Hetty's Farmhouse Bakery Read online

  I nodded thoughtfully. ‘Not too young.’

  That would make it a seven-year age gap. Probably the biggest Anna had had but I don’t suppose she’d say no. I looked across at Poppy who was staring at me as if I’d gone mad. I bet she was wishing I’d stuck to talking about my love of maths after all.

  ‘So.’ She launched herself forward and leaned on the table that separated us from her maths teacher. ‘Shall we discuss my last test results?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Purkiss with evident relief.

  Five long minutes later I was shaking his now very clammy hand.

  ‘For the record,’ Poppy said through clenched teeth, ‘Dad can come next time. Not you.’

  Forty minutes later, we’d nearly finished. Most of the teachers agreed that Poppy was a bright and competent girl but needed to work harder in school. I could see their point, she could drive the tractor now that her feet reached the pedals, stay up all night to help with the lambing and had her own business selling eggs to the teachers at school, but ask her to analyse a William Wordsworth poem or list the properties of sound waves and she stared at you blankly. She and I both. There was just one teacher left on the list – Poppy’s least favourite. She groaned as Miss Compton beckoned us to her table …

  ‘It’s simple: you need to engage more.’ Miss Compton was not only Poppy’s form tutor but her English teacher too. She turned to address me. ‘The class was studying A Christmas Carol last lesson and I asked Poppy to pick out an example of use of imagery. She couldn’t answer because she didn’t even know which book we were reading.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ I replied. It occurred to me to ask why on earth the teacher thought that reading a Christmas story in May would ever interest a class of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, but I managed to restrain myself.

  ‘But, Miss, there was a pair of robins outside the window, and each time they landed on the fence, their little beaks were stuffed with insects to take back to the nest; I couldn’t stop watching.’ Poppy turned to me for support. ‘Robins make such good parents.’

  My heart leapt for my girl; she loved being outdoors, would spend all day on the farm if she was allowed. A Victorian novel would never hold any appeal for her.

  ‘I’m sure they do,’ I said, ‘but you can see Miss Compton’s point of view, Popsicle.’

  I realized my error straight away: never use her nickname in public.

  Poppy sunk down in her chair, muttering ‘so embarrassing’ under her breath.

  ‘Do you even know the main character’s name, Poppy?’ asked Miss Compton.

  Poppy tilted her chin. ‘Do you know how many trips per day a robin makes to the nest to feeds its babies?’

  ‘No, but I don’t need to.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I feel the same about Dickens.’

  The teacher and Poppy glared at each other for a moment and then Miss Compton looked at me for help.

  ‘Your education is important, especially English; you must concentrate,’ I said firmly, earning myself a nod of approval.

  ‘What’s the point of reading stuff like that? When am I going to use it?’ Poppy asked, quite reasonably.

  ‘Well, because …’ I faltered, and smoothed down the front of my shirt while I ferreted about for a suitable reply. ‘You’ll use it when …’

  I wasn’t much of a reader either, unless cookery books counted. A few options occurred to me, such as the information might come in handy in a pub quiz, or because it will keep the teachers happy, but before I could formulate something more motivational the teacher leaned forward and cocked her head to one side.

  ‘Who inspires you, Poppy?’ she asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Poppy’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘She’s only twelve, she …’ I hesitated, I was about to add that she was only a child but that would have earned me more black marks.

  ‘Almost thirteen,’ Poppy put in.

  ‘So?’ Miss Compton continued. ‘Who’s your role model? You’ll leave home one day, perhaps go to university, travel the world; whose footsteps do you want to follow?’

  The teacher and I both looked at Poppy and I held my breath. I didn’t for one second expect it to be me; I liked to think I was a good person, kind, happy-go-lucky, but I’d done nothing remarkable with my life, nothing that would seem brave or inspirational to a twelve-year-old. Nonetheless at that moment I’d never wanted anything more.

  Poppy’s eyes met mine and she smiled, and my heart began to beat a merry tattoo. ‘Auntie Naomi’s quite cool, isn’t she?’

  I swallowed and somehow managed to return her smile. ‘She is.’

