Catching Falling Stars Read online

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  Contents

  Cover

  Other great titles by Karen McCombie

  Dedication

  SEPTEMBER 1939

  Chapter 1 Goodbye, Don't Cry

  Chapter 2 Together Apart

  Chapter 3 Here But Where?

  Chapter 4 Safe - and Stranded

  Chapter 5 What a Welcome…

  Chapter 6 No Way Home

  Chapter 7 Glory's Gift

  Chapter 8 Unwanted Guests

  Chapter 9 Run Away, Run Away

  Chapter 10 Making the Best of It?

  Chapter 11 Blue Eyes Red-Rimmed

  Chapter 12 Sunshine and Shadow

  Chapter 13 The Truth About the Truth

  Chapter 14 A Change of Plan

  Chapter 15 The Wrong Friends

  Chapter 16 The Unexpected Visitor

  Chapter 17 Shush, Don't Tell

  Chapter 18 The Outsiders

  Chapter 19 Little Miss Popular

  Chapter 20 The Spring Uncoils…

  Chapter 21 How to Sew a Truce

  Chapter 22 Signs and Stars

  Chapter 23 Time to Go Home…

  Chapter 24 Sunshine and Falling Stars

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  SEPTEMBER

  1939

  I stand shivering on the doorstep and take a deep breath.

  Sticky toffee.

  Milky chocolate.

  Treacle-ish liquorice.

  Like every kid who’s grown up in this part of north London, I’m used to the sugary sweetness that lingers over the whole neighbourhood.

  At the end of the day, shrieks ring out in our little terraced street whenever parents and older brothers and sisters come home from the Barratt’s factory and hand over broken and misshapen treats they’ve sneaked in their pockets.

  But that’s not going to happen today, since there are no children around to shriek and suck on shards of peppermint or striped rock.

  They’re all gone.

  Every child in the street, every boy and girl in my class at school.

  It’s as if the Pied Piper came and stole them all away.

  But they’re not stolen – they’re about to be hidden.

  Clutching suitcases, gas masks and brown paper bags filled with sandwiches, they’ll clamber on to waiting trains, which will chug them to unknown destinations in the countryside. By tonight they’ll all be tucked up in bed in sleepy villages and towns far from London, and far from the bombs Adolf Hitler plans to send to our city any day now.

  They’ll be safe.

  All except Glory Gilbert and her little brother, Richard, whose names aren’t on the lists of evacuees.

  That’s because when it came to it, Mum and Dad just couldn’t bear to part with me and Rich, especially while the sky stayed empty, and free of danger.

  Well, that’s the reason they gave, but of course I know the real reason we weren’t allowed to go…

  “Your face looks funny, Glory,” says Rich, playing hopscotch with himself on the pavement and landing on every crack. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Saying goodbye has made me a bit sad, that’s all,” I tell him, though that’s not the whole truth.

  The whole truth is sometimes too much for Rich, since he’s only six and quite a nervy boy.

  So if I told him how I was truly feeling, it would probably frighten and worry him. He doesn’t need to know that saying my passing goodbyes to everyone just now broke my heart. Or that my chest aches with disappointment, thinking of the adventures my classmates will have without me. Or that I’m frightened and worried myself, of big things like bombs and small things like what’s going to happen with school, since most of the teachers have gone away too.

  “Don’t be sad, Glory! I’m here, and I won’t ever leave you.”

  Poor little Rich; he has no idea that he’s the reason we’ve been left behind.

  Because of his nervousness, because he’s different enough to be bullied, my parents decided he wouldn’t be able to cope with a new life filled with strangers.

  “Thanks, Rich,” I say, twisting the damp handkerchief that’s in my hands.

  Rich smiles happily, unbothered by the fact that we’re all alone, the only children in a street full of adults – unless you count our big sister, Lil. But at sixteen she’s all grown up, working shifts alongside Dad. In fact, any minute now, they’ll be heading off to the factory, where they’ll push up their sleeves, Dad minding the machinery, Lil filling sherbet fountains and cutting long rolls of pink seaside rock.

