My Secret Sister: Jenny Lucas and Helen Edwards' Family Story by Helen Edwards, Jenny Lee Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

he picked me up under the arms and threw me two or three feet into a fireside chair.
    I yelped with pain.
    ‘Now, perhaps that will help you to remember what you were told. You will not leave that chair without permission for two weeks.’ He pushed his red, sweating face up close and his bulging eyes stared into mine. ‘ D’you hear me? ’ he shouted.
    ‘Yes,’ I whispered again.
    He banned me from walking for two weeks, forcing me to remain in the chair and sit still all day every day. I wasn’t allowed to move for a fortnight – fourteen endless days. That’s a long time for a small child, left alone with no television and nothing to do.
    At least it was peaceful in the daytime. From the second he came through the front door, every moment became unpredictable and every word or movement a risk. But the beating Tommy gave me for breaking my plaster was slight compared with what was to come.

CHAPTER 5
    Jenny
    Barefoot Summers
    As we drove away from our house in Jesmond to go to our bungalow, I would often look back at Newcastle, a grey city cowering under dark clouds and heavy rain, and then find, forty miles later when we got to Embleton, that the evening sunlight was spilling its golden glow across the dunes. In my memories, it was always sunny there. The fresh sea air infused us with energy and melted our stresses away as we crossed the links to reach our sanctuary. You could taste the salt on the air and smell the ozone. It was fantastic. ‘There’s more ozone in the air at Embleton, mind, than anywhere else in the British Isles,’ my mother used to say. I don’t know if it’s true, but that’s what she always said.
    As soon as we arrived at the bungalow, it was off with the town clothes and on with our T-shirts and shorts, but no shoes. It was just grass and sand, so we were in bare feet all the time. The sea was close enough to our house that as I lay in bed at night I could listen to it breathing in and out. I imagined there were mermaids on the rocks, sea-gods on the sand and white horses prancing. Most nights I fell asleep to the ssshhh-shhhh of the waves running up and down the beach in the darkness.
    I have a distinct memory of being woken one morning by sunbeams streaming through my window. I had learned to know from the sound of the sea on the sand whether the tide was in or out, so I knew it was a low tide that morning. I lay completely still, listening to the seals barking on the rocks below, a weird, eerie bark – ‘oww-oww-oww’ – echoing across the bay. The flat stones on the beach below our bungalow, where the seals basked, stretched to the water’s edge. They gathered on the higher stones at the back, with gulls, terns and eider ducks nesting amongst them. Terns and kittiwakes skimmed over the dunes and swooped down to land on the stones. I could hear the rhythmic knock-knocking of the sea birds hammering snails on the stones, breaking their shells to extricate breakfast.
    The whole bay was a playground, for the wildlife and for us. Some days we went looking for birds’ eggs in the gorse, where thrushes and skylarks nested. We didn’t touch them if we found some, just walked away to a safe distance where we could look through our heavy field glasses and watch the mother birds coming to and fro to feed their chicks. We watched frogs in ponds as they laid their spawn, and loved seeing the eggs hatch and the tadpoles stretch their legs as they darted about beneath the surface and gradually grew into frogs themselves. Nearby there was a nature reserve visited by cormorants and swans, and we often lie down in the gorse with our field glasses to watch them come and go.
    Our bungalow was in the perfect spot for some daily golf practice as I got a bit older. As the light faded, I chipped balls from the long dune-grass onto the mowed lawn of the nearby green. The third was a difficult hole, a long green with two bunkers, one on either side, so from the bungalow I had to hit over a massive