Home for Christmas
ANNIE GROVES
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Copyright © Annie Groves 2011
Annie Groves 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
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ISBN: 9780007361519
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2011 ISBN: 9780007419395
Version: 2017-09-12
The memory of the late Tony Bosson.
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
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
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Annie Groves
Just After Christmas 1936
‘Darling, oh, your face is so cold.’
Sally Johnson, eighteen years old and near the end of her first year as a probationer nurse at Liverpool’s Mill Street Hospital, laughed at her mother’s loving complaint as she reached up and kissed Sally’s face.
‘That could be because it’s trying to snow out there and my face is the only bit of me you can’t tell me to wrap up warmly,’ Sally teased her affectionately. Standing in the delicious beef-scented warmth of the family kitchen, she unwrapped herself from her gloves, scarf and hat, and then the good warm coat that her mother lovingly insisted on her wearing.
The kitchen table, with its blue-and-white-checked oilcloth, had already been set for their evening meal. Above it, the light from the blue and white glass ceiling light, burnished Sally’s dark red curls. She had inherited her hair colouring, so her father often said, from his own mother, whilst her oval-shaped face, with its high cheekbones and good skin, came from her petite fair-haired mother.
Sally knew how lucky she was to have grown up in such a close and loving family. Her parents – her tall, dark-haired, handsome father and her pretty mother, adored one another just as they did her, and she loved them both dearly in return. Life was pretty good in the Johnsons’ smart semidetached house in the middle-class Wavertree area of the city.
‘Morag said today how much she and Callum had enjoyed spending Christmas here with us,’ Sally told her mother as she went to hang up her outdoor clothes in the hallway, glad of the brief moment of privacy so as to conceal the soft blush that had burned her face just because she had spoken Callum’s name.
Callum. Sally would never forgot the kiss he had given her under the mistletoe on Boxing Day when they had been alone in her parents’ front room.
‘Morag’s always telling me how lucky I am to have you and dad as my parents,’ Sally added, as she returned to the kitchen. ‘Not that she needs to remind me.’
Morag and Sally had met when they were doing their initial three months’ training together at Mill Street Hospital. Morag and her brother, Callum, an assistant teacher, had lost their own parents in a boating accident on Loch Lomond two years before Callum’s work had brought them to Liverpool. The two girls had hit it off straight away, and once Sally had told her mother about Morag and Callum’s sad loss, Sally’s mother had made them both very welcome at number 28 Lilac Avenue.
Sally could still remember that dizzy breath-catching-in-her-throat feeling she had had when Morag had first introduced her to her brother. Callum had come to walk Morag home from the hospital after they had been on nights, and the minute she had seen her friend’s tall, good-looking brother, with his thick dark hair and his warm smile, Sally had been lost. Callum also was kind and considerate and, well, just everything Sally had ever imagined herself finding attractive in a man. She knew that her parents liked him, from the way her mother fussed over him, and her father took him off down to his garden shed to talk about whatever it was men did talk about in such male havens.
Callum, with his worn Harris tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, his tattersall shirts, and the warmth in his piercing blue eyes whenever he looked at her, had stolen Sally’s heart completely. And by kissing her as he had done on Boxing Day evening he had shown that he cared about her too, even if he had said afterwards that he hadn’t intended it to happen and that, as a poorly paid assistant teacher with a sister to support, ‘he was the worst kind of a cad for kissing her when he knew he had nothing to offer her.’ But then he had paused and looked at her and said huskily, ‘At least not at the moment.’ Sally had known then that those words, coming from Callum, were every bit as good as a request to go steady from another young man, and her heart had swelled with gratitude to whoever was responsible for her meeting him.
No one could possibly have a better friend than Morag. She and Sally were closer than sisters. They did everything together: worked; complained about their poor aching feet and their raw hands; went dancing together at Liverpool’s famous Grafton Ballroom,