The Urchin's Song by Rita Bradshaw Read Free Book Online

forwards, Josie bent and whipped up the heavy black poker standing to one side of the small grate, and now she was screaming at the top of her voice, ‘You dare! You dare touch me and I’ll kill you! I will, I’ll kill you!’
    It was Bart’s misfortune that he chose to ignore her. As he made another stab for her, Josie brought the poker whacking down on his right forearm with all the force her slight, twelve-year-old body could muster, and they all heard the bone snap.
    His scream ascended into the two rooms upstairs, bringing Maud and Enoch bolt upright on the hard wood settle in front of their small fire, and then he was on his knees holding his dangling arm and his curses filled the house.
    Josie was shaking uncontrollably as she remained standing close to her mother, but she kept the poker raised in front of her, not at all sure whether her father would try to attack her again. And then, as Gertie edged behind her and Jimmy, who now cautiously approached his father, said, ‘Da? You want me to get someone, Da?’ her brain whirred into action.
    ‘Leave him.’ It was a curt snap, and such was Jimmy’s surprise that he did exactly that, backing away from the kneeling figure of his father as though Josie was going to wield the poker at him next.
    Josie couldn’t have said exactly when in the last few seconds her father’s intentions had become plain to her, only that it was as if a fog had cleared somewhere in her memory. Now she recalled Ada, and then some many months later Dora, leaving the house with her father, and her mother spending hours crying into her apron. And when her sisters had returned they had been different somehow, quite different, barely speaking to her mam any more and only really having time for each other.
    It had been Vera who had told her, quietly and gently one night not so very many months ago when someone in one of the pubs had sniggered on hearing Josie’s surname and made a comment she hadn’t understood, the rumours about how her estranged sisters had earned their living before they had left Sunderland. All her mother had ever said was that Ada and Dora had run away to parts unknown to escape their father; something Josie had been able to accept quite readily. But she’d assumed, naively she now realised, that her sisters had chosen their path in life themselves.
    ‘You did it, didn’t you?’ She advanced on her father, hearing her mother’s, ‘Lass, lass. No, lass,’ through the swirling horror in her head. ‘You made Ada and Dora do that.’
    Her father made no response beyond more muttered curses, his face as white as a sheet as he sank back against one of the table legs, leaning against it for support as he held his broken arm to him, clearly on the verge of passing out.
    ‘And you’d have done the same to Gertie tonight.’ She was speaking the words out loud, but even now she could hardly believe them. She knew her father was harsh and unfeeling, a bully and the type of man who had little conscience, but this . . . She fought the tide of nausea rising in her throat. This was something so unnatural, so wicked . Oh, Gertie, Gertie. She turned, staring into her sister’s small bewildered face, her plain, snub-nosed, dear little face, and the urge to bring the poker down again, this time on her father’s head, was so strong it frightened her.
    Gertie stared back at her big sister. She’d gleaned enough to know that whatever her da had had in mind, Josie wasn’t having any of it, and as Josie was the one person in all the world she trusted implicitly, that was good enough for her. Her mam was scared rigid of her da, they all were - except Josie. Even their Jimmy wet his pants if he thought he was going to get wrong by their da.
    Josie turned from her sister to where her mother was watching her. ‘You knew? All the time you knew about Ada and Dora, that it was me da who’d made ’em do that?’ Josie asked heavily.
    ‘Aye, I did. I did, me bairn, an’ may God