Chapter Two
Island House, Melstead St Mary
October 1962
Hope
Hope had lost track of the time. Something her husband, Edmund, frequently complained that she did. It infuriated him, especially if she forgot they were going somewhere, or had guests coming for dinner.
She never used to be like this, but her busy work schedule meant that every minute of her day was devoted to the children for whom she wrote. If she wasn’t writing her books for them, she was replying to the hundreds of letters she received from all around the world.
Her various publishers and agent applauded her for her prodigious output, but it was the children’s applause that mattered most to her. When she received a letter from a young child thousands of miles away in Nairobi, she knew then that she had done her job.
She hadn’t always been a children’s author. In what felt like another life, she had been an illustrator after going to art school. Her early work had included illustrating wildlife books for children. It was during the war that she had changed direction and commenced writing the series of books which was to make her name. Based on Stanley, their young evacuee billeted at Island House, and his devoted dog, Bobby, she had created Freddie and his faithful mutt, Ragsy.
Of course, in the end Freddie had to grow up and she had to find new characters with which to amuse her readers. Her agent urged her to be more like Enid Blyton and feature a group of friends who together solve mysteries. She went along with the suggestion, but on the understanding that she would include two girls within the storyline who would show just as much pluck and intelligence as the boys, if not more. After all, hadn’t women shown their mettle during the war just as much as their male counterparts, women such as Hope’ssister-in-law, Evelyn, and her stepmother, Romily? While they had been away doing their bit, Hope had had the job of maintaining order at Island House and writing her books. For some of her storylines she rifled her own childhood for inspiration – ghastly Nanny Finch; the mother Hope had never really known; the distant father who was always away and the siblings who found it so difficult to get on. Although thankfully she and Kit had never fallen out with each other.
As well as this hugely successful series of books, Hope also wrote for much younger children, featuring imaginary woodland folk who inhabited Sweet Meadow Wood. These shorter and much simpler stories were influenced by the imaginary world into which she had escaped as a child, and they soon became as popular as her other books. Next she devised a range of board games and jigsaws based on Sweet Meadow Wood, and in recent years she had created a new series ofTales from Pepper Brook Farm.
Everything she had written had been an attempt to entertain and brighten the lives of the children for whom she wrote. It had 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 amiddle-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 beenill-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, so why not make use of it yourselves?’ she’d said with her customary logic, not to say generosity.
Technically Romily was Hope’s stepmother, having married her father, Jack Devereux, but being only a few years older than Hope, they had been more like friends, or even sisters. Romily had inherited Island House – so named because of the stream that fed the large pond and which skirted around the house down into the next valley – when Jack had died shortly before war broke out, but the family had always been made to feel welcome. Well, everyone except for Arthur.
Despite their initial reserve at having a stepmother not much older than themselves, Romily soon came to be a breath of fresh air in their lives. She was, even in her grief at being widowed, a tour de force and a great example to Hope, who was still mourning Dieter. But somehow Romily, with hercan-do approach to life, had nurtured and encouraged Hope. It was thanks to Romily, too, already an established and successful novelist herself, that Hope had become a children’s author. She doubted she could have done it without her stepmother’s help and support. Kit often joked that the Devereux family could never do anything by halves. ‘Why have one bestselling author in the family when you can have two?’ he’d say.
It had been Hope who had wanted to sell their old house on the edge of Clover Woods. Edmund had been happy to stay, but she hated the way it was no longer so private. The woods she had played in as a child had been partly cleared to make way for the building of a new development of houses. It was just one of the many changes going on in the village. It was called progress and she didn’t like it. She blamed it on the war; it had altered things, not just here in Melstead St Mary, but everywhere. People’s expectations had changed; they were dissatisfied with the old, they wanted newer, bigger and better.
The main street in the village had seen a turnaround in shops. There was still Minton’s bakery and the butcher’s shop, but where there used to a hardware store, there was now a supermarket where customers wandered the aisles with a wire basket, filling it themselves. The choice of food available was greater, but the service was less personal.
The one addition that Hope actually approved of was the small library which she and Romily had helped to get off the ground.
Knowing how resistant to change she was, Edmund had been surprised when Hope announced that they should move. He had been even more surprised when she had suggested they build a new house to live in. He had gone along with her wishes, but hadn’t shown the same level of enthusiasm in the design process as she did. Her main priority was to find somewhere that was in no danger of being overlooked, and she had made doubly sure of that by buying the surrounding land from the farmer who owned it. Initially he had refused to sell, but when she offered an amount well over the odds, the farmer agreed. She kept that from Edmund because she suspected he didn’t always like the fact that her writing earned her the kind of money it did.
Throughout the war Edmund had worked as a hospital doctor in London. He had wanted to enrol as an army doctor, but with so many already gone, his skill was needed to treat all those injured servicemen who were sent home to be patched up. They married in 1945, three months after the end of the war, and he immediately left his post in London and took over the practice here in the village when Dr Garland moved to Norfolk.
Edmund had been keen to have a child of their own, but it was not to be. Tests proved that Hope was the one at fault, though no doctor used that word. She was secretly relieved. The thought of being weighed down by the needs of another child had frightened her. She had done her best with their adopted daughter, Annelise, but she knew deep in her heart, she was not the maternal kind.
In August 1939, just days before Hitler invaded Poland, and a year after Dieter died, Hope had travelled to Germany to visit his family. It was in Cologne when she went to see Dieter’s sister, Sabine, and her Jewish husband Otto Lowenstein, that they begged her to save their only child by taking her to England. Hope tried desperately to convince them to come with her, to escape the fear of living in Nazi Germany, but they wouldn’t leave Otto’s parents. With a heavy heart, and fearful of the enormous responsibility laid upon her, Hope returned to England by train and boat, pretending theten-month-old baby was her own. It was the longest journey of her life. Sabine and Otto’s fear at what Hitler might do was justified; they both perished in the Holocaust. But thanks to her, Edmund would remind Hope whenever she felt she had failed Annelise, their precious child had survived.
Edmund had proved himself to be a wonderful father to Annelise and Hope would always be grateful for that. He was also an excellent uncle to their niece and nephew, Em and Pip.
Downstairs, she spotted that afternoon’s post on the hall table. She flicked through it, putting aside most of the letters that were for Romily, then found one that was for her. It was handwritten and with a local postmark. Absently, she tore it open as she began moving towards the drawing room. She had taken no more than a few steps when she stopped dead in her tracks.
Stunned, she realised she was looking at a poison pen letter. The words – in a jumble of cut out newspaper print – leapt off the page at her.
