When the Bough Breaks

Table of Contents

Further Titles by Connie Monk

Title Page

Copyright

1919–1933

Chapter One

Chapter Two

1939–1945

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

1954

Chapter Ten

SEASON OF CHANGE

FORTUNE'S DAUGHTER

JESSICA

HANNAH'S WHARF

RACHEL'S WAY

REACH FOR THE DREAM

TOMORROW'S MEMORIES

A FIELD OF BRIGHT LAUGHTER

FLAME OF COURAGE

THE APPLE ORCHARDS

BEYOND DOWNING WOOD

THE RUNNING TIDE

FAMILY REUNIONS

ON THE WINGS OF THE STORM

WATER'S EDGE

DIFFERENT LIVES

THE SANDS OF TIME

SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW

FROM THIS DAY FORWARD

ECHO OF TRUTH

MISTRESS OF MANNINGTOR

FAST FLOWS THE STREAM

THE LONG ROAD HOME

TO LIGHT A CANDLE

A SECOND SPRING

HUNTERS' LODGE *

A PROMISE FULFILLED *

BEYOND THE SHORE *

WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS *

 

 

*
available from Severn House

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First world edition published 2011

in Great Britain and the USA by

SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

Copyright © 2011 by Connie Monk.

All rights reserved.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Monk, Connie.

When the Bough Breaks.

1. World War, 1939-1945–Social aspects–Great Britain–

Fiction. 2. Women gardeners–Fiction. 3. Great Britain–

History–George VI, 1936-1952–Fiction.

I. Title

823.9'14-dc22

ISBN-13: 978-1-7801-0335-8 (Epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8017-8 (cased)

ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-339-7 (trade paper)

Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

This ebook produced by

Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

Dennis Hawthorne wasn't a man to let his spirits be cast down easily, but as he closed the door of that dingy office and came into the bright sunshine his future held no ray of hope. This wasn't the dream that had kept him going through those hellish years of the war. Yet he ought to be thankful – he
was
thankful. Thousands of men who had lost their lives in the stinking trenches would jump at the offer he'd just turned down. But he couldn't, he
wouldn't
, waste the glories of the life that had been spared to him in that miserable, gloomy shed that called itself an office.
Look across the harbour to the open sea, listen to the cries of the gulls as they circled an incoming fishing boat
. . . Then without warning the scene before him seemed to be wiped out by the vision that haunted him and, even now, more than a year since it had happened, all too often dragged him out of sleep to find himself trembling, sweating, sometimes crying like a child. There by the harbour, the May morning was overtaken by the scene of his nightmare. He was shivering despite the palms of his hands being clammy; he felt the sweat break on his brow. He was climbing out of the trench, charging into no-man's-land, then the sound of the explosion seemed to be bursting in his head and he saw Ted Turner blown to pieces only yards from him. Ted Turner who had been his friend since they started infant school on the same day. Now instinctively he raised his shaking hand and wiped his forehead, making a supreme effort to appear normal, standing there amongst the dock workers.

‘You all right, son?' a kindly voice asked.

‘Yes, I'm fine. Just so bright coming out from that dark shed.'

‘Ah, give me the fresh air, no matter what the weather chucks at you. Been in there to see the old man about the job, have you?'

Dennis looked at the stranger with the kindly voice, a man more than twice his age. ‘You work for him?' he asked.

‘Ah, I work here on the dock, loading. I saw the notice in the paper for a bookkeeper. Did you get taken on?'

‘I turned it down. I did right, I know I did. But God knows how long before I find anything. Couldn't do it though, couldn't be stuck in that dark hovel.'

‘You home from the army I s'pose. A land fit for heroes, that's what you boys were promised. Tell you one thing, though, lad. Nothing in this world is ever what you dream it will be; but there's usually something good to be found if we look for it – a mate to work alongside, someone to have a joke with. You'll find the right thing, mayhap it's just around the next corner, eh?'

Dennis's bad moment had passed and with the stranger's optimistic comment echoing in his mind, he started up Quay Hill to catch the bus back to Exeter where he rented a bed-sitting room. Yes, he'd done right to refuse. He was still free and like that chap had said, something good might be just around the next corner. Reality caught up with him when he joined the end of the queue waiting at the bus stop, for nearby was a man no more than his own twenty-one years, a man propped up on crutches with one empty trouser leg pinned up, and attached to a cord around his neck was a tray with boxes of matches. Dennis dug in his pocket for a penny and bought a box just as the Exeter bus drew up.

Two women laden with shopping baskets got on first, then with a smile and, ‘Good luck, mate', to the match seller, he followed.

