Adventures of the Yorkshire Shepherdess by Amanda Owen

Author:Amanda Owen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

6

Where’s Eartha?

‘BARN SALE’ the advertisement said, the rural equivalent of a garage sale. The listing in the local free advertiser read like a dream: cheese press, hay spades and other farming bygones, it said, then a telephone number. I rang straight away.

‘When’s the sale?’ I enquired. ‘It doesn’t say in t’paper.’

‘Why, what’s ta wantin’?’ came the curt reply.

I explained that I didn’t know until I’d seen what was for sale.

There was a long silence.

‘We’eell thoo’d better come now,’ came the reply, eventually.

Swaledale has many little green lanes that veer off into the unknown, tracks hemmed in by drystone walls that inhibit the passage of anything wider than a four-wheel drive. These lanes tend to follow the contours of the land, winding their way to secluded farmsteads, and it was one of these lanes that I was now carefully negotiating in the Land Rover, cash in pocket and excited children in the back.

We had already had a stroke of luck on the journey from Ravenseat, so spirits were high. The road down Swaledale was winding, with hairpin bends, humpback bridges and numerous undulations that could test the skills of any driver, particularly any that were loaded to the gunwales with merchandise. White van men, given an impossible timetable in which to deliver parcels to houses in the area, would undoubtedly test the protective packaging of those items marked as ‘fragile’ or ‘handle with care’. Only recently, I was sent a gift of a very pretty religious ornament of the Good Shepherd complete with a pensive look as he scanned the horizon, presumably looking for his missing lamb. Unfortunately, it wasn’t only a lamb he was missing when he arrived: a limb, too, had become detached, presumably lost in transit.

Today, though, the bumpy road was to be a blessing, as it was our turn to be the finder of good things. Just as we rounded the corner out of Gunnerside, I spied something lying ahead of us in the middle of the road.

‘What’s that?’ shouted Sidney, who was travelling in the middle seat on the middle row, looking over my shoulder.

‘That, my little ginger freckled friend,’ I said, ‘is a loaf of bread.’

I checked that there was nothing behind and then did an emergency stop. Reuben leapt out of the back door and scuttled off to retrieve it.

‘It’ll be all right for thi chickens, Miley,’ I said as Reuben got back into the Land Rover.

Reuben reported that the bread, medium-sliced Warburtons, was in date and the packaging unscathed.

‘OK, it’s not for t’chickens, it’s for us,’ I informed Miles.

‘Do yer think we should hand it in?’ said Violet innocently. ‘To the police.’

‘Use yer loaf,’ I said. ‘Finders keepers, in this case.’

It was like a modern-day version of Hansel and Gretel following the trail of breadcrumbs, only, in our case, it was Warburtons toastie, medium-sliced or – the absolute pinnacle – a seeded granary. Every few hundred yards, there’d be another loaf. This went on for a couple of miles until the trail petered out.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.