The Great Christmas Knit Off
Read The Great Christmas Knit Off Online
Authors: Alexandra Brown
Published by HarperCollins
Publishers Ltd
77–85 Fulham Palace Road
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
First published in Great Britain by Harper 2014
Copyright © Alexandra Brown 2014
Cover images ©
Shutterstock.com
Cover layout design © HarperCollins
Publishers
Ltd 2014
Map © Nicolette Caven 2014
Alexandra Brown asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
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.
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Source ISBN: 9780007597369
Ebook Edition © November 2014 9780007597376
Version: 2014-10-09
For my Nanny Edie
Who always loved a good knit and natter session xxx
‘In the rhythm of the needles there is music for the soul.’
– Anonymous
Contents
H
ettie Honey picked up a lovely lavender lace weight that a customer had abandoned by the till after pondering for what seemed like an eternity that, actually, it wasn’t the right shade of lavender after all. She then walked across the shop floor of her House of Haberdashery to repatriate the ball into its rightful place – a wooden, floor-to-ceiling cabinet comprising twenty-four cubbyholes inset over three shelves crammed with every colour, ply, and type of yarn imaginable. Hettie smiled wryly, remembering the programme she had listened to on the radio not so long ago. Knitting! It was all the rage nowadays and she hoped it would finally catch on in Tindledale, her beloved picture-postcard village and Hettie’s home for the eighty-three years of her life to date. She ran the timber-framed, double-fronted shop adjacent to the wisteria-clad roundel of the oast house her father had built before she was even born.
Hettie lifted the tray on which sat the last remnants of her afternoon tea; a cheese sandwich minus the crusts because her teeth weren’t as strong as they used to be plus a pot of tea and a pink iced finger that had only cost ten pence on account of being past its best. Kitty, in the tearoom up on the High Street, had tried to give her the bun for free, but Hettie hated taking charity, especially when she felt there were other people in far more need. Hettie moved to the back of the shop, swept the curtain aside and went through to the little kitchenette area. Years ago this had been her mother’s sewing room, and the wooden Singer machine with its rickety foot pedal still lived there, with a multitude of multi-coloured bobbins all piled up high on the shelf behind it.
After placing the tray on the draining board next to the age-veined Belfast sink and carefully wrapping the crusts in clingfilm to dunk into her warming homemade soup the following afternoon, Hettie picked up the picture frame on the mantelpiece above the fire and ran a finger over the faded black-and-white autographed photo. She allowed herself an enormous sigh. She wasn’t usually one for self-pity or hand wringing, but another one of the letters had come this morning, with FINAL DEMAND stamped across the top in ugly red type. Business had been so slow these past couple of years, and now, with her dwindling savings and pittance of a pension, she had come to realise that it was going to take a darn miracle this Christmas for Hettie’s House of Haberdashery to remain afloat come the new year.
There had been talk of retirement; of closing down the House of Haberdashery; of putting her feet up and going ‘into a home’. Hettie’s nephew, her brother Harold’s son and last of the Honey family line, was all for it. On one of his rare visits, on the pretext of seeing how she was, he’d told Hettie he was concerned about her living on her own, that she needed the rest and that ‘it’s not like you’ve got
that
many customers these days, is it?’ He said he’d make sure she had her own bedroom or at the very least, a twin sharer. ‘And besides, it might be nice for her to have the company of people her own age.’ He’d put forward a strong case and had already contacted the council to enquire about a suitable place. But Hettie wasn’t losing her marbles and she knew that what he was really after was to bulldoze her beloved home – the oast house surrounded by a meadow of pretty wild flowers, and the place where she grew up. There’s her cosy bedroom suite, set upstairs in the roundel with its magnificent view of the valley, the lovely farmhouse kitchen with the walk-in pantry, the sunroom, the snug – it’s got the lot, and that’s on top of all her memories wrapped within its circular walls. Not to mention her beloved little shop, right next door, crammed full of all her favourite knitting and needlecraft goodies.
Then he’d be able to get his hands on the land for one of his building projects. He’d told her all about the one with ample parking and plastic windows that his company had created in the town where he lived, over fifty miles away. Seventeen months it had taken, he’d said, to fight all the objections from the local residents’ association, and he had puffed on about it for the entire hour of that tedious visit. But Hettie isn’t ready to be written off; to be carted away to an old people’s home like a nag to a glue factory, not when there is plenty of life still left in her sprightly body. Besides, ‘going into a home’ would mean leaving Tindledale behind, and Hettie knows more than anything that this is where her heart belongs. It always has, even when she’d had the chance of a different life, far, far away.
Three weeks until Christmas …I
stare at the radio mounted in the dashboard of my clapped-out old Clio as I negotiate a particularly icy corner off Lewisham High Road. Jennifer Ford! Did the London FM newsreader guy just say Jennifer Ford had
absconded
? I wasn’t really paying attention, but I know that name. F-O-R-D, the woman had even spelled it out for me, as in Harrison Ford, that’s what Jennifer had said. It was about a month ago, and I had shuddered, which is hardly surprising given my monumentally embarrassing showdown at the altar of my own
Star Wars
-themed wedding just six months previously. I’m still cringing. 4 May it was, obviously. Luke, my ex – and for the record, a massive tool, I know that now, it’s just a shame I didn’t know it then – anyway, he thought it would be a brilliant idea to have ‘May the fourth be with you’ in big swirly gold lettering on the wedding invites. He was literally leaping over the proverbial moon when we managed to secure the date with the church. So why then didn’t he turn up?
Jilted at the altar! That’s me. I’m the woman none of us ever wants to be. Stood there in a floaty neck-to-toe white hooded dress, complete with Princess Leia buns, having opted for the pin-on ones after my unruly red curls had refused to get involved, the realisation dawning that he wasn’t actually going to turn up. A
no-show
. And that’s when I knew, really knew, what had been going on, because Sasha, my identical twin sister and far more glamorous than me – even her name is bursting with va-va-voom compared to my Sybil – wasn’t there either. To be honest, I think I had known, deep down, in the weeks and months leading up to the wedding that something wasn’t quite right. But I had chosen to ignore it – or perhaps that’s the whole purpose of hindsight: its job is to protect you, to let you be obliviously happy for just a while longer before the reality swoops in to deal a cruel, mean blow.