Gemini Girls Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Marie Joseph

  Title Page

  Gemini Girls

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Footsteps in the Park

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Maggie Craig

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Marie Joseph was born in Lancashire and was educated at Blackburn High School for Girls. Before her marriage she was in the Civil Service. She now lives in Middlesex with her husband, a retired chartered Engineer, and they have two married daughters and eight grandchildren.

  Marie Joseph began her writing career as a short-story writer and she now uses her Northern background to enrich her bestselling novels. Down-to-earth characters bring a vivid authenticity to her stories, which are written with both humour and poignancy.

  Her novel A BETTER WORLD THAN THIS won the 1987 Romantic Novelist’s Association Major Award.

  Also by Marie Joseph

  Ring A-Roses

  A Leaf in the Wind

  Emma Sparrow

  The Listening Silence

  Lisa Logan

  Polly Pilgrim

  Clogger’s Child

  A Better World Than This

  Passing Strangers

  A World Apart

  The Travelling Man

  When Love Was Like That

  and Other Stories

  Since He Went Away

  Gemini Girls

  Marie Joseph

  Gemini Girls

  For Sarah and Emily,

  my twin granddaughters

  CHAPTER ONE

  LIBBY PEEL KNEW she had no right to be there. But then Libby was not over-concerned with rights and wrongs. All she knew was that on that warm summer evening her whole being throbbed with the excitement of finding herself where she was not supposed to be.

  The market place of the Lancashire town that May evening in 1926, on the very eve of the General Strike, was certainly no place for a slightly built girl, her long brown hair bundled up beneath a small straw hat. But Libby felt not even the faintest twinge of fear.

  Here was where she was meant to be; right here in the middle of it all, not merely sitting at home with her hands folded in her lap, waiting for things to happen. She found she was almost jumping up and down on the cobblestones as the blood pulsed through her veins with a wildness she had no desire to control.

  Mr Baldwin, the Prime Minister, an obstinate, short-sighted, pig-headed little man, in Libby’s opinion, had turned up his nose at the idea of any further dealings with the miners – earthworms, as a lady member of the aristocracy had called them.

  So the strike was on . . .

  Already the trains had stopped running, the town’s evening newspaper had printed its last ‘Special Pink’, and to Libby’s disgust, the government had seized the monopoly of any further news bulletins, giving of course their side of the case. Even before it had begun, the fight was unequal.

  The militant speaker, balanced precariously on a makeshift platform, was a weaver from one of the town’s cotton mills, possibly even from the mill owned by Libby’s father. The stocky little man was waving his short arms about, yelling at the top of his voice. ‘They say the weavers are in the second line. That’s all. The bloody second line!’ His face glistened with sweat, and his whole body seemed to swell with indignation. ‘That’s what they say we are!’ He pointed a finger, stabbing the air to emphasize his next words. ‘But what bloody second line? Second lines are called up second, and we are ready now, lads. Think on! We’re ready now!’

  The crowd surged forward roaring its approval.

  ‘So what the ’ell are we waiting for?’ The speaker put up a clenched fist as a man tried to pull him down from his perch. ‘What about Chorley? Now there’s a town not waiting for some bloody second line! And don’t forget that Chorley’s not supposed to be a trade union town. Fertile as bloody granite from a socialist point of view is Chorley, and yet their weavers are ready to walk out to a man. Aye, missus, that’s right. To a woman an’ all. So where does that leave us, eh?’ He dropped his voice a fraction, sensing the crowd’s sympathetic attention. ‘I’ll tell tha lot summat for nowt. The maister at my mill has a son, a great ’aporth of a son what plays golf three mornings a week when he’s supposed to be working. Oh, aye, he does that. An’ he’s a member of the Manchester Exchange, and gets there on a railway contract paid for by the likes of us, while his father’s weavers have to feed their families on bread and jam, with sixpenn’orth of fish of a Saturday night when the chip shops want to get rid. Bloody disgraceful!’

  Libby stared down at the cobbles. So the man wasn’t from her father’s mill after all. Oliver Peel’s only son, her brother Willie, had been killed in France at the very end of the war. There were no days for Willie at the Manchester Exchange. Willie’s life had ended with a flash of gunfire, and life at Westerley, the big house on the outskirts of the town, had never been the same since then.

  For the first time since mingling excitedly with the milling crowd, she felt apart from them, and with the feeling came the first twinge of unease. In spite of the third best coat and the plain straw hat, Libby began to realize just how conspicuous she was. She tried to move and found that she was hemmed in as surely as if she had been nailed to the ground.

  ‘We’re still a country of down to earth, moderate thinking people,’ she had told her twin sister Carrie before sneaking out of the house and starting on her long walk into town. ‘It’s no use, Carrie, I can’t, I just can’t sit here at home while everything is happening. I have to be there to see.’

  Carrie, a mirror image of her twin, had tried hard to dissuade her. Libby frowned, thinking just how conspicuous the two of them would have been standing together in the market place. Most people knew the Peel twins when they were together, even if they were sometimes unsure which was which.