  “Glory?” says Rich, flopping down on to his scraped, bare knees and pulling his beloved felt toy duck from the pocket of his long shorts. Duckie takes a turn hopscotching along the pavement – helped by Rich – and does a better job of it.

  “Uh-huh?” I murmur in reply, wondering what question Rich has for me.

  His mind has a habit of skipping from subject to subject and sometimes it’s hard to keep up. It drives his teacher scatty.

  “Did you want to be vacutated like your friends, Glory?”

  “Evacuated,” I correct him, avoiding his question. Not telling the whole truth is one thing, but if I say “No, I didn’t”, it’s a downright lie.

  “Of course your sister didn’t want to go!” booms Dad, and I turn to see him striding out of the door of our flat and along the stone-flagged passageway, shrugging his jacket on. “We Gilberts stick together, don’t we? Oi, Lil! Hurry up or we’ll be late!”

  Well, Dad might not be right, but at least it saved me from fibbing.

  “I’m coming!” I hear Lil yell back.

  Her yell is immediately followed by the usual thud-thud-thud from the flat above, as Mrs Mann – our elderly neighbour – stamps on the floor, letting us know in no uncertain terms how much our family annoys her with our noise and jabbering.

  I bet she’d have loved it if me and Rich had been evacuated along with the rest of the local children. Still, she’d have been stuck with Lil and her habit of turning the wireless up loud when one of her favourite American swing bands comes on.

  At least we know there’s one thing that Mrs Mann hates more than us, and that’s the roost full of chickens that Mr and Mrs Taylor keep, in the garden that backs on to ours. When the hens start their clucking and crawing, it’s only a matter of moments till we hear a window whack open and a roar of “Can’t you keep those creatures quiet?”

  “Hey, what are we all doing out here?” Mum calls out, coming out of the flat ahead of Lil, her hands busy with her apron as she wipes flour off them. “It’s chilly with the door open, you know.”

  “They’re waiting for me, of course!” I hear Lil call out, and turn to see her sashaying along the passageway as if she’s off to a dance instead of the factory floor. “They want to cheer and wave me off, don’t you, peasants?”

  Lil can’t help herself; she always grabs the chance to be cheeky. But I adore her anyway. How could I not, when I have her to thank for my name? If she hadn’t called me Glory ever since the moment she stuck her head in my cot and met me, I’d have everyone calling me Gloria, like the grumpy great-aunt I was named after.

  “Hold on.” Dad suddenly frowns at Lil. “Tell me you’re not wearing rouge on your cheeks, young l
ady!”

  “Of course not, Dad,” my sister assures him. “I’m probably just a bit flushed because I’ve been rushing around…”

  As Lil lies herself out of a telling-off, I’m vaguely aware of a dull droning sound, but don’t take much notice till I feel a small hand slip into mine.

  “Glory, Glory, Glory?” murmurs Rich, gazing up at the plane passing overhead.

  He always says my name three times – like a charm – whenever he’s worried, nervous or excited. And looking down into his long-lashed eyes now, I see pure dread.

  “Dad?” I say urgently. “That’s one of ours, isn’t it?”

  Dad glances from me to Rich to the plane in the sky.

  “Yes, yes it is,” he confirms quickly. “It’s definitely one of ours – you can tell from the markings. See?”

  “Course it is,” Lil joins in. “So everything’s all right, Rich!”

  “But why is it up there? Why is it even flying?” Rich starts fretting in earnest, moving from one foot to another. “Are there German bombs coming NOW?”

  “No, son,” says Dad, putting a hand on Rich’s shoulder in the hope of calming him. “There’d be an air-raid warning if anything was happening. The pilot is probably just on his way from one airfield to another.”

