Yorkshire Writers' Lunch

“Now, now no more tears young lady, we’ll go upstairs and find you some new clothes. Then we shall see what to do.” Sandra didn’t like the sound of that – she’d heard those words a thousand times and they always meant something horrid. The lady was smiling kindly but she knew that meant nothing. If she ran to the back door now….. “Come on slow coach,” Pink lady was looking down at her from the stairs, “up to Steph… your room.” Sandra gasped; Her room? Had she heard right? She walked up the stairs, thinking that pink lady’s slippers looked beautiful with the patterns of flowers and the bobbly thing on the front of them and she wished very hard that she might be able to have some like them one day especially if she could stay here. She asked if Stephen’s room was really hers. Pink lady looks a bit sad, Sandra thought, maybe the room won’t be mine after all. “Yeas I suppose so my dear, for the time being.” “Is that a long time?” asked Sandra. “Let’s put these clean clothes on,...

Sandra pulled the eiderdown up to her chin and rubbed the silky fabric on her cheek. This bed was warm and comfortable, the first proper mattress she had slept on for a whole week. She’d asked the pink lady to leave the light on but drowsiness was sweeping over her like a tide. She bit her lip to stay awake and focused her eyes on the photograph of the boy in a silver frame on the dressing table, a slim boy about her age with light hair and shy smile. She liked him. He looked friendly. Sandra had never wanted to say the word Winwood again, but it had worked. The train man had shaken his head and the pink lady had gone quite pale. They gave her a dog-eared Beano Annual and told her to sit on the sofa. She couldn’t hear what they said in the kitchen even though their voices were quite loud, but when the man went out of the house again, the pink lady came to sit on the sofa beside her. She put her arm around Sandra’s shoulder. “Well, this is muddle,” the lady said. “In fact, it’s a...

Tony brought Sandra home. Switching the car engine off, he turned to the girl in the backseat. She glanced up at him but wouldn't say a word. She was much too still and may have been in shock.    He gave a gap-tooth smile. "Do you live near here, Sandra?"    She stared into her hand at a black and white sea shell. On the off chance it might sooth her, Tony had plucked it from his dashboard.    "Stephen - my boy - found that last time we went to the seaside. He called it his zebra shell." He paused. "You live by the sea?"    Still nothing. Tony sighed.    The curtains twitched in the living room window. They had been seen.    "I'll be right back," Tony said.    He walked in the door, loosening his tie. Monica's shadow preceded her from her place at the end of the hallway.    She had her arms folded over her pink fuzzy jumper. She fixed him with a stare through horn-rimmed spectacles....

The girl kept to the shadows as she sidled into the deserted railway station. It was already dusk; the evening sky heavy with its threatened rain. Peering round, the girl checked no-one was there ahead of her, or following her, before she scurried down the platform and opened the heavy door to the waiting room. It creaked as she pushed it further and stepped into the room. All was in darkness. No train was expected that night, no passengers would be waiting to be picked up. The girl headed to the furthest corner, curling up on the hard wooden seat and trying to make herself comfortable. For a little while she lay awake, wondering about her journey, wondering where she would go tomorrow, where she could go tomorrow. Then exhaustion set in and she fell asleep. Hours later, the sound of a train chugged along the single track, straining up the incline over the moors, before slowing its engine for the flat run to the station. There were no lights on in the station but as the moon fina...