I hope you can forgive me for all the things I did. If you can’t, I don’t know what will happen to me.
I know I don’t deserve a family, but I hope you will let me be part of yours anyway.
Yours faithfully,
Olivia Glass
I put the letter in an envelope, and Chris wrote the address on it and gave me a stamp.
“First class,” I said. “It has to be first class.”
“Olivia,” said Chris, “you know this might not work, don’t you? I know Jim cares about you very much, but . . . he has other kids he needs to think about. The answer might still be no. You need to be prepared for that.”
“No!” I said. “It won’t be no. It can’t be!”
“Let’s hope it’s not,” said Chris, but he sounded sad.
He gave me the envelope and I took it to the postbox at the end of the road.
“Number ten!” he said as I went, and I nodded.
“Number ten.” I kept forgetting which one their house was. All the houses looked the same.
At the end of the street, a granddad was walking along with a kid a bit older than Maisy. The kid was bending down to stroke a cat.
“Puss!” he was saying. “Puss puss puss!”
“Gently,” the granddad was saying. “Don’t startle him.”
Why didn’t anyone ever love me like that?
The notice on the front of the postbox said the last collection was at 5.45, which meant my letter wouldn’t be picked up until tomorrow morning. It would take all day to get to Jim’s house, and there was no post on a Sunday. But it would get there on Monday morning. Perhaps I would know what the answer was on Monday afternoon. Perhaps Andy would know when he came to pick me up from school.
“Monday,” I said. I kissed the front of the envelope, for luck, and I pushed it through the letter hole before I could change my mind.
HISTORICAL NOTE
Amelia Dyer was a real person. She was born in 1837 and died in 1896, when she was hanged for murder at the end of a sensational trial. Nobody knows exactly how many people she killed in her long career, but it is estimated to be around four hundred. Some died at birth, delivered in such a way as to look like stillbirths. Some died of diseases relating to malnutrition and neglect while in her care. Others were strangled and dropped into the River Thames. It was partly due to the furore surrounding her trial and others like it that the care system as we know it was created.
Jim’s house in Close Your Pretty Eyes is fictional, although Amelia Dyer did live in similar places, and moved frequently in her thirty-year career as a baby farmer. There is, however, no evidence that she ever returned to any of them after her death.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This novel had three editors: Marion Lloyd, Alice Swan and Genevieve Herr. You didn’t always agree with each other, but between you you all made this a better book. Thank you. Thanks also to my agent, Jodie Marsh, and to everyone at Scholastic for your continued support of my odd book ideas.
When writing Close Your Pretty Eyes, I read a huge number of blogs and memoirs by adoptive parents, foster carers and foster care survivors. These were too numerous to mention here, but thank you all. Without your honesty and your bravery, this would have been a very different book.
Thanks to my fellow writers in coffee shops, Victoria Van Hyning and Tara Button, and my book-encouragers and moan-listeners, Susie Day, Pita Harris, Jo Cotterill, Frances Hardinge, and all my online writer friends. Thanks to my lovely husband Tom Nicholls, for saying things like, “I don’t mind if you don’t earn much money,” and “You want that printer fixed right now? Well, all right then.” One day I really will start listening to your accounting advice. Promise.
Last but most definitely not least, thanks to Adele Geras for answering my panicked Twitter request for creepy lullabies with the most perfect of perfect titles. And to Phil Hoggart, who doesn’t know it yet, but I stole his TARDIS air freshener to give to Liz. Sorry. I don’t think she’s going to give it back.
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First published in the UK by Scholastic Ltd, 2013
This electronic edition published by Scholastic Ltd, 2013
Copyright © Sally Nicholls, 2013
The right of Sally Nicholls to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her.
eISBN 978 1407 13540 3
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Sally Nicholls, Close Your Pretty Eyes
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