Home on a Yorkshire Farm

Jane Lovering

Description

Escape the rat race by heading to the Yorkshire Moors in Jane Lovering’s funny, warm and magical new novel. Perfect for fans of Our Yorkshire Farm!

Needing an escape, Dora swapped city living for life as a shepherdess on her grandad’s Yorkshire farm. More than a decade later Dora is still there, now farming the fifty acres and caring for the one hundred rare sheep by herself. She never hears the call of the city, but instead relishes the peace and simplicity of life on the Moors.

When Dora’s glamorous but quarrelsome sister Cass, her teenage nephew Thor and his handsome tutor Nat, turn up for an unexpected and unreasonably long stay, life on the farm is thrown into chaos. Cass brings with her unwelcome memories from the past, and of someone who once stole Dora's heart.

Dora takes refuge in the comforting routine of the farm, the sheep never allowing her too much time to dwell. But, as the seasons change, the snow starts to melt, and as lambs begin to fill the fields, Dora can’t keep hiding in the hills. Because even though she’s trying, Dora can’t run away from a love that never really let her go…

Let Jane Lovering whisk you away to the beauty and serenity of the Yorkshire Moors, far away from the noise of the city. Just right for fans of Emma Burstall, Holly Martin and Kate Forster.

Please note that HOME ON A YORKSHIRE FARM was previously published as HOME ON FOLLY FARM.

Praise for Jane Lovering:

'A funny, warm-hearted read, filled with characters you'll love.' Matt Dunn on A Country Escape

What readers are saying about Jane Lovering:

‘Jane Lovering has that ability to choose exactly the right words and images to make you laugh, with a wonderful touch of the ridiculous, then moving seamlessly to a scene of such poignancy that it catches your breath.’

‘It is very difficult to explain just how wonderful this book is. The power of her words and her descriptive prowess to put it bluntly is amazing… the emotional impact it has had on me will be long lasting.’

‘Fall in love with reading all over again with this cracking tale from Jane Lovering. An excellent reminder, if one is needed, of the absolute pleasure of losing yourself in a good book.'

Sujets

• Mashups
• Holidays
• Siblings
• Mammals
• Humorous
• Women
• Coming of Age
• Condado de Yorkshire (Reino Unido)
• Inglaterra
• Friendship
• Contemporary history
• Workplace
• Romantic Comedy
• Sibling
• General officer
• Woman
• Mammal
• The Women
• Animals
• General
• Holiday
• Contemporary
• Topic
• Family Life
• Romance
• England
• Yorkshire
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Boldwood Books
• Date de parution: 16 mars 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781800482388
• Langue: English

Extrait

HOME ON A YORKSHIRE FARM


JANE LOVERING
CONTENTS



Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14


More from Jane Lovering

About the Author

Also by Jane Lovering

Love Notes

About Boldwood Books
To my utterly wonderful sister-in-law, Debs, who manages to keep my brother, David, in line. I’m not sure how she does it… I think a cattle prod, but she says not.
Also to my assorted collection of nieces and nephews, Ed, Beth, Ben and Amy Lovering. They’re a lovely bunch.
And this book is also dedicated to all the farmers of North Yorkshire, who work horrible hours in awful weather doing a largely thankless job, this one’s for you, lads and lasses.
1