  ‘I am me!’ Libby would shout in one of her childish tantrums. ‘And she is her!’

  Carrie was slightly smaller than her twin. Libby’s small brown mole at the left side of her mouth was on the right side of Carrie’s, and Libby was right-handed to Carrie’s left-handed awkwardness.

  Libby was outspoken and sure, while Carrie was quiet and often – very often – not so sure, but this time she had surprised her sister by her vehemenc
e.

  ‘Father will kill you if he finds out where you’ve gone. He says that dignity for the middle classes is all-important just now, and what is there dignified about going down town all alone and listening to the agitators?’

  ‘Pooh to dignity!’ Libby had said, slipping out of the side door. ‘There’s nothing dignified about being hungry.’

  But all the same, remembering Carrie’s words, her heart contracted with fear. Oliver Peel sober was a force to be reckoned with, and Oliver Peel in his cups was as bad as a raving lunatic.

  ‘I hate him,’ she thought. ‘He is my own father and I loathe him.’ She kicked viciously at a harmless cobblestone, then turned to apologize as her kick landed on the shin of the man standing next to her.

  He stared at her with open curiosity, a tall man with black hair and a thin pale face, flushed now with an excitement to match her own.

  ‘No place for a lass on her own.’ The stranger tuttutted in cheeky disapproval. ‘And you are on your own, aren’t you, lass?’ He grinned so that the craggy seriousness of his features broke up into lines of almost boyish mischief. ‘Finding out for yourself what the peasants think?’

  It was so near to the truth that Libby’s large brown eyes fell before his steady gaze. The crowd, pressed from the back, surged forwards towards the speaker’s rough platform, and at once the man took her arm and pulled her close to his side, bending down to speak into her ear. ‘What the heck are you doing here, for heaven’s sake, then? Looking for a chance to hop up there yourself and put the other side to us ignorant workers?’

  Libby tried to pull away, but he held fast, and because she was privately glad of his supporting arm (although she would rather have died than admit it) she flared into instant characteristic retaliation.

  ‘I work too,’ she told him. As the crowd swayed her hat was knocked sideways, causing the slipping bun of her long hair to wisp down her back.

  ‘In a shop?’ The stranger grinned. ‘No, come off it, lass. You’ll be telling me next you’ve been out picking coal from the surface Burnley way.’ He lifted one of her gloveless hands and pursed up his lips at the sight of the engagement ring on her third finger. ‘What’s your man doing letting you come down here?’ His eyes twinkled. ‘Or doesn’t he know?’

  Libby blushed a fiery red as tears of humiliation pricked behind her eyes. ‘I’m a teacher.’ With as much dignity as was left to her, she clung to her hat with her free hand. ‘And I know why I am here. I know.’ She tilted her chin. ‘There are children in my class who haven’t got a pair of clogs to their name, even in the winter, and if their father is lucky enough to have an egg for his tea, they are allowed to dip a finger of toast in it.’ Her eyes met his. ‘I’m on your side, can’t you see?’

  Tom Silver, a compositor on the town’s weekly newspaper and the youngest Father of the Chapel in the county, wrinkled his hawklike nose at her.

  ‘All the same,’ he said wickedly, ‘I wouldn’t mind laying bets that you have never had to queue up with your brothers and sisters for a dip in your father’s soft boiled egg. That’s a fact, isn’t it lass?’

  Libby widened her eyes to stare furiously into the teasing, laughing face so close to her own. She was tightly pressed against his side. She could actually feel the restrained violence emanating from his body. This man was making her feel ridiculous; he was enjoying himself. She did not know him at all, and yet she was being held so close to his side that they might have been lovers. She tried to turn away from him, but at once he swung her round again, and now she could see the irregularity of his front teeth, and the way his brown eyes were flecked with green. He pursed his lips into a mocking semblance of a teasing kiss, and she jerked her head backwards so that the hat slipped even farther sideways.

  The part of Libby that was all Oliver Peel made her temper flare. ‘If I told you who my father was you wouldn’t speak to me like that, whoever you are. But I won’t tell you because you wouldn’t believe me!’

  ‘Then don’t bother, lass.’ Tom Silver laughed outright into her upturned face. ‘Tell you something, though. If you really are a teacher, I wouldn’t like to be in your class.’ His next words were drowned by a man built like an ox who had pushed the speaker bodily from the platform.

  ‘This is the day we have been waiting for, lads!’ The puffy face beneath the greasy cap sharpened with wild enthusiasm. ‘This is the hour when the oppressed throw off their shackels and make a stand for what is theirs by right! As Mr Bevin says: “We are not declaring war on the people. War has already been declared by the Government, urged on from behind by sordid and selfish capitalism!”’

  ‘Good man, Bevin.’ Tom Silver pulled hard at Libby’s arm as the crowd swayed forward dangerously. ‘Come on, lass. There’s going to be a free-for-all. The Bolshies want a fight. I am going to get you out of here somehow.’