  “But what if it’s not? What if this is the proper war starting and the air-raid siren is broken!” Rich frets on, his eyes filling with tears. “Or – or the man who works the siren could be off sick and—”

  “Shh, Rich,” says Mum, crouching down in front of him and running a hand tenderly through his hair. “Everything will be fine. We’ve got our nice, strong Anderson shelter in the back garden, haven’t we? And as long as we’re together, we’ll be safe; safe as houses. No bombs from Mr Hitler will bother us, I promise!”

  “Mum’s right,” I say to Rich, squeezing his hand gently.

  But the fingers of my other hand are crossed, hoping that Mum can keep her promise…

  ONE YEAR LATER

  “Bluebells, cockleshells!” my little brother sing-songs to my skipping, as he sits on the doorstep with the sleeping black-and-white kitten in his lap.

  This one is Buttons. Its sister Betsy – the tabby – is curled up asleep on the top of the Anderson shelter in the back garden.

  Rich got them both last week for his seventh birthday. It was quite a birthday; the kittens arrived and our big sister left, just like that.

  “I’m off to do my bit for the war effort,” Lil announced to Mum and Dad, her suitcase already packed and in her hand.

  “I’ve joined the Land Army, and they’re going to train me to help our hard-working farmers tend their livestock and crops, while all the young men are off fighting for queen and country!” she cheerfully explained to Rich.

  Dad raged at Lil for not discussing it with him and Mum first and for lying about being eighteen to the Land Army recruitment officer, when she’s really only seventeen.

  Poor Mum was beside herself. “But we’re meant to stay together as a family!” she’d said, reminding Lil of the promise she’d made Rich on the day of the evacuation, almost a year ago.

  Lil just laughed, her eyes bright and her cheeks rouged pink, and kissed Mum on the forehead.

  “Ta-ta for now!” she’d called out. “I’ll write soon!”

  We’re still waiting to hear from her…

  “Just a couple more minutes, Rich, and then we’ll go indoors and help Mum, all right?” I pant, breathless from jumping over my skipping rope.

  There’s a huge pile of washing on the kitchen table. With no Lil around, I should give Mum a hand – she’s been ever so busy since she started at the parachute factory.

  Till last week, Lil was employed there too. Working with the silk and the sewing of the parachutes took her fancy when Barratt’s swapped from making dolly mixtures and aniseed balls to assembling gun parts as part of the war effort.

  Dad stayed on, though. And nowadays he’s no soonker home and had his dinner than he’s off changing into his civil defence uniform so he can go out on watch for enemy aircraft.

  “Yes, all right,” says Rich, stroking the kitten as he starts up with the skipping song once again. “Bluebells, cockleshells… Aw, why did you stop, Glory?”

  I’ve let the rope go slack in my hands because we’re being stared at. Hard.

  A stout old lady dressed in drab shades of brown is stomping towards me and Rich, with a laden wicker basket in the crook of one arm and a newspaper tucked under the other.

  “Hello, Mrs Mann,” I say politely, but I know I’m wasting my time.

  Our upstairs neighbour will always find something to moan about. Specially when it comes to my family. Mum says we could be Mr and Mrs Archangel Gabriel and their three angelic kids, and she’d still hate us. “We’d be playing our harps too loud, or littering the yard with too many feathers or something,” Mum joked.

  “Pavements are for walking on, Gloria Gilbert!” Mrs Mann says sternly as she reaches us.

  She knows that Glory is the name I answer to, which is why – of course – she never calls me that.

  “There’s no law that says you can’t play on them,” I feel like muttering back at moany Mrs Mann, but I don’t, since Mum brought me up to always be polite, no matter what.

  “And how you two children can be smiling at a time like this, I really don’t know…” Mrs Mann moans on, holding up her newspaper, as if that should be a lesson to us.

  The paper’s folded but I know what the headline says; I saw it earlier when I went to the shops on an errand for Mum. It’s about the bombing that’s been going on at airfields around the country.