  Dan’s sister, Naomi, had converted a little row of farm buildings her dad had left her in his will into an award-winning farm shop. She had a head for business, she was good to her staff, gave fantastic customer service and on top of that was the best sister-in-law I could have wished for. And right now I felt inordinately jealous of her.

  ‘Naomi Willcox, from the farm shop?’ Miss Compton gave a bemused smile. ‘I was thinking of someone a little further afield.’

  ‘Why?’ Poppy frowned. ‘I don’t get all this “go out and see the world” stuff. What if I like it in Carsdale?’

  Poppy and I were alike in looks, but complete opposites in other ways; I’d been dying to leave when I was her age. For once, the teacher hadn’t got a ready response but pulled a face as if she was chewing a wasp. I cleared my throat and picked up my bag from the floor; this discussion wasn’t going anywhere.

  ‘I take all your points on board, Miss Compton, and my husband and I will see to it that Poppy starts showing more interest in her studies.’

  ‘Good.’ The teacher started to shuffle her papers. ‘Because her schoolwork has to take precedence over her love of nature.’

  Poppy pushed her chair back and stood up. ‘Do you want your usual half-dozen eggs tomorrow, Miss?’

  Miss Compton’s cheeks turned pink. ‘Er, yes please, Poppy.’

  Poppy nodded. ‘Okay, but you still owe me a pound from last week.’

  The teacher fluttered her hand up to her neck and smiled sheepishly at me. ‘I didn’t have any change.’

  ‘Scrooge,’ said Poppy, hefting her school bag over her arm.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Miss Compton’s head reared up.

  ‘The main character in that old book,’ she replied innocently. ‘And the answer to my question is up to one hundred times a day.’

  ‘Oh right, yes.’ The teacher’s blush deepened. ‘Well done.’

  One nil to Poppy, I thought, with a rush of pride as we walked out of the school hall.

  Chapter 2

  ‘Home?’ Poppy asked, pulling off her school tie and flinging it on to the back seat a few minutes later when we’d made it back to the car.

  I grimaced as I did up my seat belt. ‘Sorry, love, shopping first.’

  We set off to the sound of Poppy complaining that for once she’d just like to get home at the same time as normal people. She usually travelled on the school bus, which due to its circuitous route took over an hour to reach Sunnybank Farm. I reminded her that at least she’d only got one more day before school finished for a week and promised her a treat if she pushed the trolley for me.

  I was keen to get home too but couldn’t pass up the opportunity to visit a proper supermarket while we were in town. Carsdale only stretched to a couple of little grocery stores, both of which were very pricey, and although I bought local as much as I could to support them, it was nice to do a big shop every now and again.

  With Poppy steering the trolley and me tossing item after item into it, we soon managed to accumulate a mountain of food and after half an hour we headed to the tills. The shop was busy and by the time we’d loaded all our shopping on the conveyor belt, quite a queue had built up. Poppy wasn’t keen on packing, so while she retreated to sit on the bench with her pot of pomegranate seeds, chosen as her treat, and check for vitally important messages on her phone, I began loading the bags.

&nbs
p; And then an image popped into my head: my little blue purse sitting on the kitchen table.

  ‘Oh no,’ I said suddenly, with a bolt of panic.

  I’d taken my purse out of my bag to pay a bill over the phone this morning. I reached for my bag now, already knowing it wouldn’t be there.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked the cashier, a pale-faced girl who, judging by the long and consonant-heavy name on her badge, may have been Polish.

  The other people in the queue stopped to stare as I rummaged in my bag. My phone, car keys, bottle of water and tub of dog treats: all present and correct. No purse.

  ‘I haven’t brought my money,’ I said, feeling the heat rise to my face. And my armpits. ‘I’m so sorry; I can’t pay for my shopping.’

  A collective groan went up from the queue, two of whom had already started unloading their shopping on to the belt. The two behind them pulled away from the queue and dashed to the other open till.

  ‘No cards at all?’ The girl blinked at me with large worried eyes.

  ‘Poppy?’ I called, grasping at the ultimate straw; I didn’t even know why I was asking. ‘You haven’t got any money on you, have you?’

  Bless her, she reached into her blazer pocket. ‘How much do you need?,’ she said, holding out a handful of coins.

