Sapphire Battersea

Jacqueline Wilson's Sapphire Battersea is a Victorian story for 9 year olds about a girl who has finally got her mother back and is about to lose her all over again.

What happens

Her name, she will tell you, is Sapphire Battersea. Her mother chose it because her eyes were so blue when she was born. She writes it on her notebook. She stitches it inside her uniform. She stirs it into the soup.

Nobody uses it. Not the Foundling Hospital, and not even her mother. Everyone calls her Hetty Feather, which is a made-up label handed to foundlings, and she loathes it.

Her mother is Ida, the kitchen maid. Ida has skivvied at the hospital for years for one reason, so she could get a glimpse of her daughter every day. An extra potato at dinner. Secret sugar on the porridge. Hetty only learned the truth recently.

So at night she creeps down the stairs to Ida's tiny room and they whisper for hours.

Then Sheila wakes up and follows her.

What happens next is quick and horrible. A matron overhears. Ida is dismissed. Hetty is dragged upstairs screaming and locked in the punishment cupboard until morning, and when she is let out, her mother's room has been stripped bare.

You get all of it in Hetty's own words, and she is furious for most of them. She has a temper to match her red hair and she knows it. She calls the matrons Pigface Peters and Stinking Bottomly. She threatens to tear out Sheila's tongue and feed it to the pigs. She announces she will publish her memoirs and make their fortune.

Even the kind adult in her life teases her about it. Miss Smith hears her describing her poor mother weeping in a squalid gutter, tells her she has a majestic imagination and says she might borrow the phrase.

Do go in knowing how hard the opening is. A girl loses her mother because two adults decide it is shameful for a mother to love her own child. She is locked alone in the dark and hits the walls until her knuckles bleed. One matron tells her she is born in sin and probably the spawn of the Devil. She is then so ill she faints and splits her head open on the stone floor.

A child who worries about being separated from a parent could find those chapters genuinely upsetting, and nothing about them is softened.

If your reader loves a heroine who answers back, though, Hetty is wonderful company and she is never flattened for long.

What to read next

This isn't where she starts, by the way. Hetty Feather's first book goes back to the baby left at the hospital and the kind country family she was fostered out to.