Diamond 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

  About the Author

  Also by Jacqueline Wilson

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Diamond wasn’t always a star. Born to penniless parents who longed for a strong, healthy son, she was a dainty, delicate daughter – and a bitter disappointment.

  Discovering she has an extraordinary gift for acrobatics, Diamond uses her talent to earn a few pennies, but brings shame on her family. Then a mysterious, cruel-eyed stranger spots her performing, and makes a deal with her father. Diamond is sold for five guineas, and is taken to become an acrobat at Tanglefield’s Travelling Circus.

  The crowds adore Diamond, but life behind the velvet curtains is far from glamorous. Her wicked master forces Diamond to attempt ever more daring and dangerous tricks, until she is terrified to step into the ring. But there are true friends to be found at the circus, too: the gentle Mister Marvel; the kindly Madame Adeline; and the glorious Emerald Star, Tanglefield’s brand-new ringmaster, and Diamond’s heroine.

  When life at the circus becomes too dangerous to bear any longer, what will the future hold for Diamond? And will her beloved Emerald be a part of it?

  In memory of Joan Beswick, who was like a second mother to me

  MY NAME IS Diamond. I used to be called Ellen-Jane Potts, but my dear friend Hetty says it doesn’t matter a jot if you change your name. She has changed her name three times. She calls herself Emerald Star for all the shows – and now she has fashioned herself an emerald-green riding jacket and has shiny swashbuckling boots to stride about in. Oh, she looks such a picture! No wonder she has ‘Star’ for a name: she is the true star of the show. She is the cleverest girl in all the world.

  She is smiling now as I say this, going as red as her hair. She is writing down my story for me. I am a fool when it comes to printing and spelling because I have never been to school. Hetty has laboured hard teaching me, but without any real success. I can only write about a c-a-t sitting on a m-a-t, and so my life-story would be very limited without Hetty’s help.

  There was a cat that lived in Willoughby Buildings, along with us and all the other families – a big black creature of the night called Mouser. I don’t know about mice, but he certainly dined well on rats, of which there were plenty. Mouser was the only creature in Willoughby who went to sleep with a full stomach. Sometimes we were so hungry we almost considered dining on rats ourselves.

  But that was in the bad old days. Shall I get started on them? No, Hetty says I should simply tell it straight. She forgets that I am a bendy girl, so I can walk bent over like a crab and turn a back flic-flac on command! But I shall try to do my best to please her, because she is my dearest friend in all the world – and she is holding the pen.

  I was born in 1883, the fifth child of my mother, Lizzie Potts, and my father, Samuel. I was the second girl, and I’m afraid I was a bitter disappointment to my parents. I have a feeling my mother had been brought up to be a bad girl. Whenever we complained about our own lot, she would not speak of her childhood but shook her head at us and said, ‘You don’t know you’re born.’ This always struck me as a little odd, because of course I knew I’d been born, and my mother – and doubtless several of my siblings – had been a witness to the fact. Not my pa though. He always made himself scarce at such times.

  He stayed out all night while Ma was labouring, and sometimes the next night as well. He’d be down at the King’s Arms, celebrating the new baby – or drowning his sorrows, whichever way you want to look at it. Not that he needed an excuse to go to those establishments, or any other public house, for that matter. He was famous for his love of the drink – which is strange considering he was a patterer by profession and specialized in selling religious tracts and homilies against the demon drink.

  You don’t know what a patterer is, Hetty? There! You don’t know everything, for all your wonderful education. A patterer is like a pedlar, but he doesn’t sell toys and gimcracks, he sells cards and pamphlets and papers. He wanders from village to village, setting up in the middle of the street on market days and crying out his wares. I reckon you’d be good at that job, Hetty, seeing as you can come out with all the spiel and sweet-talk whenever you fancy.

