Thicker Than Water Read online

  Contents

  Also by Bethan Darwin

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  About Honno

  Copyright

  Also by Bethan Darwin and available from Honno

  Back Home

  Two Times Twenty

  Thicker than Water

  by

  Bethan Darwin

  HONNO MODERN FICTION

  For the Gaskell, Darwin,

  Davies and Hopkins families.

  This book is fiction and the characters whose stories are told are made up. However, my family’s history did give me the idea for the story and some markers around which to drape it.

  My grandmother’s twin brother from Shevington, Wigan, agreed to accompany his sister on the ship to Canada to join her husband who had gone on ahead. He was meant to return to Shevington having safely dropped his sister off but, having fallen in love with a Scottish lady on the ship on the way over, he stayed in Canada for good. I have been to Oshawa many times to visit my lovely family who still live in the city. My great grandfather Idris was a miner in the Rhondda and decided when registering my grandmother’s birth that he would drop one letter from his own name and call her Iris. It was a privilege to have them all keep me company while I was writing.

  The historical events that are the backdrop to the story are correct and a few of the characters are also real – members of the British royal family, UK and Canadian politicians, and the McLaughlin family. Parkwood, the McLaughlin family home, is now a National Historic Site, popular for weddings and as a film location. The Parkwood website and that of the Oshawa Historical Society were both hugely helpful when writing this book.

  Mr and Mrs Dunington-Grubb, the landscape designers who worked on the gardens at Parkwood, moved to Canada from the UK in 1911 and set up one of Canada’s first landscape gardening businesses, called Sheridan Nurseries, which is still in operation today. When researching the Dunington-Grubbs and the Parkwood gardens I found a reference in a local Oshawa newspaper article to a head gardener at Parkwood called Mr Wragg. I hope he would not have minded his namesake having a part in this story.

  The 1926 General Strike paralysed Britain between 3 and 11 May, 1926, when other workers came out on strike in support of the miners who were faced with a cut in pay by mine owners. On 12 May, 1926, the TUC announced the end of the General Strike as terms had been agreed with Stanley Baldwin’s government. The Miners Union rejected the agreement, and continued striking. The strike caused great hardship with many families dependent on public soup kitchens. Faced with starvation and many miners having already returned to work, the strike finally ended on 19 November, 1926. Between 1921 and 1931 there was a decrease of 21,371 in Rhondda’s population, as many families left the valleys to seek employment elsewhere, escaping from the General Strike, and I found many Welsh names in the passenger lists of people emigrating to Canada during this period. The website of the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 provided useful detail about what it was like for people arriving in Canada around this time.

  Between 1869 and the late 1930s it is estimated that 100,000 children were sent to Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand from Britain as part of the child migration scheme. Churches and philanthropic organizations such as Barnado’s, the Salvation Army and the Quarriers believed that the British Home Children as they became known would have a better chance in the the New World.

  Some became members of the family but others were used as a cheap form of labour and overworked and neglected. Others were subjected to the stigma attached to being a Home Child – scum from the slums, as Jean is told in this story – and as a result often concealed their origins. In 1987 British social worker Margaret Humphreys brought public attention to the Home Children, leading to the creation of the Child Migrant Trust whose purpose is to help Home Children re-establish their identity and reconnect with relatives.

  Over 10 per cent of Canada’s population is estimated to be descended from Home Children.

  I grew up in Clydach Vale in the Rhondda and my primary school was Ysgol Gynradd Gymraeg Ynyswen. The Polikoff’s clothing factory was very near the school and most people knew somebody who worked there. Production at the factory had started in 1939 and in its first three months the workforce increased to nearly 1,000. In the 1970s the factory became known as the Burberry factory, latterly making Burberry polo shirts. When the factory was closed in 2007 around 300 jobs were lost. It would make me very happy if there was a real life Perfect somewhere out there willing to open a factory in the Rhondda.

  My thanks go to Caroline Oakley, Honno’s editor, whose gentle prodding helped get this book written round and about my full time job as solicitor; to my sister Anwen Darwin who did a final proofread and found the typos I’d missed; and to my husband and business partner David Thompson for the male perspective he brings to proofreading and for the many weekends and evenings he did all of the cooking and the homework supervising so that I could write.

  Chapter 1

  Gareth wakes early and with a crick in his neck. This always happens when he has to sleep in his daughter’s bed. It’s too narrow for him, on account of the many soft toys that Nora insists share her bed with her. The dollies got ditched when she hit eight but the soft toys are hanging on and she keeps them lined up along her bed in a special, secret order. It is more than Gareth’s life is worth to sling them out of the small single bed to make more room for his long frame. Even last night, as he rescued Nora from a bad dream, scooping her up sobbing and sweaty and delivering her to the safety of his side of the bed, when he put her down gently next to her mother, she’d whispered to him urgently “Don’t mess my Beanie Boos up Dad.”

  He sits up sleepily and rubs his sore neck. It is early, 5.45am or so he reckons. July sunshine falls through the thin material of Nora’s bedroom curtains and makes pink puddles on the floor. He realises that what has woken him is Jake crying. He gets out of bed gingerly so as not to disturb the long line of soft toys staring at him dolefully with big, round, unblinking eyes.

