While I Was Waiting. Georgia Hill

       Prologue

       June 1963, Clematis Cottage, Stoke St Mary, Herefordshire

       I am really not sure why I am writing this. A foolish whim by a foolish old lady and it will probably sit in a box unread and decay much like its writer when Death makes his careless decision. But perhaps someone will find it. Someone will care enough to read it and somehow I know this is what will happen.

      Hetty snorted and slammed down her fountain pen. Pompous stuff! She could hear Richard saying the very same thing. He had always hated any whiff of pretension. She smiled. Richard and Edward. The aunts. Papa. Dear Peter. She hadn’t allowed herself to think of them all for such a long time – had been too busy tagging on to other people’s lives. She sat back to ease her stiff shoulders. Gazing at the view from the window in the sitting room, where she had placed her desk, she realised she had always been squeezed into other people’s lives.

      ‘A veritable cuckoo,’ she said out loud to the emptiness. ‘I’ve never, until now, had the luxury of being myself, of having my own life, as I want it.’ She glanced around the sitting room of her little cottage. ‘And I’ve never had a home of my own until I moved here.’

      It was all the fault of that pesky young curate at the village church. He was the one who had suggested that she write up her life. He seemed to think she’d had an eventful one – she’d certainly lived through a time of great change, of great tragedy.

      She picked up the pen again.

       I was a young girl when I went to the big house…