Twelve Days of Christmas: A bestselling Christmas read to devour in one sitting!

But by then I was a spent force: grief, fury and guilt (the guilt because I had refused to take up jogging with him) seemed to blend so seamlessly that I didn’t know where one ended and another began.

He’d left me on my own, closing the door on the future we had all planned out. How could he? I always thought we were yin and yang, two halves of the same person, soulmates destined to stay together forever throughout eternity – if so, I’d have a few choice things to say when I finally caught up with him.

My coping strategy had been to close the door on Alan in return, only allowing my grief full rein on the anniversary of his death in late December and shutting myself away from all reminders of the joyous seasonal festivities he had taught me to love during the all-too-brief years of our marriage.

There’s even less reason to celebrate Christmas now …

Christmas? Bah, humbug!

Chapter 1

Pregnant Pause

Since Gran had been slipping quietly away from me for years, her death wasn’t that much of a shock, to be honest. That was just as well, because I had to dash straight off to one of my house-sitting jobs right after her austere Strange Baptist funeral, though finding her journals in the small tin trunk in which she kept her treasures just before I left was a very poignant moment …

When I’d locked up her little sliver of a terraced house in Merchester (not that there was anything in it worth stealing) I’d taken the trunk home with me: the key was on her keyring with the rest. I already had some idea of what was in it from glimpses caught over the years – postcards of Blackpool, where my grandparents spent their Wakes Week holiday every year, my annual school photographs, certificates and that kind of thing – layers going back in time.

I’d only opened it meaning to add her narrow gold wedding band, but then had lifted up a few of the layers to see what was underneath – and right at the bottom was a thin bundle of small, cheap, school exercise books marked ‘Esther Rowan’, bound together with withered elastic bands. Opening the first, I found a kind of spasmodic journal about her nursing experiences starting towards the end of the war, since the first entry was dated October 1944, though it began by looking back at earlier experiences:

I’d started working as a nursing auxiliary at fifteen, which meant that when war broke out at least I wasn’t sent to do hard, dirty work in the munitions factory, like many Merchester girls.

I thought how young they started work back then – and, reading the following entry, how stoical she was:

Tom, my childhood sweetheart, enlisted in the navy straight away, though I begged him to wait until he was called up. Sure enough, he was killed almost immediately, to the great grief of myself and his poor, widowed father. After this, I resolved to put all girlish thoughts of love and marriage behind me and threw myself into my nursing duties …

That last line struck me as being much like the way I’d moved house and thrown myself into a new job right after Alan died: only somehow in my case it didn’t seem stoical, more a denial of those wonderful years we had together.

I knew Gran had eventually gone on to marry the father of her childhood sweetheart – she had said to me once that they had felt they could be a comfort and support to one another – so where this Ned Martland came in was anyone’s guess! I was starting to think I must have imagined the whole thing …

Gran seemed to have filled the ensuing pages with a moralising mini-sermon on the evils of war, so I put the journals back in the trunk again, to read on my return.

I spent a week in Devon, looking after a cottage for one of my regular clients, along with two budgerigars called Marilyn and Monroe, Yoda the Yorkshire terrier and six nameless hens.

It was very soothing and allowed me the space to get a lot of things straight in my mind – and also to make one large and potentially life-changing decision – before coming back home braced and ready to sort out Gran’s house, which belonged to a church charity. They were pressing me to clear it out and hand back the keys, so I expect they had a huge waiting list of homeless and desperate clergy widows.

I had a week before my next Homebodies assignment, which I was sure would be more than adequate. And I was quite right, because I’d almost finished and was starting to look forward to escaping to the remote Highland house-sit which would safely take me over Christmas and into New Year, when it was suddenly cancelled.

Ellen, the old schoolfriend (or so she calls herself – Laura and I remember things a little differently) who runs the Homebodies agency, tried to persuade me to cook for a Christmas house-party instead, but she did it with little hope.

‘I don’t know why she even bothered asking,’ I said to Laura, who had popped in to help me sort out the last of Gran’s belongings. Well, I say help, but since she was heavily pregnant with her fourth baby she was mostly making tea and talking a lot. She’s blonde, pretty and petite (my exact opposite), and carried the baby in a small, neat bump under a long, clingy tunic top the same shade of blue as her eyes.

‘She asked because you’re a brilliant cook and it pays so much better than the house-sitting,’ she replied, putting two fresh mugs of tea down on the coffee table. ‘Plus, she has all the tact of a bulldozer.’

‘But she knows I need a rest from the cooking in winter and I don’t do Christmas. I like to get away somewhere remote where no-one knows me and pretend it isn’t happening.’