  Gareth finds Jake standing upright in his cot, gripping the bars and howling fit to burst. He stops crying immediately he sees his father and beams instead. Tears glisten, silver on the edges of his smile.

  “How do you do that fella?” Gareth asks as he picks him up. “Go from sad to happy in a heartbeat? The wonders of being one.”

  Downstairs in the kitchen, with Jake settled comfortably on his hip, Gareth lets the dog out and opens the fridge. It’s still a pleasant surprise that he doesn’t have to make up formula, can just pour ordinary milk from the fridge into a bottle and shove it in the microwave for 40 seconds. He is well aware that Rachel is trying to move Jake away from a bottle and onto a cup, but Jake much prefers a bottle and it’s much less hassle to give him what he wants. Anyway, Rachel is still asleep
and is not around to see what Gareth is doing. While Jake necks his bottle, Gareth changes his nappy. No poo – result! – but the nappy is round and tight as a bomb, swollen with night-time wee. Another fifteen minutes and Gareth figures it could well have exploded. He has witnessed one or two exploded nappies in his time and he counts his lucky stars that this morning is not being spent scooping absorbent gel beads out of every corner of Jake and his babygro.

  Gareth rummages around in his sports bag in the hall, finds tracksuit bottoms and a t-shirt, some smelly sports socks that will do again rather than risk waking Rachel and Nora fetching clean ones. He stashes Jake into his pram, finds the dog’s lead and off the three of them go for an early morning run.

  There are many joys of living in Penarth, a Victorian seaside town just outside Cardiff. For Gareth, the main one is being able to see the sea from his home. Running along a wide, cliff top coastal path before most people are up and about comes a close second. Jake loves it the faster Gareth runs and giggles whenever Gareth swerves the pram around in big circles. The dog, a ten year old Border Terrier called Oscar, finds the pace hard to keep up. He lives in a house with four children and there are always food scraps on the floor to hoover up. Oscar suffers from middle age spread.

  Gareth passes very few people on his run. One other runner, female, slim and fit with her hair in a bouncing pony tail, faces straight ahead and does not make eye contact. A couple of other dog walkers, to whom he nods companionably, maintain the etiquette required of dog owners. We own dogs. We therefore have a bond. We will acknowledge each other despite being strangers. Just like people with campervans and Fiat 500s do.

  He runs as far as Lavernock Point, where Marconi sent the first wireless signals over the open sea from Flat Holm in 1897. The first message, in Morse code, was “Are you ready?” Gareth never fails to think of this message when he reaches Lavernock Point. He thinks that if he were going to send a historical message, something that would end up in the national museum, he would have come up with something more lyrical, more memorable. Something more like Neil Armstrong’s one small step. Or failing that, something funnier. I can see your house from here.

  Lavernock Point is where Gareth turns round. Jake and Oscar both know this marks the return leg of the journey but they also know what comes next. Oscar pulls up at the first bench they reach, flops to the ground, panting. Gareth sits down and fishes around under Jake’s push chair, retrieving a bottle of water for himself and a box of apple juice for Jake. He swerves Jake’s pushchair around so that he is facing away from him, looking out over the Bristol Channel. Then he pops open the iPhone carrier strapped to his right arm which does not contain an iPhone at all but a pack of ten fags, a lighter and a box of Tic Tacs. He lights up and pulls deeply on his cigarette while Jake slurps his juice. When they are both done Gareth gargles with Tic Tacs and gets up ready to go but Oscar refuses to budge, stares expectantly at Gareth.

  “Sorry mate, I forgot,” says Gareth, pulling out the buggy board from under the pram. Oscar hops on and off they go again. Gareth puts on a faster turn of speed for the way back. It will be 7am soon and his family will be waking.

  When he arrives home, breathing more heavily than he would like, Nora is sitting on the stairs waiting for him. She looks at him accusingly as he manoeuvres the pushchair into their hallway, which still has the original Victorian tiled floor. These tiles are just one of the reasons Rachel fell in love with this house, but they are rarely visible under the sea of shoes and coats and school bags that everyone dumps there.

  “I didn’t touch your teddies Nora. Honestly.”

  “They’re Beanie Boos, not teddies. And yes you did. Coconut and Stripes had switched places.”

  “Well they must have done that by themselves to wind you up when I was sleeping because I didn’t touch them, honestly.”

  “Yeah, right Dad! Anyway I put them back in the right order now. Will you make me pancakes for breakfast?”

  “Not on your nelly, Nora. I only make pancakes for birthdays and holidays. And sometimes when we’ve run out of bread. Come on, I’ll make you all some toast. Go wake up Iris and Eloise. Keep the noise down though – let your mother sleep a bit longer.”

  “Do I really have to wake up Eloise? She shouts at me.”

  “She shouts at us all love, it’s an intrinsic part of your job when you’re seventeen.”

