelly

Author:Charlie Connelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-07-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Four

All the refugees had gone now, except one. All of them would come back in the weeks that followed to thank Nellie for her kindness and hospitality, and they were all surprised to see the little girl still there. They’d comment on how spruce the laundry was looking, how everything was back to normal, at least on the surface, and then they’d see a familiar face.

‘Lilian’s staying with us,’ explained Nell, before taking them to one side out of earshot.

‘Her parents were killed, their house was completely flattened,’ she’d whisper. ‘I kept asking if she had any other family, but she says no, she hasn’t, it was just the three of them. Well, I can’t turn her out and I can’t send her to the workhouse, so if you ask me she’s better off here with us. My girls love her, she’s about their age and she’s already calling us her new family.’

Lil seemed to have an old head on her young shoulders. She said her parents trusted her to do things not many girls of her age could. That’s why she wasn’t in the house when the explosion happened; she was just off a train at Silvertown, having run some errands for her mother in Stratford and walking home when she was blown off her feet and across the road by the explosion, landing against some old wooden crates. She’d run towards her home but when she reached the house saw that it was completely destroyed, the bodies of her parents visible in the pile of rubble, and just turned round and walked away, keeping walking until she heard Nell outside Cundy’s offering shelter to those who needed it.

‘I don’t know where she’d have ended up if she hadn’t come in to us,’ said Nell.

There were moments when the mask slipped. Sometimes Nell would hear sobbing in the night and she’d go into the girl’s room and Norah or Ivy would have their arm round her, but the worst one was the night the Knight’s Soap Works caught fire, three months almost to the day after the explosion. It traumatised most people, truth be told, to see the sky burning orange again and flames leaping high into the night, even in an area where industrial fires were almost commonplace, but when at around one o’clock in the morning Nell was woken by screaming and saw the orange light playing on the walls, her first thought was, oh God, not again. She went immediately to the girls’ room where Lil had her hands over her ears and was screaming hysterically. Nell sat with her all night, feeling her body trembling, her heart racing, and her muscles jerking and twitching even long after the fire had been dampened down and the night sky had dimmed to its normal hue. Whatever memories she was replaying stayed behind her clamped eyelids, and it was hours before she even considered letting go of Nell.

The following year, almost exactly a year after the Silvertown

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