THE H-BOMB GIRL by Stephen Baxter (beach books txt) 📕

of England facing America and Ireland, had once been a great port of the British Empire. Its docks were seven miles long. And millions of people had drained through here, heading for new lives overseas.

The Pier Head itself, where all the buses started and finished, was a major meeting place for Liverpudlians. It was just a big, empty, windy square. But people swarmed here, white, black, Asian, Chinese, all busy, all on their way somewhere. An awful lot of them were young.

All the way up the motorway Laura had been determined to hate Liverpool. But, surrounded by all this bustle, she felt excited. There was a jammed-together, mixed-up energy here that you would never find in a little town like Wycombe.

At last Dad turned the car back the way they had come, and drove her out to school.

Once there he got out of the car and hugged her. It was an old wartime pilot’s habit, he’d once told her. You said goodbye every morning, because you never knew if you would come home that night.

They left her at the gate and drove off.

Chapter 2

Saint Agnes’s Roman Catholic Secondary Modern School was a blocky brick pile, murky and old. It looked more like a hospital than a school. Laura heard the kids calling the school “Aggie’s.”

It was a quarter to nine. All the kids were outside. The older kids hung around by the gate or on the pavement. The younger ones messed about in the playground.

There were workmen here, unloading vans and carrying ladders and planks and boxes of tools into the school. Laura’s school in Wycombe was always being rebuilt too, classrooms shuffled around or extensions added, to cope with an ever larger population of kids. The workmen eyed up the older girls, and some of the girls played up to their whistles.

Laura waited by the gate. Nobody spoke to her. Anyhow their accents were so thick she couldn’t understand a word anybody said.

Miss Wells, Laura’s form teacher, came walking through the crowd. She was carrying a handbell. The kids got out of her way. Evidently she wasn’t somebody you messed with.

Miss Wells peered closely at Laura. “Miss Mann. Welcome to Saint Agnes’s.”

Miss Wells was about Laura’s height, and she was bundled up in a thick overcoat and scarf, even though the morning was warm. She might have been sixty. Her steel-grey hair was pulled back from her forehead, and her face was a leathery mask of wrinkles. But it was an oval face, her mouth small, her nose regular, her blue eyes bright blue.

Laura suddenly saw that this teacher, who Laura had only met briefly yesterday, looked like her own mother, or one of her aunties. That threw Laura, and she couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Cat got your tongue?”

“No, Miss.”

“ ‘No, Miss.’” Miss Wells laughed. She stared at Laura, as if deeply interested in her. “A big day for you to write about in your diary, Miss Mann.”

Laura frowned. “How do you know about my diary?”

“Oh, just a hunch. Lots of people keep diaries.” Miss Wells leaned closer. “Here’s a date to make a note of. Saturday the 27th of October.”

That was two weeks tomorrow. “Why? What’s happening then?”

Miss Wells winked. “Fireworks. One day they’ll call it ‘Black Saturday.’ You’ll see. Nice talking to you, Miss Mann. Time to round up the flock.”

She strode off through the playground, ringing her bell.

Something was very odd about that woman, Laura thought. But she couldn’t work out what.

The kids funnelled into the school like sheep to be sheared.

The classrooms were grim boxes with floors of worn wooden blocks. The radiators were lumps of iron. The whole place was gloomy and cold, with high, grimy windows.

There was an assembly, eight hundred pupils singing a hymn in a hall like a cave, with gym equipment folded against the walls. The school seemed packed to the brim with kids.

Then came registration, with Miss Wells in her form room. Thirty-five fourteen-year-olds crammed into desks that were too small and covered with ink stains. There was one black kid in the class, a skinny boy called Joel. He sat down at the front. As the others filed in some of them made soft jungle noises at Joel, but he ignored them.

Miss Wells stuck Laura in an empty desk right at the back, next to an older-looking girl called Bernadette. Laura heard whispering, a bit of scandal. The desk was empty because the previous girl was “in the pudding club.”

Bernadette didn’t say a word to Laura. She didn’t even look at her.

Miss Wells handed Laura a timetable. There was going to be a lot of religion, a couple of periods a day, and Mass on Wednesday morning. Laura had been brought up in the Church by Mum, but her old school in Wycombe hadn’t been Catholic. Well, she would be getting to know God a lot better.

The first lesson was French. The teacher was a small elderly lady they had to call Madame Minet. Surrounded by a cloud of perfume and make-up, “Minnie Mouse” seemed kind, and told Laura not to worry.

Laura had been doing all right at school. But her old school in Wycombe had been smaller than Aggie’s, and a lot less like a huge zoo. And Laura was stuck right at the back, where everybody smelled of cigarette smoke.

The back-of-the-class crew weren’t interested in French or maths. They were interested in Laura. In the second lesson, the maths teacher picked her out for an answer: “Forty-two.” Bernadette and the others took the mick: “Oh, foor-ty-tooo, ee-oh, ain’t I prop-ah, Lai-dee Muck of Muck Hall. Who was at your last school, Prince Charles?”

Laura was relieved when the morning break came.

All the kids spilled out into the yard again. A teacher walked around sternly, bell in hand. There was no equipment in the yard. The kids organised themselves into huge games: football with fifty boys on each side, complicated chase games like alley-oh fought out between whole armies. In their purple blazers, the