Father Unknown by Lesley Pearse Page B

Ellen,’ Mrs Palstow said, assuming the child thought she was in trouble. ‘It wasn’t very wise to put paint in Sally’s hair, I expect her mother will be cross. But I did see what she did to your painting and I shall tell her so.’
    Ellen didn’t answer but ran towards the school building and disappeared into the cloakroom. Mrs Palstow walked on back to her classroom, her mind now on the story she intended to read to her class.
    Ellen stood in the cloakroom, her hands under the running tap but her mind firmly fixed on what Sally had said. She very much wanted to discount it entirely, to laugh in Sally’s face, yet she sensed that the other girl had got the story from listening to someone in her parents’ grocer’s shop. Could it possibly be true?
    Her hands became numb from the cold water, but she didn’t feel it as she was picturing a woman with a baby in her arms jumping from a cliff top. It couldn’t be right; mothers protected their babies. Although she couldn’t remember back to when Josie was born, she could recall when she started walking. Mum was always shouting at her to watch her baby sister, and sometimes Ellen got blamed when Josie fell in mud. The confusion of it all made her cry, and with that she grabbed her raincoat from the peg and ran out of the school, across the playground and into the street, leaving the tap still running.
    She took the short-cut home across the fields, but it was still a long way and she had a stitch from running long before she got to the stile that took her back on to the road. It was only three weeks into the autumn term, but it was already turning colder, and recently heavy rain had turned the path to mud. At the back of her mind she knew she would be in trouble for leaving school, for not putting on her Wellingtons, and especially for leaving Josie to come home alone. But that seemed far less important than to see her dad to find out if what Sally had said was true.
    Beacon Farm, the Pengelly land, stretched for about a mile along the road between Mawnan Smith and Maunporth. But although this might have seemed fair acreage to a passer-by, it wasn’t good farming land, for it was a narrow strip, running down to the cliffs and the sea, with no flat fields for crops, and clumps of thick woodland and marshy areas. Only the very committed would have tried to farm it.
    But the Pengellys were too committed, or at least too stubborn, to walk away from it. It had been passed down through three generations, and each one of them believed it was better to eke out an existence on their own land than to go cap in hand to anyone else for a job.
    Albert, Ellen’s father, had finally come to own it when his father died back at the start of the Second World War, and Albert still farmed it in much the same way. He kept cows, chickens and a few sheep, and grew vegetables. Even if he had had the money to buy new modern machinery, it was doubtful that he’d have done so. To him, his ancient tractor and his muscle were enough. When times were hard, he would take himself off to Falmouth and join a fishing boat for a few weeks. That was the way his father, and his grandfather before that, had got by, and Albert knew no other way.
    The farmhouse reflected the hand-to-mouth existence of its owners. Situated in a dip and concealed from the road by woodland, it was in a sorry state. The roof sagged, the windows were ill-fitting, and wooden outhouses and extra rooms had been added in a haphazard fashion to the original stone-built two-room cottage. Inside was no better; there were no modern amenities, and the furniture was a motley collection of hand-me-downs.
    But however dilapidated the farmhouse was, its setting was idyllic. The front of the house faced the sea, there were wooded hills to either side and before it the land gradually sloped down to a small rocky cove. The view was beautiful, whatever the season. Even in the depths of winter when the sea was dark and menacing and the trees bare