  Dad’s been talking to me about it too. In this whole year since war’s been declared, Hitler’s never bothered sending his Messerschmitts to London. People in the newspapers and on the radio; they’ve called it the “phoney war”, ’cause there’s been no fighting here, no trouble at all.

  The real war has been happening far away, in countries safely across the sea from us – and so lots of evacuees have been drifting back home to the city.

  But in the last few weeks things have changed.

  German bombers have targeted ships in the English Channel and even some coastal towns – and now Hitler’s decided to take a pop at the planes and runways of the Royal Air Force. That’s what today’s papers are full of.

  Dad says we’re not to worry, though; the RAF are doing a top job of seeing off the Nazi planes.

  So if Dad says we’re not to worry, then I’m not going to let moany Mrs Mann scare me.

  “The war will be on our doorstep any day now, mark my words!” she barks as she disappears into the passageway.

  “Ignore her! Silly old moo,” I say to Rich, pulling a face at Mrs Mann’s back. “Bluebells, cockleshells… Uh-oh. What’s wrong?”

  I stop skipping again when I see the panic in my brother’s eyes.

  “Glory, Glory, Glory?” he says, shuffling nervously from one foot to the other. “What was she saying? What does she mean? Are soldiers coming? Will there be shooting? Is the war here at last?”

  “No, not at all,” I say sharply, and grab my brother’s hand. “Let’s go inside and see Mum, shall we? Maybe if we ask nicely she’ll give you some money for that new Wizard comic you wanted…”

  I’ve got to act fast and get my brother indoors and distracted, ’cause once Rich starts panicking, it’s incredibly hard to calm him down. He’ll spiral into tears and screams and then the net curtains will start twitching like billy-o, with neighbours either sympathizing with our family for having such a peculiar, nervous child, or tutting about his ridiculous behaviour.

  Thankfully, at the mention of his favourite comic, Rich gives a little hiccuping gulp, and I see I’ve got his attention. This might be all right if—

  WEEEE-oooooo-WEEEEEE-oooooo-WHEEEEE…

/>   A sudden ear-bursting, heart-stopping whine blasts through the air, the sound rising and falling ominously.

  Me and Rich, we’re both frozen to the spot.

  “It’s fine,” I tell him in a firm voice. “It’s just an air-raid warning. It hasn’t meant anything before; it probably won’t come to anything this time either.”

  “GLORY! RICH!!” Mum calls urgently to us through the passageway.

  “Coming!” I shout back, realizing that me and my brother have to get to the shelter and fast.

  We run inside and for a second – after pulling the front door of the flat closed behind us – the sound of the siren is thankfully muffled. Then it whines painfully loud again as we dive through the back door and into the yard, where Mum stands in front of the arch of the Anderson shelter, beckoning us both to bend down and hurry inside the low entrance.

  “Quick!” she says, a tendril of dark hair escaping from under the scarf tied around her head.

  Rich, clutching Buttons, dives in first. But I pause just long enough to scoop Betsy from the top of the shelter, where she’s hunkered on the thick layer of earth and growing veg that covers it.

  “Betsy!” Rich calls out from the gloom of the shelter. My eyes haven’t got used to the lack of light yet, but I manage to plonk myself down on the scratchy wooden bench beside him. It’s not hard; the shelter isn’t exactly roomy.

  “Oh, no … no, no!” comes Mrs Mann’s voice from the far end of the wooden bench opposite. “We are not having dirty animals in here, thank you very much!”

  What moany Mrs Mann just said; it would be funny if Rich wasn’t getting upset again. The shelter has a damp earth floor, rust blooming on the corrugated metal “walls” and a soggy, musty, metallic smell like the inside of our bin. I’d rather bury my face in Betsy’s or Buttons’ fur any day than spend time in this rotten, dank hole. Specially when I’ve got to share it with Mrs Mann.

  I don’t even know what she’s doing here. She doesn’t usually come to the shelter; she likes to hide under her kitchen table.

  “Shoo, shoo!” she shrieks, as if the kittens were rats on the loose instead of our beloved pets.