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PATRICIA BURNS is an Essex girl born and bred and proud of it. She spent her childhood messing about in boats, then tried a number of jobs before training to be a teacher. She married and had three children, all of whom are now grown up, and she recently became a grandmother. She is now married for the second time and is doing all the things she never had time for earlier in life. When not busy writing, Patricia enjoys travelling and socialising, walking in the countryside round the village where she now lives, belly dancing and making exotic costumes to dance in. Find out more about Patricia at www.mirabooks.co.uk/patriciaburns
Patricia Burns
To Dorothy Lumley, who never stopped believing in this book Contents
January 1953
IT SEEMED to be a day like any other. Windy, certainly, but at Marsh Edge Farm they were used to almost constant wind, exposed as they were. It swept over the Essex flatlands with increasing power that day, the last day of January in the year of the new Queen’s coronation. It came howling across the low grasslands that had once been part of the sea, raced over the snaking sea wall and buffeted the grey North Sea into angry white-topped waves. It whipped the skirts of Annie Cross’s old grey mac round her frozen legs as she brought the dairy cows in for evening milking. She pulled her muffler more snugly round her neck and looked round anxiously at her small son. Bobby was plodding behind the last animal, stick in hand, the clinging mud nearly to the top of his wellingtons. His small face was pinched and his nose was streaming. In the gap between his raincoat and his boots, his bare knees were bright red with cold. Annie forced an encouraging smile. ‘Nearly there, darling! Grandma’s making us some scones for tea. That’ll be nice, won’t it?’ Bobby nodded and sneezed, and wiped his nose on his sleeve. Annie’s heart contracted. He shouldn’t be out here in the wind and the cold. He should be indoors in front