  My pa specialized in little gelatine cards with gilt edges – ever so pretty, decorated with bluebirds and rosebuds and little angels. He bought them penny plain, and Ma coloured in the drawings: blue for the birds, red for the roses, pink for the cheeks and gold for the hair – dab dab dab, and there was another one done. It’s easy enough. Mary-Martha and I learned to do thirty an hour or thereabouts – you could say we were dab hands at it!

  As a single man, Pa had travelled up and down England calling out his wares. ‘Take the Lord Jesus into your heart and lead your life accordingly,’ he’d bellow. ‘Don’t forget the Sabbath. Bow your head in worship’ – though Pa himself spent Sunday lying in his lodging house till dinner time before crawling out of bed with a sore head, because even in those days, before all the troubles, he haunted all the alehouses and gin palaces his tracts warned against.

  One Sunday he met up with my mother. She’d been staying overnight in the same lodging house and I don’t doubt she had a sore head too. I always thought of Ma as old because she had such a careworn face and her tiny body was all skin and bone, but Pa said she was a beautiful, fresh young girl when he met her, with cheeks as rosy as the cherubs on his tracts, and long fair hair curling to her waist.

  Perhaps Pa would never have had the nerve to approach her if she’d been dressed up in all her finery, because he was a plain man with a great red nose like Punch, and he was a good fifteen years older than Ma to boot. But she was sitting hunched in a corner in her nightgown and shawl, weeping bitterly because some young man had treated her badly.

  Pa took pity on her, and it wasn’t long before she’d buried that fine head of hair in his shoulder. He patted her back with awkward tenderness. ‘There now, my girl. Old Sam will look after you and see you’re all right,’ he said, or something to that effect – and he was as good as his word at first.

  They made an odd couple, but Pa said they were as happy as two little lambs frisking in the meadow. That was his pet name for Ma. ‘Where’s my little lamb?’ he called when he came back from his pattering travels, and Ma would go flying into his arms.

  They rented their own little home: just two rooms in a big converted house, but Ma kept them spotlessly clean and stuck Pa’s tracts on one wall like a mosaic picture, making it look ever so pretty. She read the tracts each day too, pointing along with one finger and muttering aloud because she struggled with her reading like me.

  ‘Repent and praise the Lord,’ she said – and she did just that. Every Sunday she went along to the church at the end of the road and stood self-consciously at the back, not sure where to go or what to do, worried that the good churchgoers would point at her and the vicar cast her out – but instead they welcomed her eagerly. They gave her a hymn book, and as she had a good ear and a light, tuneful voice, she could soon praise the Lord for all she was worth.

  She begged Pa to go with her to church, but he always shook his head.

  ‘It’s not for me, littl
e lamb. I don’t take the old tracts too serious, I just sells them to put food in our bellies. Beats me why you should want to run out on a Sunday morning, my one free day, when you could stay warm and cosy in bed with me – but if that’s what you want to do, I’ll not stop you. I just want you to be happy.’

  That’s what he said to her, and that’s what she told us, over and over.

  ‘He might not be the church-going type, but he’s a dear good Christian-minded man all the same. He’s always treated me so sweet and tender,’ Ma said, eyes brimming.

  It was true enough. Pa worshipped our ma. He worried dreadfully when she started growing big with her first baby. She was very sick every morning, often fainting dead away whenever she tried to sweep the floor or throw coals on the fire. Pa did his best to help her. He got up extra early and set the stew simmering for the day. He lit the fire to keep Ma warm and tucked her up in a blanket on the sofa.

  He still went out drinking on a Saturday night, but no matter how he was feeling he hauled himself out of bed on Sunday morning to help her along the road to church. He wouldn’t go in himself, but he waited and waited for her outside in the cold until the sermon was over so he could help her back home.

  Ma was so little they were expecting a difficult birth. I think she laboured long and hard. I don’t know, I wasn’t there. Pa wasn’t there either. The moment Ma started screaming he left her with the midwife and scurried away out of earshot, straight to the alehouse. He said he couldn’t bear to hear her suffering. He drank himself insensible, and then wouldn’t come home till morning, sure he’d find himself a widower – but when he eventually crawled back, sobbing and cursing, he found Ma in bed, still breathing, with a big blond baby boy bawling his head off in her arms.

