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

‘You’re welcome. But the house can’t be that big, can it? Otherwise there would be some live-in help.’

‘Not necessarily, these days,’ I said, drawing on my long experience of house-party cooking, where sometimes the only live-in staff had been myself and the family nanny. ‘Ellen mentioned a daily cleaner. It’s big enough to have a lodge though, because the owner’s elderly uncle and his wife live there and I’m to call in for the keys on my way up to the house.’

‘I can see you’re dying to go, but I still don’t like to think of you marooned in a remote house all on your own over Christmas,’ Laura said. ‘Have you got your phone and charger, and enough food and drink in case you’re miles from the nearest shop? I mean, the weather report said we were in for a cold snap next week and the odds on a white Christmas are shortening.’

‘Oh, come on, Laura, when do they ever get the long-term forecasts right? And come to that, how often does it snow here, especially at Christmas?’

‘But it’s probably different in East Lancashire, up on the moors.’

‘It might be a bit bleaker, but I’ll believe in this snow when I see it. And Ellen said Jim and Mo have left me all their food, since they won’t need it – they were only stopping at home long enough to fling some clothes in a suitcase and get their passports before they flew out to Dubai. I’m hardly likely to eat my way through a whole turkey and all the trimmings over Christmas, even if I do get snowed in.’

I gave her a hug – but cautiously, because of the very prominent bump. ‘I’ll be fine, you know me. Give my love to your parents and have a great time and I’ll see you on Twelfth Night!’

I climbed into the heavily-laden car and drove off, Laura’s small figure waving at me in the rear-view mirror until I turned the corner, realising just how fond of my best friend I was.

Now Gran had gone, was there anyone else in the whole world who really cared about me? Or who I really cared about? I couldn’t think of anyone … and it suddenly seemed so terribly sad. I’d had other friends, but mostly they’d been Alan’s too, and I’d pushed them out of my life after the accident.

But soon, if my plans for a baby came to fruition, I would have someone else to love, who would love me in return …

My spirits lifted as I drove further away from home, just as they always did, for the joy of each assignment was that no-one knew me or my past, or was interested enough to find out: I was just brisk, capable Holly Brown from Homebodies, there to do a job: the Mary Poppins of Merchester.

Chapter 3

Weasel Pot

I have made friends with Hilda and Pearl, who have the beds either side of me at the lodging house, and they are showing me the ropes at the new hospital. Like many of the other nurses their chief desire seems to be to marry, preferably to one of the young doctors, and they teased me until I explained that I had lost my sweetheart in the first months of war, so that I now saw nursing as my life’s work.

November, 1944

Little Mumming lay in a small valley below one of the beacon hills that run down East Lancashire, where a long chain of fires was once lit as a sort of ancient early warning system.

On the map it hadn’t looked far from the motorway, but the poor excuse for a B road endlessly wound up and down, offering me the occasional distant, tantalising glimpse of Snowehill, topped with a squat tower, but never seeming to get any closer.

Finally I arrived at a T-junction that pointed me to Little Mumming and Great Mumming up a precipitous, single-track lane – though rather confusingly, it also pointed to Great Mumming straight ahead, too. All roads must lead to Great Mumming.

I took the sharp left uphill turn, sincerely hoping that I wouldn’t meet anything coming in the opposite direction, because although there were occasional passing places, there were also high dry-stone walls on either side, so I wouldn’t be able to see them coming round the series of hairpin bends.

I passed a boulder painted with the words ‘Weasel Pot Farm’ next to a rutted track and shifted down a gear. Was there ever going to be any sign of a village?

Then I crossed an old stone humpbacked bridge, turned a last bend past a pair of wrought-iron gates and came to a stop – for ahead of me the road levelled and opened out, revealing Little Mumming in all its wintry glory.

It was a huddled hamlet of grey stone cottages, a pub, and a small church set around an open green on which sheep were wrenching at the grass as if their lives depended on it. Perhaps they did. Winters were presumably a lot bleaker up here.

High above on the hillside a Celtic-looking figure of a horse had been carved out from the dull red earth or sandstone, using just a few flowing lines. It could be an ancient hill marking, or maybe some more recent addition to the landscape.

After a minute I carried on and pulled in by the green, turning off the engine. I needed a moment to unclench my hands from the steering wheel after that ascent.

