The Whiskerly Sisters Read Online Free PDF

her grandparents. With careful budgeting on the part of the little family, Verity became the first child in the village to own both a Spirograph and a Cindy. The little family was blossoming.
    Motherhood suited Fresna and, as she grew into her twenties, she was developing into a very beautiful woman; a natural strawberry blond with a lissom figure. Wherever she went heads turned and wolves whistled. Men noticed her and regularly asked her out on dates, but Fresna always refused, quietly but firmly. She simply wasn’t interested, she told them. She was preoccupied with caring for her child and, in any case, her first taste of men had been undeniably disappointing. It was obvious to her that, despite how attractive it appeared she had become, how very fetching she was told she looked, how much every red blooded male seem to desire her, the reality was that few men would be willing to take on the upbringing of someone else’s bastard.
    Besides, for Fresna family came first. Her loyalty to her child and to her grandparents was absolute and, despite what had happened, she had worked hard to regain the respect of the village and she did not want to lose it. She was known to be a conscientious worker, careful to owe nothing to anyone, even refusing to let Mrs Baxter in the sweet shop give Verity a free lollipop when she went in to collect the newspaper for gramps when he began to experience the swollen and stiff joints that accompany increasing age.
    Despite the adoration of both her great grandparents and her mother, Verity grew up unspoiled. An intelligent child, she passed her eleven plus with ease and settled quickly into the nearby Grammar School. For as long as she would allow them, granny accompanied her to the school bus stop every morning and gramps would be waiting there each afternoon to bring her back home. The little family was thriving.
    To everyone’s surprise, shortly after her thirtieth birthday, Fresna fell in love. He was a Charge Nurse at the cottage hospital on a two-year exchange programme from the Mercy Hospital, Atlanta, Georgia. He was single, over six feet tall and immaculately groomed. Furthermore, he had impeccable manners and was clearly well educated but, in the close knit community in which Fresna had lived all her life, George’s African American ethnicity was something of a sensation. His culture, his unusual appearance and the colour of his skin became a source of endless speculation and gossip among the villagers.
    For George and Fresna, however, it was love at first sight. They were soul mates. They were inseparable. They became everything to each other. He gave her bright, golden daffodils. She gave him homemade scones.
    In their very quiet way, her grandparents were delighted for Fresna. The teenage Verity seemed outwardly unaffected by the love affair, but was secretly thrilled to see her mother so happy.
    George sought a permanent nursing post and applied for UK residency. The happy couple looked for a way to be together and, after much discussion, George and Fresna moved into a little flat of their own close to the hospital where they both worked. Naturally Verity came with them, but the three of them made sure to pop in on Gramps and Granny several times a week. Thus began a very happy, very fulfilling chapter of Fresna’s life. George continued to fill her life with sunshine and flowers; she filled his with warmth and beauty. Her only disappointment, and it really was such a tiny disappointment given all she already had, was that she never fell pregnant. How Fresna would have loved to have given George a son, to have given Verity a brother. But it was not to be.
    During the summer that saw Fresna and George celebrate five years together, Gramps died suddenly. A heart attack took him quickly away after supper just as he sat down to watch the evening news and the football results. Just over a week later, he was buried in the graveyard of the village in which he had lived all his life; in