  ‘He’s my little miracle,’ said Ma. ‘Oh, Sam, we’re a true family at last.’

  I think Pa would have been happier if they’d stayed just the two of them. He was never cut out to be a family man. But now he knew that Ma had survived the birth, he was proud to call himself the father of a fine son. He went out again that very night in celebration. Ma tried hard not to mind. She held her baby tight and murmured all the good words from the tracts as if they were magical spells to keep her precious boy on the straight and narrow.

  She called him Matthew, after the first book of the Holy Gospels. A year later, little Mark was born, and two years after that, baby Luke. Ma was fair worn out coping with all three of them, and Pa was hard pressed to earn enough to keep them all fed and happy. He had to leave Ma on her own with the boys while he travelled the length and breadth of the country – and find new gimcracks to sell when folk lost interest in his tracts.

  He was at a great goose fair in a northern city when he spotted some plaster fairings on a Lucky Chance stall. They were the usual sort of fancy figures: twin dogs with long ears to sit on either side of a mantel clock, or comical little husbands and wives getting into bed, or shepherdesses with woolly lambs. It was one of these that caught Pa’s eye. He wondered whether to try and win one for his little lamb at home – but then he spied an angel with wings and a very holy expression.

  This gave him a whole new idea. He spoke to the stallholder about suppliers, bought a rubber angel mould and ordered in a sack of plaster of Paris when he got back home. Our house became like one of his own tracts: And lo, a host of angels descended in a holy throng. The mould was in labour night and day, producing angel after angel. There were disasters at first. The wings snapped off – or, even worse, the heads – but Pa soon mastered the knack of easing out a perfect white angel every time.

  Then it was Ma’s job to paint them. She varied the colours of the wings and robes, and gave the angels dark hair to contrast splendidly with their gold paint haloes.

  Pa couldn’t cram more than twenty newspaper-wrapped angels into his bag at any one time, but he charged a shilling per figure and made a good profit out of them. He’d stand in the street and sing a hymn to get everyone’s attention. Hark the Herald Angels was his favourite, and he sang it all year round, even though it was a Christmas carol. Then he’d shout out, ‘Come and buy my beautiful angels. See them and marvel! Change your luck for ever. Stand one of these holy beauties on your mantelpiece and it’ll watch over you and your loved ones, guarding you from all troubles, great or small.’

  Folk couldn’t resist them, and Pa’s pockets clinked with coins at the end of each day. His patter now was so convincing, even Ma believed it, and had a flock of five angels lined up along her own mantel, one for each member of the family: Ma, Pa, Matthew, Mark and Luke. She had another white plaster angel in reserve, ready to be painted for little John, for she was going to have another baby and couldn’t wait to have a complete quartet of Gospel children.

  She took it for granted that her baby would be another fine blond boy. She was bewildered when she gave birth to a dark little girl. When Pa recovered from his celebrations, he declared himself tickled pink to have a daughter for a change. ‘Dark, like me! Let’s hope she hasn’t inherited my features as well as my colouring, poor little mite!’

  Ma called the baby girl Mary-Martha, the holiest female names she could think of. She was a docile baby and a sweet little girl, but sadly, as predicted, she took after Pa, even developing her own unfortunate beak nose.

  Ma was a while recovering after Mary-Martha’s birth, and the midwife warned her she shouldn’t risk another child, but Ma took no notice. She loved Mary-Martha but still hankered after a little John. She lost two babies before their time and cried bitterly for weeks.

