Pastures New. Julia Williams

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      JULIA WILLIAMS

      Pastures New

       Copyright Page

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      AVON

      A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      A Paperback Original 2007

      Copyright © Julia Williams 2007

      Julia Williams asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

      Source ISBN: 9781847563613

      Ebook Edition © September 2008 ISBN: 9780007278954 Version: 2018-05-23

      For Joseph Henry Moffatt and John Douglas (Roger) Williams, for sharing their wisdom

      Contents

       Title Page Copyright Dedication Part One: Forever Autumn Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Part Two: Lighten Up Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Part Three: Here Comes The Summer Sun Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Part Four: Fix You Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Chapter Thirty-Two Chapter Thirty-Three Chapter Thirty-Four Chapter Thirty-Five Chapter Thirty-Six Acknowledgements About the Author About the Publisher

       PART ONE

      Forever Autumn

      In the allotment: Harvest the crops, dig over the soil, and prepare the ground for winter.

      State of the heart: Barren, cold, dead.

       CHAPTER ONE

      ‘There’s a fire on the anti-clockwise section of the M25, just before the junction with the M1, and the traffic’s backing up to junction 26, so do avoid that if you can …’

      Hopefully that will have cleared by the time I get back, thought Amy, as Sally Traffic made way for a debate about gun crime. She’d always hated driving on the motorway, and never more so than now, when she had to do it alone.

      Oh Jamie, I miss you so much …

      The thought came unbidden and unprompted, and she blinked back the sudden tears.

      This would never do.

      Pull yourself together, girl, Amy admonished herself sternly, straightening her slight shoulders and gripping the steering wheel tighter. If she really was going to make this move, she had to be strong. She had to. Hold on to that thought …

      At least it was a gloriously sunny day, and the soft undulating Essex countryside was looking its best. Field after field of sun-drenched corn. Thanks to the rotten summer, the harvest was late, but here and there bales of hay indicated that it was finally underway. And the smell of burning stubble was a reminder that summer really was drawing in. Constable country, Amy thought to herself. She wouldn’t be surprised to find a haywain round the next corner.

      The journey from North London had taken much longer than she had envisaged, but eventually Amy found herself driving over the little humpbacked bridge that, according to her map, marked the boundary between the Essex and Suffolk sides of the pretty market town of Nevermorewell. A feeling of excitement grew in her as she pulled the car into the