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Back When We Meet Again Save as PDF
Chapters (57)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Epigraph
  4. Prologue
  5. One
  6. Two
  7. Three
  8. Four
  9. Five
  10. Six
  11. Seven
  12. Eight
  13. Nine
  14. Ten
  15. Eleven
  16. Twelve
  17. Thirteen
  18. Fourteen
  19. Fifteen
  20. Sixteen
  21. Seventeen
  22. Eighteen
  23. Nineteen
  24. Twenty
  25. Twenty-one
  26. Twenty-two
  27. Twenty-three
  28. Twenty-four
  29. Twenty-five
  30. Twenty-six
  31. Twenty-seven
  32. Twenty-eight
  33. Twenty-nine
  34. Thirty
  35. Thirty-one
  36. Thirty-two
  37. Thirty-three
  38. Thirty-four
  39. Thirty-five
  40. Thirty-six
  41. Thirty-seven
  42. Thirty-eight
  43. Thirty-nine
  44. Forty
  45. Forty-one
  46. Forty-two
  47. Forty-three
  48. Forty-four
  49. Forty-five
  50. AUTHOR’S NOTE
  51. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  52. POPULAR BOOKS FROM THE ERA
  53. When We Meet Again
  54. A Conversation with Caroline Beecham about When We Meet Again
  55. Discussion Guide
  56. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  57. What’s next onyour reading list?

Sub-Divisional Inspector Robert Warner stated that on June 14, with Inspector Nixon, of the NSPCC, he visited the house at London Road, Woodford. Receiving no answer to his knock, he climbed the wall and entered by the back door. In the front room on the ground floor he saw a woman named McIntyre and three girls, Yvonne Ellis, Betty Pritchard and Annie Pritchard. On a broken couch he found the boy Norman Rogers, aged 11 months, lying on some newspapers and covered with a piece of filthy canvas. The child had on two wet garments which were black and filthy. He was emaciated and covered in sores. The girl, Ellis, was sitting in a broken armchair nursing a boy of about 11 months. The boy appeared to be fairly well nourished but was very dirty. Ellis was unwashed and badly clothed. In the back room was a child named Malcolm Strong, aged about 16 months, sitting on a chair-bedstead. There was another child, Hannah Rogers, about 1 month old, lying in filth and covered with vermin bites. The mattress on which the child was lying was filthy and covered with vermin. In an upstairs room a girl, aged 18 months, was lying motionless on a mattress on the floor, and appeared too weak to move. In another room were three infants covered with a quilt. They were dirty and when looked at by the doctor they uttered feeble cries. He visited a back room and there found a girl of 11 months lying in a crib covered with maggots; she was apparently too weak to move.

Alice pressed her lips together, placing her hand over her mouth as she forced herself to carry on. She glanced quickly through to where Elizabeth worked as she considered what her mother would say if she read about these monsters; maybe then Ruth might reconsider giving her more of the facts.

In a carriage in the same room he found the dead body of the child, Sally Merriweather, covered with an old frock and swarming with maggots. The children were removed to the infirmary. The house was in a filthy condition. The beds were broke. And the mattresses verminous. There was hardly any food in the house. Mrs. Pritchard returned at 3:15 p.m. and asked, “Where are my children?” She said that she had been up all night and had been out to try and find the dead child’s father. The child, she said, died at five o’clock in the morning. Detective-Sergeant Ryder said that he arrested the man Pritchard at an office in the City. Pritchard stated that he had been trying for a long while to get his wife to return the babies to their mothers.

Alice just managed to place the article out of sight in her bag before she retched into her handkerchief.

Twenty-three