Free Custard Tarts and Broken Hearts by Mary Gibson

and proper now!’
    As he was leaving, Nellie glimpsed through the kitchen window three familiar figures, trooping down the basement steps. She ran to the front door and immediately swung Bobby up into her arms. Even the usually undemonstrative Freddie hugged her, as Betty called from the kitchen for Nellie to bring them all in. She plonked an enormous enamel teapot on the table and an assortment of mismatched cups. ‘They’re all welcome to sleep in the kitchen too, but we’ll have to put ’em top and tail!’ she added cheerily. Once the three Clark children were seated around the Boshers’ kitchen table, drinking Betty’s dark sweet brew, Alice quickly unburdened herself. She said their father had forbidden all mention of Nellie’s name, but oddly he seemed to have lost interest in the rest of them.
    ‘We ain’t seen nothing of him today, didn’t come home for his dinner, and I’ve been so worried about you, Nell!’
    ‘Don’t worry, Al,’ Nellie said, squeezing her little sister’s hand, ‘we’ll be together again soon, I know we will.’
    ‘We can’t stop long, I’m scared in case he comes home and finds us gone,’ Alice said, gulping the rest of her tea.
    Nellie saw them out and, at the top of the basement steps, gave Alice some hurried instructions about looking after her brothers and father. Alice left with promises to bring the boys back to see her when she could.
    ‘And you two boys do as Alice tells you while I’m gone!’ Nellie called after them as they turned the corner.
    The following evening, after another long day at the Labour Institute, she and Lily were sitting outside on the wall at the top of the Boshers’ basement steps, trying to cool off in what passed for an evening breeze. The temperatures had reached a hundred degrees that day and the two girls barely had enough energy to chat. Nellie saw Alice first, being followed two steps behind by the boys, who both had sorrowful hangdog expressions. She was surprised to see them again so soon; she’d expected her father to monitor their comings and goings more closely. But as Alice sat herself on the wall beside them, Nellie knew immediately that all was not well.
    ‘What’s the matter with you two?’ Nellie asked the glum-looking boys.
    ‘Dad give us a walloping!’ Freddie shouted at her, his face swollen and red with tears.
    Before Nellie had a chance to blame her father, Alice jumped in. ‘He found out they’ve been swimming in the river.’
    Bobby and Freddie, like all the boys who lived anywhere near the Thames, made it their playground during the summer. They would regularly sneak down the river stairs, leap across the moored barges tied up in rows that reached almost to the middle of the river, and then dive into the treacherous currents. The great wide sweep of the Thames, which wound through Bermondsey and Rotherhithe, was perilous and polluted and their father had quite rightly forbidden them from swimming in its waters. But Nellie could understand how the overwhelming heat had won out over her father’s warnings: the water might be filthy, but at least it was cool.
    ‘Well, don’t come looking for sympathy, it’s your own fault!’ she said, as Bobby came to lean on Nellie’s knees. She kissed the top of his head, nonetheless, belying her stern tone.
    ‘He don’t care about us, anyway,’ said Freddie, banging his boot against the bottom of the wall. ‘He never even speaks to us, just belts us.’
    Whatever Nellie felt about her father, it hurt her to think his sons thought this way about him. ‘Well, he just doesn’t want you to end up like your friend Michael McIlvoy, does he?’
    One of their neighbour’s children, nine-year-old Michael McIlvoy, had swum out to a notorious current in the centre of the Thames known as the Fountain. Boys would let themselves be dragged under and sucked along beneath the water by the undertow and, if they were lucky, they were shot clean out of the river by a water spout.