The Magic of Christmas Read Online Free PDF Page A

from the land of legend into a Lancashire backwater like Middlemoss.
    The last remaining acres of darkly watchful ancient woodland that crowded up to the back of Perseverance Cottage would have looked normal enough to them, I suppose — apart from Caz Naylor, who as usual was camouflaged from headband to boots, Rambo-style. I spotted him flitting in and out of the trees only by the white glint of his eyeballs and the sweat glistening between the green and brown streaks on his naked chest. A blink and he was gone, back to wage war on the dangerous alien life form known to the uninitiated as the grey squirrel.
    Still, even in Arthurian times they would probably have had some kind of shamanistic Green Man and so would be used to such goings-on, and the duckpond, chickens and vegetable patch out front would look reassuringly normal to them. But what would they have made of the huge, tumble-down old greenhouse, the remains of a previous tenant’s abortive attempt at market gardening? Or my battered, once-white Citroën 2CV? A 2CV that, I now noticed, had its hood down, so the seats would be soaked with dew and very likely lightly spattered with hen crap. Or even, which was much, much worse, duck gloop.
    It was also listing drunkenly on one seriously flat tyre.
    Tossing the last of the feed to the hens, I stuck my head inside the cottage door.
    ‘Jasper?’ I called loudly up the steep stairs, expecting him to be still asleep. By nature, teenagers are intended to be nocturnal, so it felt cruel to have to drag him out of his lair under the eaves each morning.
    Instead, he loomed out of the doorway next to me, making me jump. ‘I’m here, Mum. What’s up?’
    ‘Flat tyre. You have your breakfast and get ready while I change it. I hope it’s a mendable puncture — the spare’s not that brilliant and if I have to buy a new one it’ll be worth more than the rest of the car put together.’
    One of the Leghorns had followed me into the flagged hallway (a Myrtle: all the white hens are called that; and the browns, Honey) and I shooed it out again. There’s something terribly cement-like about hen droppings when they set hard.
    ‘I’ll change it,’ he offered. ‘Or I can cycle over.’
    ‘No, I’ll have it done by the time you’ve had breakfast, and you’ll be late otherwise.’
    The medieval dig he was working at was only a few miles away, but the lanes between the site and us were narrow and twisty, so I worried about his safety. Annie calls it ‘mother hen with one chick’ syndrome, but she is just as dotty about Trinity, her rescued dog. And if I hadn’t been an anxious mother, then maybe I wouldn’t have demanded the right treatment for Jasper’s meningitis that time he was rushed into hospital, even before the tests came back positive … It didn’t bear thinking about.
    Jasper wandered out again a few minutes later holding a piece of toast at least an inch thick, not counting the bramble jelly and butter, removed the wheel brace from my hand (giving me the toast to hold in exchange), and unscrewed the last nut.
    ‘Thanks, that was stiff. You’d think if I’d tightened it up in the first place, I’d be able to undo it easily, wouldn’t you?’
    ‘Dad not back yet?’ Jasper asked, glancing across at the large, ramshackle wooden shed Tom used as his workshop, with the ‘Board Rigid: Customised Surfboards’ sign over it.
    ‘No.’
    ‘Well, remember that time you asked him to go and buy a couple of pints of milk, and you didn’t hear from him for a week?’ he said, clearly with the intention of comforting me should I need it. But actually, I was sure he shared my feeling that his father’s increasing number of absences were a blessing, even though I was usually the one on the receiving end of Tom’s viciously sarcastic outbursts.
    He couldn’t help but have noticed the way Tom had estranged himself from both of us, behaving more like a lodger than a husband and father.
    Just let me get him safely