  ‘Ninety-five pounds,’ said the pale-faced assistant, chewing her lip. ‘You might have enough to pay for the pomegranate.’

  Yep. Definitely one of those days.

  Poppy strode out ahead with the car keys, leaving me to return the trolley. I stowed the empty shopping bags back in the boot and we headed for home.

  Before long we’d left the supermarket and relative metropolis of Holmthwaite behind but my darling daughter was still laughing.

  ‘Only you could do that, Mum,’ she snorted after she’d finished messaging all of her friends about my disaster. ‘You should have seen your face. You’re hilarious.’

  ‘You might not think that when you see what’s for dinner,’ I said stoutly, turning on the radio. ‘Check my phone in case the vet has called, will you?’

  The smile dropped from her face and she scooped my phone out of my bag, but there had been no word from Sally yet.

  ‘That probably means he’s absolutely fine,’ Poppy said lightly as we passed what counted as the high street in Carsdale and took the steep lane up towards the farm.

  I glanced across at her and my heart squeezed with love for both her and Rusty. She had never known life without him. He’d guarded her proudly when she was a baby sleeping outside in the big old Silver Cross pram which had been Dan’s and Naomi’s before that; and when she’d learned to walk, it had been Rusty who’d stood patiently, letting her grip his fur as she’d planted one wobbly foot in front of the other. Being brought up on a farm had exposed her to the sharp end of both life and death, but Rusty was more than just an animal, he was a big part of our family.

  ‘I hope so, Poppy, I really do.’

  We turned in through the farm gates, rattled over the cattle grid and followed the track between a long sweep of hawthorn hedge. Finally, we rounded a bend and there, amongst the soft hills that led down to the River Esk at the bottom of the valley, and up to the distant peaks that were often snow-covered long after spring had sprung elsewhere, was Sunnybank Farm.

  Home.

  The farmhouse might not win any prizes for design but as far as I was concerned it was the most beautiful house in the world. The main part of it was a sturdy white rendered building with sash window frames painted soft blue, a central porch sheltering a front door that we rarely used, and a slate roof. Scattered around the edge of the yard were a random assortment of stone outbuildings, wooden lambing sheds and tumbledown barns. To the left of the house stood a huge log store which held a winter’s worth of seasoned wood at a time and in front of that my haphazard vegetable patch and a pond beloved of the hens. To the right was the track leading to the orchard and the meadow currently home to Dan’s new project, the rare-breed Soay sheep, and beyond were our fields of black-faced Swaledale sheep, which, according to my mother-in-law, had been grazing here for at least four generations of Greengrass farmers. And if you followed the track right across the farm to the far edge of our land, you’d end up at the Sunnybank Farm shop, owned and run by Naomi.

  I parked the car between the farm-shop van – which meant that Naomi was here – and the Land Rover and Poppy jumped straight out and ran indoors. At this time of day, as it glowed in the early-evening sunshine, Sunnybank Farm suited its name perfectly. And on grey days when it rained or when the clouds came down so low that we could barely see the roof, it cheered me up with its twin plumes of smoke from the chimneys at either end of the house, the slate planters on the front step full of fragrant thyme, little tête-à-tête daffodils in spring and hardy fuchsias in summer.

  Normally I’d be greeted by Rusty, not as boisterously as he’d done as a young dog, but nonetheless with waggy-tailed love and adoration in his eyes. Today I walked across the yard unaccompanied and as I approached the kitchen door I could hear Poppy already regaling Dan and her favourite and inspirational Auntie Naomi with the supermarket saga. They were standing side by side next to the sink as I came in, clasping giant mugs of tea and grinning.

  Dan was tall and broad, with gentle eyes, hair the colour of autumn acorns and a complexion that could only come from a lifetime spent out on the Cumbrian hills. Naomi was the elder by seven years and had just celebrated her fortieth birthday. She had similar colouring to her brother and was almost as tall. And although her work mostly kept her indoors, she was a keen fell runner and spent much of her time on the hills. Consequently, she was as thin as a lath and the contents of her wardrobe comprised ninety per cent fleece and ten per cent Lycra.