There are some people whose voices go straight through you, even if you are horizontal with your face in a bucket and your arm in a sheep. My sister’s voice was one of them.
‘What the hell are you doing?’
Yep. Like a steel toecap through slurry.
I hadn’t heard her arrive. The jump it caused me made the ewe struggle against the pressure of my hand. ‘I’m laying lino,’ I said. ‘Obviously.’ I stretched my fingers to their furthest extent, felt the ewe strain with another contraction, and then pushed gently. The lamb’s head popped down into the birth canal.
I would not show how surprised I was to see my sister; I would not .
‘Yeah, but does it have to be here ?’
I hadn’t been expecting to see Cass for – ooh, another five years at least, if ever. I suspected there was probably a warning email sitting in my inbox from our mother who, although she could be a little bit distant, wasn’t actively hostile, so she would have tried to prepare me. But I’d been so busy.
I had to work on not gritting my teeth too visibly as I gradually stood up away from the sheep, watched the lamb slither out onto the straw bed of the pen and sneeze, while I tried to think of something to say.
‘Where would you suggest?’ I asked. ‘Benidorm?’
The ewe reached around and began to lick her lamb clean. Job done. I wiped my arm with the handful of straw that I realised I was clutching as though it were a stand-in for my sister’s neck.
‘Well, surely, the vet does that sort of thing?’ Just on the edge of vision I could see Cassandra sitting down on a bale of hay, carefully folding her long legs up into a yoga pose, calculated to make me look even more graceless in my practical but unglamorous farming wellingtons and amniotic-stained jeans. ‘I thought you were going out with the vet, anyway – would he not do you mates’ rates? And your arm is disgusting. Don’t you have hot water and a towel? Like in James Herriot?’
I sighed and climbed up and out over the metal hurdles that formed the lambing pen. ‘No. And, yes, I was going out with Chris, but we split up six months ago. I did tell you I was having my heart broken, but you were probably, I dunno, getting a bikini wax or something.’
Cass tossed her hair, which she did more often than a dog groomer having a good clear out.
‘A bikini wax is more painful than heartbreak,’ my sister said firmly. ‘And more frequent. Heartbreak you don’t get every eight weeks from a perma-tanned sadist with acrylic nails.’
I thought about Elvie, who ran the local riding stables and who had, so I’d found out, been keeping Chris entertained, on and off, for much of the past couple of years. ‘Oh, I don’t know.’
‘Not that you’d know, anyway,’ Cass finished, looking me over as though she could see my pubic hair creeping its way up out through the waistband of my jeans and attempting to coat my torso.
‘There’s not much time for that sort of thing,’ I replied tartly. ‘What with the rare-sheep breeding and all, it’s surprising I can find time to fit in my massage sessions and the weekly blow-dry.’
My hair was currently scraped into a ponytail and had hay tangled in it, so I didn’t think the usual sarcasm alert was necessary, but I hadn’t considered Cass.
‘You should sue.’ She looked me over again. ‘I hope they aren’t charging you for that updo.’ Then she looked at her own hands. ‘I get a discount,’ she said smugly. ‘They stamp this little card for you, and every ten visits you get a free gel polish.’
I took a deep breath. She was as out of place in the creaky old stone barn as I would be – well, getting a gel polish. ‘Why are you here, Cass? I wasn’t expecting you. Did you bring Hawthorn?’
‘He’s my son , of course I brought him – what did you think I’d do with him?’
I was tempted to say I would have expected her to have dumped him on Mum and Dad, much as she’d done on many occasions since he was born, but I didn’t say it. There wasn’t the time for an argument; I had eighty-five recently-lambed ewes to feed. ‘So, where is he?’ I looked around as though I expected my nephew to pop out from behind the feed sacks.
Cassie stood up. ‘I sent him to explore.’
‘ Explore! Cass, farms are dangerous, you know that! You can’t leave a child roaming around unattended!’ I started towards the door, which was actually just a bit of tin propped against the crumbling cob wall. It didn’t really stop much, except the worst of the wind. Three ewes and their lambs had belted through it yesterday and left it bulging and corrugated where it hadn’t been before.
‘He’s twelve, Dora! That’s, like, practically forty in child years!’ Cass came out of the barn after me, the familiar note of justification and complaint in her voice. God, had I really been listening to that since she learned to talk? How hadn’t I brained her with the Encyclopaedia Britannica ?
Twelve? Was he? When had that happened? Last time I’d seen my nephew he’d been a small, pale boy, the only one who could work the elaborate TV and programme the oven. ‘I thought he was about seven.’
Cass did the hair toss again. The wind outside the barn came funnelled directly down the valley, and tossed it right back. Yorkshire in March doesn’t give much quarter.
‘Twelve,’ she said again. ‘As you’d know if you ever came to visit, which you don’t because – actually, why don’t you ever come home, Dor?’
We stood side by side for a moment, the sturdy walls of the old stone barn behind us, the unreeling endlessness of the dale in front of us. I waved a hand. ‘Sheep,’ was all I said.
‘That’s no excuse.’ Cass pouted into the weather. The weather was not the least impressed and neither was I. ‘And we’re here because Mum and Dad are getting an extension.’
There must be some kind of consequential string of actions that led to Mum and Dad’s potential extension sending my sister and her son from London to Yorkshire, but I wasn’t sure what. ‘Tell me,’ I said, with the sternness of the older sister. ‘But without references to your hairdresser, your yoga guru, Pilates or any one of your million friends. If you can,’ I added, because Cass tended towards verbosity as I tended towards fruit cake.
We walked back across the yard to the house while Cass explained. To her credit, she managed to cut out most of what her friends said, why she went to twice-weekly yoga, how Jennet Reilly had had to leave town suddenly, the advisability of expensive shoes and the opening of a new Ted Baker shop on the high street. Not all of it, obviously, but she did her best.
‘So, they’re building a kind of granny-annexe for you and Hawthorn?’ I tried to precis as I opened the kitchen door and we were greeted by a whirl of collie and the smell of ancient casserole.
‘Yes. We were tired of sharing a bathroom and now he’s getting older there’s too many wet towels.’ Cass pulled a chair from under the table and sat down wearily, as though she’d personally trudged the two hundred odd miles with her son on her back, rather than caught a train to York and taken a taxi the rest of the way. And Dad had probably driven her to the station in the first place.
‘And you’ve come to stay with me?’ I washed my hands at the big stone sink. Feeding the ewes could wait a few minutes, until I made sense of the situation, but I could hear the ‘baaing’ starting up. They’d heard my voice in the yard.
‘Yeah,’ Cass said. ‘Hotels are too expensive, apparently.’
‘What about school? And your job?’ I looked in the fridge. I’d been sure there were some yoghurts in there and I was hungry. The ewe had been trying to lamb for a couple of hours and I’d had to carry her into the barn to sort her out, so I’d missed breakfast. And, actually, thinking about it, dinner last night.
‘Job?’ Cass looked blankly at me for a moment. ‘Oh, the shop! Oh, God, no, I haven’t done that for ages ! It was just so restrictive, what with me being a single mother and everything. Oh, there’s Thor now.’
The door opened again and stayed open, letting the wind circle the kitchen. It crept over my shoulder and whirled some milk bottle tops in the fridge, as though it too was disappointed by the lack of yoghurt.
‘Thor?’
‘Yeah, he decided Hawthorn is too babyish. Didn’t you, sweet?’
Hawthorn, looking about as far from Chris Hemsworth as was possible whilst still being male and blond, slunk into the room. He was taller than his mother now, with a face that still held the soft traces of a child while his body had the height and long limbs of an adult. He needed to stop going up and start going sideways – there was a lot of filling out to do.
Hawthorn grunted and perched on the window seat, staring out across the yard as though waiting for a helicopter to rescue him. There was a suspiciously yoghurty smell about him and some smears down his jeans that told me where the four-pack of Müller Corners had gone.
‘So, what did you do while I was catching up with Auntie Pandora?’ Cass’s voice had become high-pitched and cutesy and I knew this was just for effect by the way her son flinched.
‘Updated my vlog,’ he said. ‘My followers want to know what’s happening with me.’
‘Thor runs a very popular YouTube channel,’ Cass said, in a voice so bright that one of