  Thirty minutes later Gareth is showered and suited and booted, ready for work. He takes Rachel a cup of tea. He has timed it to perfection. Her alarm goes off just as he puts the tea down on her bedside table, shoving aside books and face creams to make enough room. She opens one sleepy eye and smiles at him. Despite having on his best suit, a navy pin stripe, he throws himself down on the bed next to her and puts his head on the pillow next to hers.

  “Morning beautiful,” he says, reaching over and gently brushing her auburn hair out of her eyes. “Nice bed head.”

  “Morning handsome.”

  Gareth always looks good straight from the shower, his dark hair damp and slightly curling. Rachel knows it’s shallow but not a day goes past that she doesn’t feel grateful that her husband still has hair. Lots of thick hair. Not even the slightest threat of one of those bald patches on the crown that always remind her of medieval monks. Streaked with a lot of grey at the temples now but Rachel thinks the grey suits him.

  She pulls him towards her and kisses him hard. He kisses her back.

  “Wow! If only we had more time and fewer kids.” He sighs.

  “Have we not got any KitKats?”

  After Eloise was born, Rachel and Gareth perfected the art of the KitKat quickie. They can have sex in the time it takes a child to consume one.

  “I don’t think even chocolate would be enough of a distraction today Rachel. “

  She raises an eyebrow. Gareth is not one for turning down even the remotest possibility of sex.

  “Jake is sitting in the mother of all stinky nappies which, of course, I could not change, being in my suit and all.”

  Rachel raises an eyebrow even further, swats him gently on the arm.

  “Give me a hug instead then.”

  He pulls her tight towards him and she breathes in deeply.

  “Ah,” she says. “Good old Imperial Leather.”

  He pulls away, pretending to be annoyed. “I don’t know why you have such a downer on Imperial Leather. I’ve told you before. I like it. No matter how many fancy grapefruit or fig soaps you buy me. I want to smell clean, not like a fruit salad. You should be glad of Imperial Leather. The only other soap I like is Wright’s Coal Tar. Smells like my dad.”

  Rachel props herself up on one elbow, reaches for her tea. “OK, OK. I give in. I hate Coal Tar. From now I shall embrace the scent of Imperial Leather as being eau de Gareth. No more verbena I promise. Where’s Nora? I didn’t hear her get up?”

  “All four of your children are downstairs eating breakfast. Cereal and toast all round. Eloise is in charge, under sufferance because she has pressing diary commitments to attend to before school such as checking Facebook and putting on too much eyeliner but I’ve told her to suck it up or she won’t be getting any more driving lessons. Dishwasher is on. Packed lunches are made. Only Jake’s stinky nappy for you to sort out. Oh, and Iris can’t find any clean school trousers and is kicking off at the horrible prospect of having to wear a skirt. And now I am going to work. I’ve got an agreement to finish drafting that I should have got out yesterday and I’ve got a client lunch I could really do without.”

  “Gosh Gareth, all this getting up early and going running and making breakfast. I could get used to this. You’re a changed man since you gave up smoking.”

  “I do my best. Don’t forget I’m playing squash straight after work but I’ll be done in time to fetch Iris from Scouts.”

  Gareth shuts the door behind him and Rachel flops back onto her pillow. She needs to get up. Karen the nanny will be here shortly and she likes to be dressed before she arrives. Rachel feel
s that being in her bathrobe when Karen arrives is like admitting that she has not got her house and her children and herself under control. Which she absolutely does not but there is no need for Karen to know that. But instead of getting up she takes another sip of her tea, putting off changing Jake’s nappy for just a little while longer.

  She often wonders what possessed her to have another baby aged 42. What was she thinking? She already had three girls aged between 15 and 6. She had finally got equity partnership at her law firm, ten years after Gareth had become a partner at his firm. The inequality of this had smarted. Still smarted. She was every bit as good a corporate lawyer as him. Better even.

  They’d been competitive from the moment they’d met as post graduates studying the Legal Practice Course in London. They happened to sit next to each other on the first day and sat next to each other every day after that. Rachel had teased Gareth about his accent and had recited Under Milk Wood at him. It had been a set text for her English A level, and she knew great chunks of it by heart. It amused Gareth to hear her recite it in a passable Welsh accent, particularly given how very posh her natural Buckinghamshire accent was. Not that Gareth teased her about her accent at that time because he was trying to get her into bed. This involved prising her away from her university boyfriend, a process which took a little while but which eventually he pulled off. From that point on, they not only vied with each other during the day for the best grades but during the night had what now seems to be unfeasible amounts of cinematic quality sex.

  Rachel had been the first to land a training contract at a top City firm but Gareth was selected by a similarly high profile firm just weeks later. They were both poised at the start of highflying legal careers and destined for great things.

  Getting pregnant with Eloise when she had only just qualified as a solicitor and had landed her dream job in the corporate department had not been on Rachel’s career plan at all. She was just 25 and had been ignoring Gareth’s hints that they should get married. They hadn’t even discussed children very much. And then somehow, within a year of the second blue line appearing on the pregnancy test, she was married, had had a baby, (in that order but only just) and was going back to work.