Opal Plumstead
Authors: Jacqueline Wilson
Contents
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 another banana chew. They were my favourites. Sometimes there were only a couple in a whole bag.
‘Pax!’ I cried quickly, jumping off the tomb. I sat down beside her, not caring if I made my own tunic dirty, though I knew Mother would be angry.
Olivia ignored me, slowly unwrapping the banana chew, the tip of her tongue sticking out in anticipation. I edged closer to her, putting my hands up like paws and making beseeching panting noises.
‘All right, you wicked greedy beast,’ said Olivia, and she posted the banana chew into
my
mouth.
‘Thank you!’ I said, chewing vigorously, my whole mouth filled with the wonderful sweet banana flavour.
‘You’re such a tease. If you weren’t my best friend, you’d be my worst enemy,’ said Olivia. ‘Just don’t go on about g-h-o-s-t-s any more.’
‘I don’t believe in them, not really,’ I said. ‘I think when you’re dead, that’s it. You just moulder away in your coffin.’ I pulled a silly corpse face, and Olivia shoved me again.
‘What about angels?’ she said, looking up at the stone figures around us, all standing on their white tiptoes, wings spread, as if about to fly away. ‘I believe in angels. They’re in Heaven.’
‘I’m not sure I believe any of that any more,’ I said. ‘I think it’s all just a trick to make us meek and good. Never mind if your life is awful now, if you have to toil away twelve hours a day in a factory and live on bread and dripping, you will be rewarded when you die and go to Heaven. Only what if Heaven doesn’t exist?’
‘Shush! You are dreadful. God could smite you down right this instant,’ said Olivia. She looked up fearfully, as if she seriously thought a giant hand were about to punch its way through the clouds and pulverize me.
I swallowed the last of my banana toffee chew and looked at the bag hopefully.
‘Another?’ said Olivia.
‘Oh, yes please!’ I delved into the paper bag and found a strawberry chew this time. ‘Well, you don’t have to worry about Heaven, Olivia. If it
does
exist, you’ll fly straight there, flippity-flap, because you’re so good.’
‘You will too,’ said Olivia. ‘You’re ever so good. You always come top at school.’
‘Yes, but that’s just because I can do the lessons. That’s nothing to do with being a good
person
. I’m not at all good at home. My mother says I’m a very bad girl.’
‘Why, what do you do?’ Olivia asked, looking very interested.
‘It’s not really what I do, it’s what I
say
. I don’t think the same way as Mother and Cassie,’ I said. ‘I’m always saying the wrong thing and vexing Mother. She fusses so over the slightest little thing – and yet she lets Cassie get away with murder. When I point this out, she says I’m just jealous of Cassie and I’ve got an unfortunate nature.’
Olivia sucked at her toffee chew. ‘I wouldn’t blame you if you were a bit jealous of Cassie,’ she said. ‘I mean,
I
would be if she were my sister.’
I had invited Olivia to tea after we’d vowed eternal friendship. She had clearly been expecting my sister Cassie to be another version of me, only slightly older – pinched and pale and plain, with mouse-coloured hair and little oval glasses. She was taken aback by Cassie, in all her irritating abundance: her long thick wavy fair hair, her big brown doe eyes, her round rosy cheeks, her extraordinary curves, her flamboyant gestures, her peals of laughter. Olivia sat opposite her at the tea table totally struck dumb; she could scarcely eat. She gazed at Cassie as if she were a turn at the music hall. I tried not to mind. I was used to Cassie having this effect on everyone. I found I
did
mind all the same. Rather a lot.