The village looked as if it had grown organically from the earth, the walls and roofs all lichen-spotted and mossy. There was a raw wind blowing and it was midmorning, so I suppose it wasn’t surprising that it was deserted, though I did have the sensation that I was being watched from behind the Nottingham lace curtains …

But the only movement was the sign swinging in the wind outside the pub, the Auld Christmas, which depicted a bearded old man in a blue robe, holding a small fir tree and wearing a wreath of greenery round his head. Very odd. The pub advertised morning coffee and ploughman’s lunches, which would have been tempting had the journey not taken so much longer than I expected.

The shop Ellen had mentioned was nearby, fronted by sacks of potatoes and boxes of vegetables, with the Merry Kettle Tearoom next to it, though that looked as if it had closed for the winter. It was probably just seasonal, for walkers.

I consulted my map, started the engine, then continued on past a terraced trio of tiny Gothic cottages and over a second, smaller bridge to yet another signpost pointing to Great Mumming up an improbably steep and narrow strip of tarmac.

No wonder all the vehicles parked outside the pub were four-wheel-drive!

After half a mile I turned off through a pair of large stone pillars and came to rest on a stretch of gravel next to a lodge house that had been extended at the back into a sizeable bungalow.

It was very quiet apart from the rushing of water somewhere nearby and the rooks cawing in a stand of tall pine trees that must hide the house itself, for I couldn’t see even a chimney stack.

As I got out a little stiffly (I hadn’t realised quite how tense that drive up had made me), the lodge door opened a few inches and a tall, stooping, elderly man beckoned me in.

‘There you are! Come in quickly, before all the warm air gets out,’ he commanded urgently, as if I was a wayward family pet.

I sidled carefully past a large and spiky holly wreath into a long hallway. Once the door was safely shut behind me he turned and came towards me with an odd, slightly crablike gait, holding out his hand.

‘Noël Martland. And you must be Holly Brown – lovely name, by the way, very suitable.’

‘Oh? For what?’

‘Christmas,’ he replied, looking vaguely surprised that I needed to be told. He wore a drooping, ex-Air Force style moustache, partially covering the extensive, puckered shiny scars of an old burn.

He caught my eye: ‘Plane shot down in the war. Got a bit singed, landed badly.’

‘Right,’ I said, admiring the economy of description of a scene that would have occupied half a film and had you biting your knuckles on the edge of your cinema seat.

‘Best to say straight off: people always wonder, but they don’t like to ask.’

He took my coat and hung it carefully on a mahogany stand, then ushered me into a small, square, chintzy sitting room that would have been very pleasant had it not been rendered into a hideous Christmas grotto. Festoons of paper chains and Chinese lanterns hung from the ceiling, swags of fake greenery lined the mantelpiece and the tops of all the pictures, and there were snowglobes and porcelain-faced Santas on every flat surface.

In the bow window, fairy lights twinkled among so many baubles on the small fake fir tree that the balding branches drooped wearily under the strain.

Observing my stunned expression with some satisfaction he said, ‘Jolly good, isn’t it? We like to do things properly in Little Mumming.’ Then he suddenly bellowed, ‘Tilda! She’s here!’

‘Coming!’ answered a high, brittle voice and with a loud rattling noise a tiny woman pushed a large hostess trolley through a swinging door from what was presumably the kitchen.

‘My wife, Tilda,’ Noël Martland said. ‘This is Holly Brown, m’dear.’

‘So I should suppose, unless you’ve taken to entertaining strange young women,’ she said tartly, eyeing me from faded but still sharp blue eyes. Though age had withered her, it had not prevented her from applying a bold coating of turquoise eye shadow to her lids and a generous slick of foundation, powder and glossy scarlet lipstick. Under the white frilly apron she was wearing a peach satin blouse with huge dolman sleeves that finished in tight cuffs at the wrists, and a matching Crimplene pinafore dress. Her matchstick-thin legs in filmy loose stockings ended in pointed shoes with very high stiletto heels. I felt glad she had the trolley to hang onto.

‘The agency said you were coming on your own, though really a couple would have been better. But I suppose we’re lucky to get anyone at such short notice, over Christmas,’ she said, eyeing me critically.

‘I am sure you will cope splendidly!’ declared her husband.

‘That remains to be seen, Noël,’ she snapped back. ‘Miss or Mrs?’ she suddenly demanded, with a glance at my naked left hand.

‘Mrs,’ I said, ‘I’m a widow. I do a lot of cooking, so I’ve never been much of a one for rings.’