A Step Too Far

A Step Too Far

Meg Hutchinson

www.hodder.co.uk

Also by Meg Hutchinson

Abel’s Daughter

For the Sake of Her Child

A Handful of Silver

No Place of Angels

A Promise Given

Bitter Seed

A Love Forbidden

Pit Bank Wench

Child of Sin

No Place for a Woman

The Judas Touch

Peppercorn Woman

Unholy Love

The Deverell Woman

Slxpenny Girl

Heritage of Shame

Pauper’s Child

Ties of Love

For the Love of a Sister

The Wanton Redhead

Writing as Margaret Astbury

The Hitch-Hiker

The Seal

Devil’s Own Daughter

Non-fiction

A Penny Dip: My Black Country Girlhood

First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette Livre UK company

Copyright © Meg Hutchinson 2008

The right of Meg Hutchinson to be identified as the

Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance

with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor

be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than

that in which it is published and without a similar condition

being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this

title is available from the British Library

Epub ISBN 9781444718522

Book ISBN 9781444700763

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

A division of Hodder Headline

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

www.hodder.co.uk

FOREWORD

‘During the war, of the 9,000 people employed by Stewarts and Lloyds 56.6 per cent were women. The work done by women deserves special mention. Most of them had never been inside a factory before, yet they stood up to long and arduous hours on night and day shift. It is not often realised that women on some operations were handling one and a quarter tons of shell per hour, and in many special cases this physical effort was exceeded not only in shell manufacture but also in our steel and tube plants. This work was accomplished under blackout conditions, often during “alerts” and with all the irritations and afflictions which total war brings  . . .’

Stewarts and Lloyds

Author’s Note

Being a young child during the era in which this story is set I cannot claim to have had personal knowledge of factory procedures at that time. However the title ‘Shadow Factory’ as once applied to ‘New Crown Forgings’, a Wednesbury property of ‘Stewarts and Lloyds’, is still widely recognised in the town and living memory has supported my description of the removal of armaments under cover of darkness and then subsequent transportation via canal. Addressing the question of hours worked and wages paid information was supplied by family and friends employed in similar industries.

     Wartime wage was low for the long hours worked but as related from my own experience they had not altered a great deal by 1949 when I earned twenty two shillings and sixpence for a forty four hour week and then in 1964 the convenience of working part time paid a wage of twenty two shillings and elevenpence for a twenty seven and a half hour week.

Meg Hutchinson

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

‘Black Country at War’        –   ALTON DOUGLAS

‘Stewarts and Lloyds’        –   Loaned courtesy of Samuel Longmore

Wednesbury Public Library for their never failing assistance.

PROLOGUE

They would be sorry!

     The promise made to herself so long ago surged fresh and bright as a beacon in Katrin Hawley’s mind.

     They would all be sorry!

     Hazel eyes, glittering with the ice of vengeance, stared back from the mirror of a small dressing table.

     Yes, they would be sorry, every last one of them, and she would laugh. ‘He who laughs last  . . .’

     They had turned their backs on her! They had sent her away, ignored her as they would a pile of rubbish. Discarded her as they would throw away a broken glass!

     But broken glass was dangerous  . . . !

     Those hazel eyes watching from the mirror spewed darts of glacial venom.

     It could cut deeply!

     Silent, moving with the sinuous threat of a cobra, she smiled.

     It could prove lethal!

     And it would!

     But first it must cut, slash and tear at their lives, stab and thrust, rip each life to shreds as her own had been ripped eight years ago.

It had happened at school.

     The afternoon break, the fifteen minutes of freedom from the classroom was, whenever weather allowed, spent playing hopscotch in the school yard. The four of them, friends from the first tearful day at Infant School, were intent on the game, Katrin bending to slide her piece of broken floor tile across the chalk-drawn pattern of interspersed squares. The others had objected to her pitch, it was ‘more slidey’ than their pieces of shattered brick or stones found on the slag heaps of metal foundries; they said it was unfair. But she had stood her ground; hopscotch had no rule saying a piece of tile was not allowed.

     Among the shadows a golden-haired head turned sharply to darker-haired companions.

     ‘That’s cheating.’

     Becky Turner’s indignant cry rang again in Katrin’s mind.

     ‘. . . It were on the line . . . I seen it, your pitch were on the line!’

     ‘No it wasn’t!’ Her denial, equally loud, had followed the quick snatch of the tile into her hand.

     The golden head tossed again. ‘Yes it were, we all seen it. You seen it d’aint you Alice? And you Freda, you seen it as well d’aint you?’

     Two dark heads nodded clearly in the eye of Katrin’s mind.

     ‘Told you! We all seen it, your pitch landed on the line  . . .’

     ‘It didn’t! It didn’t land on the line! You are telling lies, you are jealous because I always win!’

     ‘And we knows how you win, it be cos you cheats, you be a cheat and a liar Katy Hawley, no wonder your folks d’aint want you . . . ! Well we don’t want you neither, do we girls? We don’t play with cheats!’

     Beneath the sheets Katrin’s fingers curled as they had curled about that piece of tile. Eight years had not dulled those words nor the determination which later understanding of them had given rise to.

     Explanation!

     Rejection swelled hard in her chest. What good had that proved? It had been meant to console, to dim the hurt of the barb thrown by an angry child, but it had merely cast a veil. Consolation had not been elimination; it had soothed the smart but not removed the sting! That had remained buried inside, remained to fester with every passing day becoming a longing, a longing time had cultivated, had nurtured, feeding it with anger until it had grown beyond a childhood need to punish three friends whose words had stung. It had become more than desire for revenge, it was an all consuming passion, a lust no words could eradicate.

     Caught in the grip of indignation at being called a cheat, an emotion not helped by being ignored for the rest of the afternoon, by being left to walk home by herself she had asked her mother, ‘Why, why would Becky Turner say I was not wanted?’

     ‘
It be no more than a spat on their part
  . . .’

     Her mother’s reply had been quick, so quick it could have been rehearsed, and that was what time had revealed it to be: a carefully stage managed response.

     But the response had held more. The words had been accompanied by a swift flash of alarm in her mother’s eyes, a strange expression on her face, a look which only years later had Katrin understood as being a closed ‘Ask no question.’

     ‘
. . . no more than words!
’

     Her mother had gone to stand at the kitchen sink, her attention given to the vegetables she was preparing for the evening meal, but though her face was turned away, she could not conceal the tightness of her voice.