THERE, that was the window display finished. Tania climbed out of the window and, opening the door, went round to the front of the shop to stand on the pavement and study her handiwork.

With the children due back at school from their summer holidays within a fortnight, it had all been rather a rush to get the shop open in time to take advantage of the potential back-to-school trade in children’s shoes, but somehow or other she had managed it, developing along the way a firmness that surprised even her. But, as she had quickly discovered once she had taken the decision to start her business, there were plenty of people around who were only too eager to take advantage of her naïveté and inexperience if they could, often cloaking their callousness in the guise of appearing helpful and concerned.

She had lost track of the number of people who had warned her that her whole venture was a waste of time … that opening a shoe shop catering exclusively for children was madness, especially when she had chosen as her venue a small Cheshire market town. Everyone knew that these days people wanted to shop quickly and efficiently and that the places they chose to do so in were the huge soulless shopping malls.

Tania had listened to them, but had stubbornly stuck to her guns. She was a mother herself and she knew quite well that when it came to buying her daughter Lucy’s shoes, she preferred to do so in comfort, with the help of an assistant who knew what he or she was talking about … someone who had been properly trained to measure a child’s foot and advise on the suitability of the footwear needed.

And as for her decision to start up her business in this quiet town; well, that had been spawned by several factors, chief among which had been the fact that the property she had inherited from her unknown great-aunt, which had enabled her to make the decision in the first place had been a run-down old-fashioned draper’s shop here in Appleford.

One of the most important lessons Tania had learned in life was to make the most of the opportunities fate handed to her. It would perhaps have been easier to give in to the kindly pressure of her great-aunt’s bankers and to sell the shop as it stood, but she had seen in it a means of escape for Lucy and herself from the life they had been living in their small high-rise city flat with its lack of amenities, its claustrophobia, its soulless concrete lifelessness.

She had taken one look at Appleford, seen its small country town prettiness, its surrounding green fields, its open skies, its children who enjoyed the kind of environment she had always dreamed of for Lucy, and her mind had been made up.

Since the only business she had any experience of had been gained through her part-time job in a shoe shop in the city, it had seemed a natural course of events to make the decision to reopen her great-aunt Sybil’s shop, but as a children’s shoe shop.

She had not rushed into the decision lightly, no matter what others might think.

In the six months since she had received the astounding news that a great-aunt she had never known she had possessed had died, and that she was her sole heir, she had put herself heart and soul into making her projected new business a success.

She had been on government training courses to equip her to run the administrative side of her new business. She had learned how to deal with the various tradesmen whose services she had needed to transform the decaying, run-down shop into the pretty bow-fronted eye-catching emporium it was today. She had tackled her great-aunt’s bank manager and persuaded him to advance her the money for her new venture on the strength of the building, with the shop and its upstairs flat as security. She had even taken a course in the correct fitting and selling of children’s shoes, and through it all she had been praying desperately that her venture would succeed. So much depended on it.

Already Lucy was a different child from the pinched wan-faced ten-year-old whom she had feared was growing up far too fast in their potentially morally destructive inner city environment.

Perhaps it was because she herself had grown up in the country that she had felt this almost atavistic desire to return to the slower pace of country life, to a more natural and less stress-inducing atmosphere.

It was too late now to regret that she had never known her great-aunt. No doubt she had had her reasons for not making herself known to her, for allowing her to grow up believing herself to be completely alone in the world. A car accident had left her orphaned when she was twelve years old—a vulnerable age for any child—and the abrupt change in her lifestyle, from the only child of loving, caring parents to merely one of many children growing up under the harassed and over-burdened eyes of a series of foster parents, had caused her to withdraw inside herself, to become very much a loner.

Those years were now years she preferred not to remember, not to dwell on. Those years had culminated in Lucy’s birth, Lucy who was so precious and dear to her, despite the fact that at first she had not wanted her.

She had discovered at eighteen that she was pregnant by a boy she barely knew; a boy who had forced himself on her, practically raping her, she had since realised with the hindsight of maturity and wisdom.

At the time she had been too afraid, had felt too guilty, had believed that she herself was too much to blame to tell anyone what had happened.

They had met at a party; a party to which she had gone unwillingly with a girl with whom she had worked. She had left the foster home by then and had been living in a cramped council flat along with three other girls in similar positions to herself.

No doubt because of the various traumas of their lives, none of them, including herself, had been the type to reach out to others, to make friends easily, to trust easily, and so she had had no one with whom to discuss the tragedy which had overwhelmed her when she had realised she was pregnant.

The boy whom she had only known as ‘Tommy’ was someone she never wanted to see again. The shock of his possession of her had left scars which had taken a long time to heal and by the time she had plucked up the courage to confide in her doctor it was far too late for her to have her pregnancy terminated, even if she had wanted to do so.

Then she had been desolate, anguished, frantic with fear and resentment. Emotions she had continued to experience right up until the moment the midwife had placed Lucy in her arms.

Then she had known that no matter how difficult it might be, no matter what she was forced to endure in order to do so, she must keep her daughter.

There had been privations, hardships. She had hated the necessity of accepting

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Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE

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Penny Jordan