  ‘I hear you forgot something?’ Dan nodded to the centre of the table where my purse sat in pride of place.

  ‘Yeah, we only had enough to pay for one thing!’ Poppy said with glee, shrugging off her blazer and dumping it on top of her school bag in the middle of the floor. ‘Luckily it was my thing. But I’m still starving.’

  She helped herself to the last banana in the fruit bowl and sat at the kitchen table to eat it.

  ‘I was mortified,’ I said with a shudder as I put my purse back in my bag where it belonged. ‘Wheeling an empty trolley out of a supermarket is worse than doing the walk of shame in last night’s clothes.’

  Dan’s eyes flashed with amusement. ‘And when did you ever do that?’

  I held his gaze, a smile playing at my lips. ‘Oh, you know, hypothetically speaking.’

  My husband grinned back: a confident smile that implied he knew me inside out. And he did. Mostly.

  Apart from what I’d done during the weeks I’d spent in Cornwall, the summer after our A levels. Dan had broken up with me and I’d fled, broken-hearted, to Padstow to distract myself while I waited for my exam results.

  Gil, the son of the owner of the Cornish pasty shop where I’d had a summer job, had been my therapy. We’d had fun, he’d taught me to smile again and, yes, I had done the walk of shame, tiptoeing barefoot in the early hours of the morning through the narrow streets, heels in my hand. But then Dan and I had got back together and I’d put my Cornish adventure behind me. Since then there’d only been Dan, my first and only real love.

  ‘I did the walk of shame once after a Young Farmers’ ball in a full-length puffy taffeta dress. Mother went barmy.’ Naomi sighed dreamily into her mug. ‘Worth it, though.’

  Poppy made a choking noise. ‘Nooo! Stop, Auntie Naomi, please, it makes me feel ill.’

  ‘I know,’ Naomi winced, ‘me in taffeta: I looked like a giraffe in a frock. Awful.’

  We laughed as she leaned forward and ruffled Poppy’s auburn hair and I crossed to the sink to kiss Dan’s cheek. He smelled of fresh air and damp grass and he was wearing his farmer’s uniform: rough wool checked shirt, rolled at the sleeves, over a faded T-shirt and old jeans. I felt a familiar pull of love for him, a love t
hat had changed over the years from the frantic fireworks of our first few months, to the gentler glow of a log fire. But the spark was definitely still alight.

  I’d fallen for him instantly: Dan had looked a bit like Harrison Finch, a TV presenter who I’d always had a soft spot for, he had his own car, and even at seventeen, he’d looked like a man, unlike his best friend Joe who had a baby face and coveted Dan’s stubble and muscles. But more importantly than that, I’d never met a kinder boy. My mum once said that kindness is a reflection of a person’s true beauty. I’d never forgotten that. He was still a kind man, and I still loved him for it.

  ‘That tricky ewe’s finally gone into labour,’ he said, turning to put his empty mug in the sink.

  ‘The one who lost her lamb last year?’

  Dan nodded.

  ‘How’s she doing?’

  The rest of our flock of Swaledales had already lambed. There was rarely any need for intervention but Dan kept an eye on them even so. And sometimes, like with this one, he’d bring them into a pen if they’d had issues in previous seasons.

  ‘Restless but okay, touch wood.’ He rapped his knuckles against the solid wood worktop that ran the long run of cream painted units. ‘But one of last night’s triplets died. I wasn’t surprised; he’d been weak and struggled to suckle right from the start.’

  ‘Poor thing,’ I said with a sigh.

  Poppy and I exchanged glances; no matter how much we accepted that the survival rate was never going to be a hundred per cent, we always got upset when one of our little ones died.

  ‘Sounds like you’ve all had a tough day with one thing and another,’ said Naomi. She’d helped me lift Rusty into the back of my car this afternoon after Sally had advised me to bring him into the surgery. I nodded, swallowing back the lump that rose as soon as I thought about him.

  ‘And being told my child isn’t paying enough attention in school didn’t help either,’ I said.

  ‘Poppy, school is important,’ Dan said with a growl.

  ‘Not again, please! Mum’s already gone on at me,’ Poppy groaned. ‘I’ll do my homework straight after dinner. Promise.’