Lucy Charlton's Christmas by Elizabeth Gill Page B

lived with my mother until then but she died. After that I was sent away.’
    She sounded so bitter.
    ‘Why?’ Lucy didn’t want to ask so many questions, but she didn’t see that she could get any further.
    ‘It is the custom,’ she said. ‘Children come back because of disease and because their parents desire education for them.’
    ‘So you went to live with your aunt?’
    The girl shook her head.
    ‘Only after my father died. He had apparently left no instructions and my aunt seemed to think I would do better here, living with her and coming to school than my previous place, Snowsfield.’
    ‘Your aunt lives in Jesmond?’
    The girl said nothing. The bell for afternoon lessons went at that point and Shamala got up.
    ‘I must go. We have religion.’ Her mouth twisted slightly at the idea. Everyone else called it Scripture, and Lucy thought that Shamala’s way of describing it showed her contempt for the subject, but Shamala said no more, just walked away.
    Lucy had to change and go to hockey, but her attention was with the girl. What was it like to go through so much pain, to lose both your parents and your home and be sent to somewhere that seemed so unreal, so foreign to you that you were out of place? And she had thought she could help, when she knew nothing of such things. How stupid of her, how shortsighted. Shamala probably despised her, if she thought about her at all.
    *
    The next day was Saturday. Nothing was planned at Lucy’s home. Her father went to the office as usual until lunchtime and her mother and sister, Gemma were planning on going shopping, so Lucy went to her father’s office when she judged that he would have finished anything important that he might be working on.
    She loved his office and longed for when she might be old enough to help him there. As a child she had thought she was helping, but now she knew better. However, she
could
help him feed people in cold weather, and that was what he was doing at midday today. He had opened a soup kitchen nearby and was busy there. Nobody was turned away. No wonder her mother complained that they never had any money, her father was so concerned for others he spent everything he could and perhaps more to help. Lucy was proud of him.
    She went across the road to the Church Hall where she knew she would find him, and there he was, in the main body of the hall. The women were in the kitchen, Lucy could hardly see them for steam and it was hot in there. The smells were of carrots, onions and leeks, broth and of bread just come warm from the oven.
    She joined him and he smiled at her and looked over at the people congregated at the long narrow tables. Every seat was taken.
    ‘Are you almost finished here?’ she asked him, ‘I need to talk to you.’
    He put an arm around her. She didn’t like to think she was his favoured child, but it was so. Her mother clearly preferred Gemma, and her father was there for her.
    ‘What is it? Have you come last in recitation?’ He was joking, of course.
    ‘We have this girl at school – Shamala Henderson.’
    ‘You mentioned her to me.’
    ‘Did I?’
    ‘When she first got there. You were concerned, she was so different.’
    ‘She is, and Miss Sheane is worried about her and has asked me to look after her if I can but I don’t know what to do.’
    ‘I think from what you said that she may have a particular problem,’ her father said, but he wasn’t looking at her so Lucy could tell nothing from his face. He let go of her and she followed him beyond the room into the hall where he took his coat, hat, scarf and gloves off the peg and donned them, then said –
    ‘I think your friend may be of mixed race, and almost undoubtedly her father was not married to her mother.’
    This had not occurred to Lucy.
    ‘How did you work that out, you haven’t met her?’ she asked.
    ‘She would not have been treated as she has if she were respectable.’
    ‘She says a lot of children are treated the way she