First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2015
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
Far From Home
Text copyright © Berlie Doherty, 2015
Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers 2015
Berlie Doherty asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007578825
Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007578696
Version: 2014-11-19
Praise for Street Child, the companion novel to Far From Home:
‘A terrific adventure story, heart-warmingly poignant and a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit. A magnificent story.’
Daily Mail
‘Berlie Doherty has magic in her’
Junior Bookshelf
For Tommy, Hannah, Kasia, Anna-Merryn, Eda, Leo and Tess
CONTENTS
Tell Me Your Story, Emily and Lizzie
1. Take Us With You, Ma
2. Safe Till Morning
3. The Two Dearies
4. Lame Betsy
5. Where You Go, I Go
6. Snatched in the Night
7. No Charity Children Here
8. Alone
9. Mrs Cleggins
10. We’re Going to a Mansion, Remember?
11. Bleakdale Mill
12. What Kind of Life?
13. A Pattern of Sundays
14. Winter
15. Miss Blackthorn
16. I Knew Your Ma
17. Cruel Crick
18. Sunshine
19. I Can Buy Our Freedom
20. Buxford Fair
21. Clog Dancing
22. Bess
23. The Lost Children
24. The Terrible Accident
25. No News for Emily
26. Where Am I?
27. Robin’s Plan
28. The Sheen
29. Revenge
30. I Can’t Remember
31. After the Fire
32. A letter from Dr Barnardo
33. Plans
34. One Last Thing
Acknowledgements
About the Author
By the same author
About the Publisher
We’re Emily and Lizzie Jarvis. We’re sitting by the window in our room. Outside, we can hear a soft kind of sighing, like the wind in the trees, though we know it isn’t that really. It’s a comforting sound, and it’s lulling us to sleep. But we can’t sleep yet. There’s so much to think about first, so much to talk about. So much remembering to do.
Would you like to know our story?
There used to be five of us in our family, and now there’s only two. After Pa died we had to move into a room in a big, crowded tenement house with Ma and our little brother, Jim, and we just managed to keep going because Ma got a job as cook in a Big House. But then she fell ill and she had to stop working. There was no money left to live on, no money for the rent. She gave her last coin to Jim and told him to buy a nice pie for us all, full of meat and gravy. He was so excited. He was too young to understand that Ma thought it was the last good meal we would ever have. But she couldn’t eat it, she was too ill.
And then the owner of the room came for the rent, and when he saw Ma’s empty purse, and her too sick to earn anything, he turned us out on the streets. Where was there to go? Ma took us to the Big House, down the steps to the kitchen, and she begged her friend Rosie to look after us. And then she told us we must stay there, without her. She must take Jim with her, and she must leave us behind. It broke her heart to tell us that, we knew. It breaks our hearts to think about it. But we must think about it. We must tell our story, every bit of it, so we never forget what it was like for us before we came here.
This is our story.
“Take us with you, Ma! Don’t leave us here!” Lizzie begged.
“I can’t,” her mother said. She didn’t turn round. “Bless