  But even as he turned, a tram rumbled by along the wide street flanking the market square, clearly visible to the inflamed crowd. Driven by a moustached man of immense dignity, an ex-army officer by the look of him, it stopped with a rattling shudder for the passengers to dismount.

  Grasping his opportunity to incite his listeners, the speaker wheeled round and pointed an accusing finger at the man standing on the driver’s platform.

  ‘The tram men met at nine o’clock this morning, and they are out to a man,’ he yelled. ‘Come on, lads. Let’s have ’im, the filthy scabby blackleg! Let’s have them bloody whiskers out by the bloody roots!’

  Libby found herself swept off her feet, in spite of Tom Silver’s protective arm. She watched in horror as stones were prized up by knives from the cobbled ground and hurled towards the tram. As windows shattered into a hall of splintered glass, the passengers scrambled out, a few of them mingling with the crowd as if uncertain which role would afford them the greater safety. The driver was hauled from his platform to face his accusers with the same courage he had undoubtedly shown on Flanders Field as he faced the enemy lines.

  ‘By tomorrow,’ the speaker shouted, cupping his hands to his mouth in an attempt to recapture his audience, ‘over one and a half thousand looms will be stopped in this town!’ His voice rose to a pitch bordering on hysteria. ‘The bloody government have ignored us once too often. We’ve got ’em lads, and by the time we’ve finished, there won’t be a machine working, a train running, nor a single poor bugger eking out a miserable existence on what them in Parliament calls a living wage. Listen to me, lads! We’ve got ’em. I tell you, we’ve got ’em, and there’s nowt they can do to stop us. Listen to me!’

  But it was too late. The crowd, desperate now for action and not words, were fighting for the sake of fighting.

  ‘It only takes a handful of bother-makers.’ Tom Silver put both arms round Libby as stones flew like a hail of bullets.

  Then someone shouted ‘The police! The police are here!’ and the crowd scattered. Its movement changed like a field of corn rippled by a sudden wind. For a brief moment Libby was actually lifted off her feet, so that she saw a line of policemen crossing the cobbles, truncheons raised.

  Tom Silver dragged her with him to the rough platform. ‘Stop there, and keep your head down. Don’t run, for God’s sake!’ he told her, then hoisted himself up and raised both arms above his head.

  ‘The police won’t interfere!’ He was yelling at the top of his voice. ‘They are sympathetic, you fools! They are on our side. Drop those stones! Drop the stones, men, and they won’t do a thing. Please! Listen to me!’

  But again it was too late. Libby held both hands over her head in a futile gesture of protection as the missiles flew. The police advanced slowly, in a determined line of dark blue, and she heard what sounded like the thud of a truncheon on a man’s head.

  ‘Run for it, love!’ A woman with a brown shawl clutched beneath her chin ran past. ‘They’ll nab anybody, so run like ’ell.’

  Libby could only stand there, transfixed with terror, as the crowd dispersed, the irons on clogged feet ringing metallic
ally. The younger ones were laughing, the older element cursing, and a few sober-suited clerical types walked quickly away, hands in pockets, as if embarassed by the whole situation. But the hard core of the militants lingered to hurl abuse and stones before they too melted away.

  Even as Libby hesitated, a stone whizzed past her head to hit Tom Silver full in the face.

  She saw it land, saw the way he put up a bewildered hand to his forehead, saw the blood gush and his features shrivel into a white mask before he fell from the platform to lie in a twisted heap on the ground.

  A shout went up from the fleeing crowd. ‘The police are attacking the people!’

  ‘That’s not true!’ Libby heard her own voice yell back, then she knelt down by the still figure crumpled on the cobblestones.

  He was quite unconscious, and she saw that the deep gash had missed his left eye by a fraction. He was a strange grey colour, and she pulled his lolling head on to her lap, trying in vain to stem the flow of blood with a white handkerchief pulled from her sleeve.

  ‘Do you know this man, miss?’

  The policeman was very young, very correct, his truncheon held almost self-consciously in his hand as he stared down at her.

  Libby looked up into his round face and shook her head. ‘No, I don’t know him. I don’t know him at all. He was just standing next to me in the crowd.’ Her voice broke on the verge of lost control. ‘But he wasn’t doing anything wrong. He wasn’t fighting. He was trying to calm them down. He was!’ she added, as the policeman replaced his truncheon and took out his notebook.

  ‘So the victim is unknown to you?’ he asked, pencil poised.

  Libby shook her head slowly from side to side. If she was watching this, she told herself, on the screen at the Olympia picture palace, she would laugh out loud and think how funny it was. It was like a Charlie Chaplin film: a man lay dying on the pavement as a policeman slowly and seriously took down the particulars in his little notebook. It was incredible, but it was happening. And the stranger, the man who had cheeked her and tried to protect her, looked terrible. He was shaking now, shivering jerkily as a thin trickle of blood oozed down his nose to mingle with the steady flow from the gaping wound so close to his eye.