Prologue
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Borrow-A-Bookshop invites you to live out your dreams of running your very own bookshop in a historic Devonshire harbour village… for a fortnight.
Spend your days talking about books with customers in your own charming bookshop and serving up delicious cream teas in the cosy café nook. Get to know our wonderful volunteers (all locals), always ready to offer a helping hand.
After shutting up shop, climb the spiral staircase to your two-bed apartment and settle down to admire the Atlantic views. When your holiday’s over, simply hand the keys to the next holidaymaker-bookseller.
Request your booking early. Currently, there is a nineteen-month waiting list.
Small, fully equipped private kitchen and shower room on site. All shop and café takings retained by the Borrow-A-Bookshop Community Charity.
Apply in writing to Borrow-A-Bookshop, Up-along, Clove Lore, Devon.
£380 charge per let for 14 days.
Chapter One
‘Gran needs me, sorry,’ I say, not making eye contact because I know I’ve said this a thousand times before and it wears a bit thin with people.
‘You really won’t come out tonight?’ Daniel’s looking at me incredulously from behind the yellow lenses of his achingly fashionable chunky sunglasses. ‘You only graduate once. We should be drinking champagne ’til dawn.’
‘There’s plenty of champagne here,’ I say, gesturing across the sunny quad at the waiting staff holding their trays laden with bubbly. All around us families are raising glasses and beaming their approval at their graduating loved ones. I’m not really seeing them though; I’m scanning the spaces between the family groups.
‘Looking for Mack?’ Daniel prods, and I ignore the hint of dismay in his voice. He stops a passing waiter and grabs two tall flutes, pressing one into my hand.
‘He’ll be over in a sec, I imagine.’
I use Daniel’s pointed silence to glug my bubbly and put on a good performance of looking just as happy as my classmates who are all milling around in their cliques, signing each other’s graduation ceremony booklets and posing for group selfies.
Only moments ago we all processed out of the university’s fancy auditorium and into the July glare. Daniel couldn’t get a ticket, even though I wanted my best friend there to witness it all – tickets were limited to three guests per graduate – so he was waiting outside for me, looking handsome as hell in his suit with his dark hair beautifully quiffed as usual. He’d been standing by the doors when we all emerged, flowers in hand – red roses because he knows how much I appreciate anything resembling a romantic gesture from a novel.
Mum and Dad bound towards us over the lawn. They were the last to leave the ceremony and I just know they were having their usual faffy struggle with the footrests on Gran’s knackered old wheelchair. Gran’s sailing towards us, glamorous as ever, coo-eeing and waving, but I see her get distracted before she reaches us.
‘Wait a sec, Roni,’ I hear her instructing Mum. She’s pointing her walking stick towards the Pimm’s table and the sign reading ‘free bar’ above it, and I watch Mum divert her in that direction.
Dad’s looking so proud as he approaches. I’m not really sure how to react. It’s so strange being the centre of attention. He’s snapping photos of me and Daniel on his big old camera before his hug knocks the mortar board off my head.
‘Well done, Jude! You did it! My clever girl.’
‘Thanks,’ I smile, proud that he’s proud. Oh no, he’s on the verge of tears again. He’s such a softie; I think that’s where I get it from. Daniel notices and chips in to save us all.
‘Don’t you agree we should be celebrating out on the town tonight, Mr Crawley? She deserves a proper wild night after all that work.’
‘Nothing stopping her,’ Dad says, quizzically tipping his head at me. ‘You young ones need a night out now and again.’
Young?The last thing I feel today is young. In fact, if you want to feel old before your time I recommend two courses of action. Number one: dedicate yourself to being a home carer to your lovely Gran. Spend your days nipping to the bookies for her and reapplying her corn plasters and see how young you feel. And two: sign up for a part-time degree in your mid-twenties so that you graduate alongside twenty-one-year-olds just as you’re approaching your thirtieth birthday.
I was lucky enough to get a part-time place at the Borders campus of an Edinburgh university so the classes were amazing and only ever a twenty-minute bus ride from Gran and the bakery.
I’ve never felt more ‘mature’ than when my classmates would ask me if I had kids (I don’t) or whether I wanted to join their nights out at the Students’ Union bar (I did, but never went). They were sweet though, and would say things like, ‘It’s all right, you can bring your husband along’, fully expecting me to be a proper, married grown-up like their parents (who probably aren’t that much older than me) and not in fact a perpetual undergraduate whose idea of a big day out is ‘prize bingo and bacon butty Thursdays’ down the Senior Citizens’ Club with Gran and her rowdy mates.
‘See, nothing’s stopping us,’ Daniel’s saying, and he’s nodding at Gran over by the bar. ‘Doesn’t look like your gran needs you all that much at the moment.’
Annoyingly, he’s right. Mum’s left Gran to it and is making her way towards us. I watch as Gran chats up one of the uni sports coaches by the bar. She’s waving a fag around in one hand and clasping a Pimm’s with the other. Fair play to her, the coach guy is laughing his head off. She’s offering him a cigarette now. She’ll get us all chucked out at this rate.
Gran’s like that; gets on with anybody and loves a party. Not like me. Daniel says it’s nothing but habit – my love of my comfort zone – and I could shake it off if I really wanted to, and it’s kindly meant, I know that, but he wasn’t the one stuck at home with caring responsibilities as a teenager. He was free to follow his own life path, like all my other classmates.
