Opal Plumstead 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

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  About the Author

  Also by Jacqueline Wilson

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Opal Plumstead is fiercely intelligent: a proud scholarship girl, with plans to go to university. Yet her dreams are shattered when her father is sent to prison, and fourteen-year-old Opal must abandon school and start work at the Fairy Glen sweet factory.

  Opal struggles to get along with the other workers, who think her snobby and stuck up. But Opal idolizes Mrs Roberts, the factory’s beautiful, dignified owner, who introduces her to the legendary Emmeline Pankhurst and her fellow suffragettes. And when Opal meets Morgan – Mrs Roberts’ handsome son, and the heir to Fairy Glen – she believes she has found her soulmate.

  But the First World War is looming on the horizon, and will change Opal’s life for ever.

  The brilliant new story from the nation’s best-loved storyteller, starring her most outspoken, fiery and unforgettable heroine yet.

  To dear Trish, who typed all thirty chapters for me.

  ‘DO YOU BELIEVE in ghosts?’ Olivia asked.

  We were wandering through the graveyard, trying to find some privacy. Olivia had bought a pennyworth of Fairy Glen toffee chews and we were desperate to eat them. We had to be careful, though. Last week Miss Mountbank had caught us sucking sherbet on our way home from school. She’d pounced on us from a great height, her unfortunate nose more like a hawk’s beak than ever, and had smacked us both on the back so violently that we choked. I spilled sherbet all down my school tunic. It was even worse for Olivia. She snorted in surprise and inhaled half her packet. She coughed uncontrollably, her eyes streaming, slime dripping out of both nostrils.

  ‘How dare you eat in school uniform, you uncouth little guttersnipes!’ Mounty shrieked.

  She gave us detention the next day, shutting us in the classroom and making us write I am disgustingly greedy and a disgrace to the whole school in our best copperplate handwriting. She made Olivia write it out two hundred times. She gave me an extra fifty lines – ‘Because you of all girls should know better, Opal Plumstead.’

  I was top of the class. I couldn’t seem to help it. It meant that some teachers liked me and made me their pet, while other teachers like Mounty seemed to resent me bitterly. I tried hard to make the other girls like me, but most of them despised me. They considered it shameful to be such a swot – though what else did they expect from a scholarship girl? I had been dreadfully lonely, but now I had Olivia and she was my best friend.

  Olivia Brand came to St Margaret’s last term and didn’t quite fit into any of the little gangs of girls. She wasn’t pretty enough to be popular – she was quite plump so that the pleats on her tunic were stretched out of place. She had a very prominent forehead. She looked as if someone were permanently pulling hard on her long frizzy plait. She wasn’t from a desperately wealthy family. Her father was a buyer at Beade and Chambers, the big department store in town. This meant that Olivia was shunned by the lawyers’ and doctors’ daughters. She was very young for her age, liking to play little-girl games. When she was particularly happy, she would break into a lumbering skip. She was scornfully ignored by the sophisticated girls, who already had proper figures and pashes on boys.

  For the first few days of term Olivia had blundered around by herself. She didn’t make any overtures of friendship to me and I was too proud to. It was actually Mounty who brought us together. She paired us up in housecraft and had us sharing a worktop while we made rock cakes. We measured and mixed together, and I grinned sympathetically when Olivia couldn’t resist having a sly nibble at our raisin allowance. We ended up with very bland rock cakes with scarcely any flavouring – but we’d become firm friends.

  Now we went round arm in arm and wrote little notes to each other in class and walked home together every day. Olivia was given a weekly allowance. It was supposed to be for books and stationery and ribbons and stockings, but she spent most of it on sweets. She was a generous girl and shared them scrupulously with me, though I didn’t get an allowance of any kind and couldn’t reciprocate.

  ‘Never mind – you’re my best friend,’ said Olivia. ‘Of course we go even-stevens.’

  She shook the bag of Fairy Glen toffees as if it were a tambourine until we skirted the church and threaded our way between the gravestones. I liked reading the quaint inscriptions and admired the stone angels, but Olivia seemed suddenly disconcerted.

  ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ she repeated. She was peering around warily, staring at a broken sepulchre.

  ‘Perhaps I do,’ I said. ‘Shush! Let’s listen for them.’

  ‘Ghosts don’t talk,’ said Olivia, giggling nervously.

  ‘I think they might, if we’re very receptive. Hush now, let’s see.’

  I made an elaborate show of putting my finger to my lips. Olivia clamped her hand over her mouth to stop herself spluttering. We waited.

  A bird sang in the tree, repeating the same three trills again and again. Leaves rustled slightly in the breeze. There was a very distant rumble of traffic. Nothing else.

  Then we heard a faint keening sound.

  Olivia gasped and clutched me. ‘Did you hear that?’ she whispered.

  ‘Listen!’ I hissed.

  Silence. Then it came again, soft, sad, yearning.

  ‘Oh, there it is again. Quick, Opal, let’s run. I don’t like it,’ Olivia cried.

  Then she saw my face. ‘It was you!’ she said, and thumped me with her satchel.

  ‘Of course it was me, idiot!’ I said.

  I hummed again, and Olivia put her hands over her ears.

  ‘Stop it! It sounds so creepy. Stop, or I won’t share my toffee chews.’

  That shut me up effectively. I mimed buttoning my mouth and hitched myself up on a tomb, swinging my legs.

  ‘All right, I’ve stopped now. Come on,’ I said, patting the space beside me.

  ‘I’m not sitting there, right on top of a dead person,’ said Olivia.

  ‘Well, they can’t do anything, can they? Not if they’re dead.’ I looked again at the broken sepulchre, the stone lid crumbling away. ‘Though perhaps I wouldn’t sit on that one. They might just reach out a very bony hand and grab our toffee chews.’

  ‘Stop it! I’m warning you, Opal Plumstead. I’ll eat them all myself. Look!’ Olivia sat down on the sandy pathway, undid a banana chew, and stuffed it into her mouth. She crammed in a raspberry chew as well, to emphasize her point.

  ‘You’re getting your tunic filthy – look,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t care,’ said Olivia indistinctly, her cheeks bulging.

  ‘Let’s sit on the grass,’ I suggested.

  ‘How do I know that the dead people haven’t wriggled about a bit under the grass. The plots are so overgrown, you can’t work out exactly where the graves are.’ Olivia unwrapped an