Christmas in Cockleberry Bay - Nicola May Page 0,1

little snooze was what she needed before she embarked on the day’s chores.

Taking in the glorious expanse of water in front of her, she then turned her gaze to her beloved Rosa’s Café and reminded herself that she must talk to Nate, her brother and now manager of the establishment, about putting the Christmas lights up. With her newfound excitement around everything Christmas, in Rosa’s eyes it was never too early to start decorating. Plus, it was the legendary Cockleberry Bay fireworks display the following weekend, so even the beach wall would be illuminated.

This reminded her to ask Mary, her mum, if she could babysit and dog-sit then, too. It would be nice to have some free time without the responsibility of Little Ned or Hot. Plus, she had planned with Nate that this year they would serve hot dogs as well as hot chocolates with marshmallows out at the front of the café, so it would need all of their hands on deck.

It was a relief to her that now Little Ned was taking his bottle without a tantrum she could leave him for a few hours. She felt no guilt in doing this, any more than she had about giving up breastfeeding. She had struggled with it. The baby wasn’t taking enough milk and they were both getting uptight and stressed every time a feed was due. Did changing to a bottle make her a bad mother? Surely not. Rosa tried to tell herself that it made her a sensible one. To her, motherhood was about practicalities: getting through each day in the easiest way she could, with the best interests of her baby at heart, of course. She had always vowed that she wouldn’t be one of those mothers whose baby literally took away their identities as soon as they were born. However, she was beginning to understand exactly how that happened. A baby certainly was for life and not just for Christmas!

On seeing that the newly refurbished Ship Hotel had beaten her to it with their white twinkly lights, she made a little disgruntled sound. They had also already lit their open fire, as she could see the sweet-smelling woodsmoke billowing from its chimney into the bright but chilly late-October afternoon. The path that led up to South Cliffs and the magnificent views over the English Channel was empty, aside from one lone dog-walker. The beach was quiet too; a high tide had thrown varieties of slimy green and black seaweed up onto the wet, dark sand. A small blue fishing boat could be seen way in the distance. And then she spotted a single cormorant, its wings spread wide, flying towards West Cliffs with a fish hanging from its curved yellow and grey beak.

Now that winter was almost upon them, Rosa was thankful for the sea wall in front of the cottage. It acted as an adequate defence, apart from the one terrible storm they had had the summer before last, which had not only flooded the café, but had caused carnage on the beach and to sea life, including many of the gulls.

She’d noticed recently that the tides were definitely getting higher and had thrown up more than just seaweed, especially around the time of a full moon. The sea would sometimes completely engulf the Bay, thrusting boats right up close to the wall in front of their house, disappearing as quickly as they had come with the ebbing tide. She couldn’t recall this ever happening when she had first moved here.

With its fantastic array of shops and eateries, and its stunning beach and cliff location, Cockleberry Bay was a sought-after area in which to live. There were generations of families who had been born here and would never leave, so the sea-fronted properties rarely came onto the market. When they did, it was usually city-dwellers on the look-out for a second property who, on promising hungry estate agents back-handers for immediate information, snapped them up quickly. So it had been fortuitous timing that the detached and desirable Gull’s Rest should come up for sale just when she and Josh were looking for a new home before the baby came, and that they should get wind of its availability before anyone else.

Gull’s Rest had been owned by a rich city gent, Sandy Hamilton-Jones, and was previously being lived in by his estranged wife, Bergamot. The agent had unprofessionally told Rosa that Mr Hamilton-Jones, despite making his wife sign a pre-nup, had come a cropper.