The bus was taking a long country route back to Exeter. It was only about midday and the thought of his bed-sitting room held no appeal. What was there to hurry for? When a couple of women got up to disembark in a village, he followed them, his nose immediately being assailed by the smell of fish and chips. So it was that with his lunch wrapped in a greasy newspaper package he turned from the village street in what he was to come to know as Sedgewood and started to walk down a narrow lane, which was signed:
To the Common.

About a quarter of a mile on he came face to face with his future. No longer was it shrouded in impenetrable mist. On a garden gate was a faded sign:
COTTAGE AND ABOUT FIVE ACRES TO LET.
The cottage stood empty, looking unloved and desolate with its painted name, Westways, so faded it was barely readable. But it wasn't the cottage that set his imagination racing, it was the land; five acres as sadly neglected as the building itself. It was like stumbling upon something held in a time warp. This was his future: Dennis had never felt as certain of anything. Pushing open the gate that hung on one hinge he walked up the weed-choked path and pressed his nose to the windows of the house. He battled his way through the overgrown land, imagining the hours he would spend restoring it. Hours? Weeks, months, he corrected himself. He remembered how he used to love to work with his grandfather on his vegetable plot and, casting a glance to the pale winter sky, wanted to believe that his decision was gaining approval.

There was no time to loose. He jotted down the name of the agent and caught the next bus back to Deremouth. By the end of the day his future had a shape: he would breathe new life into these five acres of south Devon countryside and make the house a home. Long ago someone else must have lived there, tilling the land, caring for the property, and that's how it would be again.

That was in May. He became the tenant on the first of June, and before that he had to attend an auction sale in Exeter and bid for the bare essentials of furniture. He took note of every penny he spent, for he had little enough to live on and he knew it would be some time before the land could bring him any income. But there were things he had to have: gardening tools (all bought second-hand) and his one extravagance, a motorized digger. But he had plenty of clearing to do before he could hope to use that.

That summer he worked outside seven days a week from first light until dusk. His scheme was to clear and plant out one patch at a time. That way by the time the winter crops came along he ought to be making some sort of a living. He found time to go to the village, to make friends with the shopkeepers and get the greengrocer's word that he would be prepared to take his crop assuming that it was of high enough quality.

During the winter evenings he distempered the inside walls. A stranger seeing it would have thought his home a barren and cheerless place, but to Dennis it was an object of pride. The rooms were small, a kitchen-cum-sitting room, a ‘parlour' or dining room, then upstairs two bedrooms. Outside on the back wall of the cottage he kept a zinc bath, which he had to bring indoors and fill with water heated in buckets on the range. A few yards from the cottage was an earth closet. After his years in the trenches, to Dennis it all seemed like luxury and, in the beginning, even the solitude was balm to his spirit. Surely if anything could dispel the memories that tormented him it must be the work he did on the land.

For the first two years he worked alone; paying a helper's wage was out of the question. Bit by bit the ground was cleared, the earth turned with his motor digger and then planted. So often he sent up a silent thank you to his grandfather who had died during the war years and had left to Dennis what little money he had. Living frugally he survived, learnt to look after himself and gradually to eke out a living from his land.

It was in the summer of 1922 that something happened to change his future. Each day he delivered his boxes of vegetable to Jack Hopkins, the village greengrocer, in a handcart. With the delivery made he was just pushing his cart back along the track towards Westways when he saw a girl trying to put the chain back on her bicycle. Sometimes people from the village walked this way, taking the track that led to the common. But he'd never seen this girl before. She probably wasn't local, he decided, for from her attire he imagined she had been on a long cycle ride. Wearing grey flannel pleated shorts and a white short-sleeved shirt she might have been no more than a schoolgirl – or that was his impression until he came nearer.

‘Do you need a hand?' he called as he approached her.

‘I don't know what's the matter with it today. Three times the chain has come off. It's never done it before. I think I've got it on and half a mile along the road it's slipped again.'

‘Perhaps something needs tightening. Have you a tool bag?'

‘No – just two hands. And oily ones at that,' she answered cheerfully.

She had turned the bike upside down and had been crouching by its side to fix it. Now she stood up and he saw immediately that he'd been wrong in thinking her a schoolgirl. She was a young woman, and an attractive young woman too. At a quick glance he took her in from head to toe. His first thought was that her hair reminded him of autumn and conkers; to say it was brown made it sound ordinary but it wasn't really auburn. She was very slim, yet he was aware of her breasts under the thin cotton of her open neck blouse. Her long slender legs were bare and on her feet she wore a pair of strapped sandals little different from those of a child. Yet she certainly wasn't a child; if she were, her long hair would have been in a pigtail instead of being swept up and pinned to the top of her head. And her face? If he thought of the picture stars of the day who were considered beautiful, then she was no beauty for there was nothing ‘rosebud' about her mouth. Her cheekbones were pronounced and her nose tip-tilted. Yet her wide dark eyes were like no eyes he had ever seen.