  ‘What did I tell you?’ said the midwife – but Ma wouldn’t be told. She started all over again, and this time cried with happiness when she knew she was carrying another child. She thumbed her way through all Pa’s tracts to select quotes from the Gospel of St John, highlighting them all with expensive gold paint, and then stuck them up above her bed. She asked Pa to fashion a little shelf there too, and stood the first of all the plaster angels on it, to flap his wings protectively above her all night long, keeping her little John safe.

  She laboured for two whole days when her time came. The midwife was sure she would not survive the birth. But at long last the baby appeared – a small scrap of a child to have caused so much pain. It wasn’t the longed-for John. It was me.

  Poor Ma. She didn’t want a daughter. She already had Mary-Martha. She took one look at me and turned her face to the wall. She nursed me every few hours but showed no other interest in me whatsoever. She couldn’t even be bothered to give me a name.

  So Pa chose Ellen-Jane, after his mother and Ma’s. Both these grandmothers were already dead.

  ‘And I shouldn’t think this poor puny mite’s long for this world either,’ he said.

  I stayed poor, I stayed puny – but I thrived.

  MY BROTHERS HAD holy names, and they were indeed holy terrors. They tormented me royally.

  Matthew, the eldest, wasn’t quite so bad. He would snatch and strike a blow if I ever had anything he wanted, but if I fell, he’d always pick me up and run around with me until I stopped crying.

  Mark was the sneaky one, the master of sly pinches and whispered insults. Luke was the whinger, always complaining, bursting into tears if he couldn’t get his own way. Pa clouted them all on a regular basis whenever he was home, but it didn’t make a blind bit of difference to their behaviour.

  Mary-Martha was a good child – almost too good. I’d cram a stolen fingerful of sugar into my mouth or blotch one of the tracts and tear it into scraps, but Mary-Martha would say, ‘Ma and Pa might not know, but the angels do!’

  I started to be terribly aware of all those plaster angels staring at me, their painted mouths ‘o’s of shock and horror. Once when I was very little, I tipped them all over, even the special one above Ma’s side of the bed.

  Ma was speechless when she saw, her mouth working but no sound coming out. She went to bed and cried because she thought it such terrible bad luck. Pa didn’t care about luck – he was simply angry that so ma
ny of the angels had got chipped, losing their noses and fingers and wing-tips.

  ‘Which of you little varmints did it?’ he bellowed.

  We all stared at him, trembling.

  ‘Right then, you shall all suffer, even the baby,’ he said, reaching for the cane in the corner of the room.

  ‘Don’t, Pa! It wasn’t me! It was the baby what did it all!’ Mark cried.

  Pa shook his head, unwilling to believe I could be so bad. I wasn’t yet five at this time and looked a deal younger.

  ‘It wasn’t you, was it, Ellen-Jane?’ he asked.

  He probably expected me to lie, and then he would have pretended to believe me, because he wasn’t really a cruel father, not then. But those angels were crowding in on me, ready to tip me over, straight down to Hell. I didn’t dare tell a lie, not in front of all of them.

  ‘Yes, it was me, Pa,’ I said.

  Pa always declared he was a man of his word, so he seized his cane and beat me on my bottom. He did it lightly, but I screamed my head off.

  ‘That’ll learn you,’ he said breathlessly – but all it did was teach me to fear the wrath of those angels, and to hate my telltale brother Mark.

  The angels seemed determined to punish poor Ma, even though I was to blame. She was still hoping for a little John, though the midwife said this was madness. Ma wouldn’t give up hope, though as the years passed, there were no more babies.

  Pa was mightily relieved. He feared for Ma’s life – and he was also finding it hard to cope with filling seven empty bellies every day. Folk within fifty miles had no more interest in his tracts and his plaster angels, and he hated to travel further afield now because Ma was in such a fragile state. She’d grown paper-pale and very thin, and drifted around our home in her nightgown like a little ghost. Her beautiful blonde hair grew thin and limp, straggling unbrushed down her back. She could barely attend to us, and the boys weren’t much help about the house, but Mary-Martha tied a big apron round her waist and became a second little mother to all of us.