I hope no one is reading this expecting Coronation Street spoilers. There have been some lovely communications regarding Barefoot on the Cobbles lately. Firstly, two lovely readers, without internet access, took the trouble to write me letters saying how much they had enjoyed it. I also had an email from a reader from New Zealand who not only praised the book but said I had inspired her to write the story of her own family history tragedy. I have also been contacted by two relatives of the minor characters in the novel. One leading to ongoing research into the family, which may turn out to be intriguing.

This has been interspersed with precious time spent with my descendants; there may be more about that later. I have also started another run of my In Sickness and in Death course and the students are wonderfully active, sharing stories of the ailments of their ancestors. One of the best parts about Pharos courses is the interactions between the students. This has all taken my mind off a few recent technical hitches. Yesterday a very forbearing audience sat through a presentation that really did need the accompanying slides, when my laptop (and a backup laptop) failed to communicate with the projector. I am also juggling external hard drives, in an attempt to recover files that have been damaged due to a corrupted memory stick. Fortunately they were backed up and I realised before I overwrote the complete files for another back up. A salutary lesson not to rely on memory sticks/data sticks/flash drives, call them what you will.

In the course of checking files to see if they were damaged, I came across I passage that I wrote for part of Chapter 1 of Barefoot but which was left on the cutting-room floor. I thought you might like to read a little about Polly as a young girl.

1884

Polly Wakely leaned back on the Devon bank that edged the lane leading from Horns Cross to Peppercombe. Her two younger sisters, tired of gathering bluebells, sat beside her. All had severely plaited hair and identical rough, linen smocks. Polly, on the brink of womanhood, had abandoned her bonnet in an act of defiance. She was meant to be shepherding her sisters home from school but the temptation to linger in the spring sunshine, to stretch the time between the agonies of the classroom and the drudgery of chores at home, had got the better of her. Polly did not begrudge having to mind Ada and Ethel, in fact she quite enjoyed it. She hoped that she might have children of her own one day, in an unfathomable future that seemed impossibly far ahead. The role of chaperone to the younger members of the family had, until recently, been the task of her older sister, Jane. Jane, shy and retiring had found it difficult to discipline the two youngest girls but Polly was firmer. Despite their very different personalities, the Wakely sisters had always been self-sufficient, content with each other’s company and united against the taunts of their classmates.

            A small group of children turned the corner and spotted the Wakelys. Here was an easy target.

            ‘Yer ma tellin’ fortunes today then?’

            Polly was not as feisty as her eldest sister, Lydia, now working away in service but she had had years of practice standing up to bullies and defending her own. She knew that the comment was intended to provoke a reaction, perhaps to initiate a fight. She had succumbed to this when she was younger, arrived home with hair pulled, face scratched and pinafore torn. She considered herself too old for such scraps now and she had learned that there was nothing the tormentors hated more than to be ignored. She turned her back and pretended that she had not heard, putting a warning hand on Ada’s arm, to indicate that she should do the same.

            The oldest boy picked up Ethel’s discarded bouquet.

            ‘What’s these ole flowers for then?’ he mocked, tossing the drooping blooms over the hedge. ‘Going to pop them in the pot and make a spell?’

            Polly groaned inwardly, would this stupid tale never cease to dog their lives. Ethel was less resilient than her sisters and was distressed at the loss of her flowers but she knew that she must not give this big boy the satisfaction of seeing her cry.

            One of the girls in the group was regarding them with sympathy but her companions quelled any attempts at compassion.

            ‘Them’s nought better than gypos, don’t you go frettin’ over them. Turn you into a toad as soon as, they would.’

            Polly knew she had to be brave, that her ma would be cross if Ada or Ethel went home in tears and told tales of what was responsible for their distress. As each of her children left toddlerhood behind, Eliza Wakely had urged them to ignore such taunts. She understood their pain, she had suffered the same in her turn. In fact, thought Polly, although there had been no school to endure in those days, it had been worse for ma and her sisters. Their very surname, Found, had marked the family as out of the ordinary. It had all been ages ago, before even ma’s grafer’s time but still the rumours swirled. Going back some, the original Found had been just that, found in the church porch over Morwenstow way and Polly and her sisters were suffering for it still.