Clover Moon Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  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

  Author’s Note

  All About the Victorians

  About the Author

  Also by Jacqueline Wilson

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  When my mother named me, she must have been thinking of a lucky four-leaved clover. I’m sure Mother wanted me to be lucky.

  Clover Moon lives in Cripps Alley, a grimy backstreet of Victorian London, with six younger siblings, her weary father and his sharp-tongued and uncaring second wife. Devoted to her sister Megs, sparky and imaginative Clover is quick to learn her letters and loves to get a chance to paint or draw. But, despite her talents, she is condemned to life as a household skivvy. Then a chance meeting with an artist gives her an inspiring glimpse of another world – and an idea of how she might find it . . .

  For Alex Antscherl

  Thank you so much for the last twenty years!

  1

  ‘WHO’S COMING TO play then?’ I yelled, running out of our house.

  ‘Me!’ said Megs, jumping up from the front step, where she’d been waiting for me patiently.

  ‘Me!’ shouted Jenny, Richie, Pete and Mary. Bert can’t talk properly yet but he crowed.

  ‘Me!’ shouted Daft Mo from two doors down. He’s a great gawky lad now, but he isn’t right in the head and can’t start work at the factory, so I let him play with us.

  ‘Me!’ shouted Jimmy Wheels, bowling up on his wooden trolley, the cobbles making it rattle violently.

  Jimmy’s my special friend. Some of the alley folk think he’s as daft as Mo because he talks funny, but he’s sharp as a tack.

  ‘Now don’t you encourage them kids, Clover Moon,’ said Old Ma Robinson, leaning against the crumbling brick wall of her house and lighting her pipe. She puffs herself silly, Old Ma. Her face is turning as yellow as a smoked haddock. ‘They’re wild enough left to their own devices, but with you stirring them up they get up to all sorts.’

  ‘Quit nagging her,’ said Peg-leg Jack, stumping his way down the alley for his lunch-time pint of ale, his scrappy terrier trotting beside him. ‘Clover’s like a little mother to all the kids.’

  ‘Better than a mother,’ Megs muttered indistinctly, sucking her thumb.

  Our own mother died when Megs was born. She can’t remember her, naturally. I’m sure I can. Her name was Margaret. Megs is called after her. I wish I was, but my name is special too because Mother chose it.

  She must have been thinking of a lucky four-leaved clover. I’m sure Mother wanted me to be lucky. And though I started off with blue eyes like all babies, they’re now clover-green. Mother was sweet and soft and beautiful, with manners like a true lady, and she sat me on her lap every day and played with me. She still does so, in my dreams. Fat chance of Mildred ever doing that. She’s Pa’s second wife. She doesn’t even cuddle her own children, never mind Megs and me. She shouts and she slaps and we try our best to keep out of her way.

  Jenny and Richie and Pete and Mary and Bert are Mildred’s children, our half-brothers and -sisters. Bert is the baby. I carry him even when I’m doing my chores. He howls whenever I set him down. He’s fourteen months old so he should be toddling around, but his legs buckle whenever I put his funny fat feet on the floor. Pa’s worried that there’s something wrong with his legs and he’ll end up like Jimmy Wheels, but I think Bert’s just lazy.

  Jimmy Wheels gets around all right on his trolley, even though he can’t walk. Megs used to be frightened of him, especially when he came up close. She squealed like he was a mad dog about to bite her ankles. I had to give her a talking to – Jimmy Wheels is sensitive and I didn’t want his feelings hurt. His dad makes it plain he’s ashamed of having a crippled son, but Jimmy’s got a lovely ma. He’s lucky he doesn’t have a stepmother like Mildred. Sometimes I think I’d sooner have spider’s legs like Jimmy’s so long as I didn’t have Mildred.

  She’d been nagging at me since six in the morning, when we’d lit the copper for the big wash. I hate Mondays – all that soaking and scrubbing and boiling and rinsing and wringing until my hands are crimson and my arms ache and my dress is soaked right through and even little Bert tied on my back looks as if I’ve dropped him in a puddle.

  But now the sheets and underwear and aprons were flapping on the line across the cobbles, and there were a dozen other lines all down the alley. Only half the folk bother to do a weekly wash. I don’t think Old Ma Robinson ever washes her bedding, her clothes or herself. You can smell her coming before you see her.

  ‘What do you want to play then?’ I asked.

  ‘Families!’ cried little Mary, rolling up her pinafore to make a cloth baby.

  ‘Murderers!’ shouted Richie and Pete, pulling manic faces and curving their hands as if about to strangle someone.

  ‘Grand ladies! And I’ll be the grandest lady of them all,’ said Jenny.

  ‘Races!’ said Daft Mo, who had the longest legs.

  ‘Yes, races!’ Jimmy Wheels pleaded, because he was the fastest of all, thumping his hands down on the cobbles and rattling along like a cannon ball. He could speed freely under the sheets, and didn’t mind being dripped on either, but the rest of us would be slapped in the face by wet cotton as soon as we took a few strides. But the white sheets had given me an idea.

  ‘We’ll play sailing ships,’ I said, seizing the bottom of a sheet and making it billow in the wind.

  We’d never seen the sea and hadn’t seen any sailing ships when we walked all the way to see the filthy Thames – just barges and tugs and rowing boats – but every child had peered at the tattered pages of the nursery-rhyme book I’d stolen off the second-hand stall in the market.

  I was the only one who could read. Mr Dolly had taught me when I was six or so. I was already in charge of Megs and Jenny and Richie, who bawled non-stop when he was a baby. Mr Dolly was shocked that Mildred wouldn’t let me go to school, but I was much more use at home being her skivvy and minding the little ones. Mr Dolly said it was a shame because I was a bright little thing, so he showed me all my letters and made me figure out a story about P-a-t the d-o-g and J-e-t the c-a-t, and before I knew it I could read any column in his newspaper, though I didn’t have a clue what all the politics were about.

  I loved my stolen nursery-rhyme book though. I learned the rhymes by heart and could see every detail of the coloured illustrations even when I closed my eyes. I Saw Three Ships was one of my favourites, especially the comic duck in Navy uniform peering through his telescope. Mr Dolly let me peer through his old telescope to see how it worked. He didn’t need to explain the Navy to me though, because you can see Peg-leg Jack any day of the week down the Admiral’s Arms public house.

  So we played sailing ships. We each seized a sheet and shook it hard and jumped up and down, pretending we were sailing on a choppy sea. I let Jimmy Wheels have Mrs Watson’s longest double sheet that nearly trailed on the ground when she hung it on the line. He seized hold of it, rearing his head up and singing his version of a sea shanty. His hard, calloused hands were filthy from propelling himself along the ground, so the bottom of the sheet suddenly had