been to lighten the darkness they had endured during the war, and long after it was over. The relief that the fighting had stopped had soon given way to another battle, that of the country rebuilding itself while still making do with rations. The thorough drabness of it all had worn people down. Maybe not so much for the Romilys and Evelyns of this world who always seemed to bounce along with whatever was thrown at them. But for someone like Hope, who didn’t have the same resilience, it was a bleak and depressing time.
She could remember in the harsh winter of 1947 sitting at her desk, and wrapped in so many layers she resembled a barrage balloon, feeling unutterably miserable. Through the window, and listening to their happy laughter, she had watched Edmund playing in the snow with Annelise and envied his ability to enjoy life in a way she found so difficult. Sometimes she wondered if she’d been cursed by being given the name Hope, she seemed to have so little of it.
Removing the completed page from her faithful old Corona typewriter, she placed it in the box file along with the rest of the chapters she had already written. If the coming days weren’t going to be so busy, she would be able to complete this latest Pepper Brook Farm book and send it off to her agent, but it would have to wait for now.
Reluctantly she stood up and looked out of the window at the garden and the large pond and recently rebuilt boathouse. She was a middle-aged woman in her late forties, but when she looked at the garden of her childhood home, and despite the changes Romily had made to it during her ownership, Hope was a girl again remembering how she and Kit used to hide in the bushes from their older brother, Arthur. How he used to love to torment them. What sport he made of exploiting their weaknesses for his own sick pleasure. She had never forgotten what he’d done to her pet canary. He never admitted it, but she knew that he had crushed the little bird and left it for her to find.
Undoubtedly his wanton cruelty played its part in shaping Hope as she grew up, but essentially, she had already been marked out as being destined always to think and fear the worst. Losing her mother at a very young age could have been the start of her problems, and certainly her widowed father had been ill-equipped to cope with three small children, but then why did her younger brother, Kit, not suffer in the way that she did? Yes, he lacked confidence at times, but invariably he was the most positive and cheerful person she knew.
Maybe she had merely been born unlucky. That’s how it had felt when, back in 1938, and after only two and a half years of marriage, her first husband, Dieter, tragically died from TB. A German living in London, he’d left his country of birth because he was afraid of what Hitler was doing there. He had been the kindest and gentlest of men. Hope had met him during a lunchtime concert at the Albert Hall. When the recital had finished, and with a shyness that had touched her, he had struck up conversation and asked if he could accompany her to another concert one day. Charmed by his accent and impeccable manners, she had readily agreed. Before long they were inseparable. But then the genuine happiness she had experienced for the first time in her life was snatched away from her when he fell ill and died.
Everyone told her that in time the pain would lessen and despite not believing a word of what they said, they were eventually proved right when Edmund, her childhood friend, achieved the impossible and brought a lightness back into her life. They married when the war was over, and he had been her constant and loving companion ever since. But never far from her thoughts was the fear that she might lose him, just as she had Dieter. Or maybe he would simply tire of her.
She and Edmund had been staying at Island House for over a month now while work was finished on their new home. They had sold their old house surprisingly quickly and had to move out before Fairview was ready. Romily had come to their rescue by offering Island House as a temporary home. ‘I shall be away in America,