Laura sank down next to me on Gran’s hideously uncomfortable cottage sofa. ‘She probably hoped you’d got over it a bit and changed your mind – you’ve been widowed as long as you were married, now. We all still miss Alan dreadfully, especially at this time of year,’ she added gently. ‘He was the best brother anyone could ever have. But he wouldn’t want us to grieve forever, Holly.’

‘I know, and you can’t say I haven’t picked up the pieces and got on with my life,’ I said, though I didn’t add that even after eight years the grief was still mixed fairly equally with anger. ‘But Christmas and the anniversary of the accident always bring things back and I’d much rather spend it quietly on my own.’

‘I expect Ellen’s forgotten that you weren’t brought up to celebrate Christmas in the same way as everyone else, too.’

Laura and I go way back to infant school, so she understands my slightly strange upbringing, but Ellen only came on the scene later, at the comprehensive (and though she denies it now, she tagged on to the group of girls who bullied me because of my height).

‘No, the Strange Baptists think the trappings of the season are all pagan manifestations of man’s fall from spiritual grace – though Gran could play a mean Christmas hymn on the harmonium.’

Laura looked at the space opposite, where the instrument had always stood against the magnolia blown-vinyl wallpaper. ‘I don’t know how you managed to fit that harmonium into your tiny cottage, I bet it weighed a ton even though it wasn’t very big.’

‘It did, but I was determined to have it because it was Gran’s pride and joy – the only time she seemed happy was when she was playing it. It just fitted into the space under the stairs.’

I hadn’t kept a lot, otherwise: the pink satin eiderdown that had covered my narrow bed as a child and two austere cross- stitch samplers sewn by my great-grandmother. One said, ‘Strange are the ways of the Lord’ and the other, ‘That He may do His work, His strange work’. That was about it.

What was left was a motley collection of cheap utility furniture, battered enamel and aluminium saucepans and the like, which were being collected by a house clearance firm.

The house had been immaculate, apart from a little dust, and Gran had never been a hoarder, so there hadn’t been that much to sort out. Her clothes had already been packed and collected by a local charity and all that was left now to put in my car was a cardboard box of neatly filed household papers.

‘I think I’m just about finished here,’ I said, taking a biscuit from the packet Laura had brought, though Garibaldi are not actually my favourite – a bit too crushed-fly looking. ‘So, are you going to call this baby Garibaldi, then?’

Now, this was not such a daft question as you might suppose, since during her last pregnancy Laura had been addicted to Mars bars and she had called her baby boy Mars. He should thank his lucky stars it hadn’t been Twix or Flake.

She giggled. ‘No way! But if it’s a girl we might call it Holly after you, even though it will be a very early spring, rather than a Christmas, baby.’

I hated my name (my late mother’s choice), but I was quite touched. ‘I suppose it would be better than Garibaldi,’ I conceded, ‘especially for a girl.’

I took a sip of the pale, fragrant tea, which was the Earl Grey that Laura had brought with her, rather than the Yorkshire tea that Gran had always made strong enough to stand a spoon in. ‘The van will be here any minute, so we’ve just got the box of papers to stick in my car and we’re done. The meter reader came while you were in the kitchen, so I expect the electricity will be turned off any minute now, too.’

As if on cue, the dim bulb in its mottled glass shade went out and left us in the gathering shadows of a December afternoon.

‘“Lead kindly light, amid the encircling gloom,”’ I sang sepulchrally.

‘You know a hymn for every occasion.’

‘So would you, if you’d been brought up by a Strange Baptist.’

‘Still, it’s just as well you’d finished sorting out,’ Laura said. ‘She wasn’t a great hoarder, your gran, was she?’

‘No, apart from the few mementoes in that tin trunk I took home – and I’ve been reading a bit more in that sort of diary I told you I’d found. Some of it is fascinating, but you have to wade through lots of Victorian-sounding moralising in between.’

‘You could skip those bits?’ she suggested.

‘I thought about it, then decided I wanted to read it all, because I never felt I really knew her and it might give me some insight into what made her tick.’

‘She was certainly very reserved and austere,’ Laura agreed, looking round the sparsely furnished room, ‘and frugal: but that was probably her upbringing.’

‘Yes, if ever I wanted to buy her a present, she always said she had everything she needed. She could never resist Yardley’s lavender soap, though, but that was about as tempted by the lures of the flesh as she ever got.’

‘She was very proud of you, having your own house and career.’

‘I suppose she was, though she would have preferred me to train to be a teacher, like you and Alan – she didn’t consider cooking much above skivvying. And when I left the restaurant and signed up to Homebodies instead, she thought cooking for large house-parties in the summer and looking after people’s properties and pets in the winter was just like going into service.’