POD: The First Two Chapters

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Numerous story lines weave their way through this intriguing and utterly gripping novel – love, betrayal, political corruption, misogyny, friendship, a woman’s journey of discovery. In the background, a disaster slowly unfolds and Jo Aldous is aware of it – the animals are fighting back. As wife of the prime minister designate, she knows too much and has to be silenced. But she does not go quietly…

Stunning! Written with such persuasive and compelling force, I couldn’t put it down.’

Juliet Gellatley

‘Interweaving human story lines against a backdrop of political corruption – in a world on the brink.’

Michael Mansfield QC

‘POD is an extraordinary book – but then Tony Wardle is an extraordinarily talented writer. I reread some chapters just for the pleasure of it!’

Wendy Turner Webster

‘It’s a gripping tale that draws you into a world that combines the familiar and the fantastic.’

Dr Justine Butler

‘Loved it!!! Brilliant plot, fantastic storylines, great dialogue and characters I believed in!’

Jane Easton

UK £8.95 ISBN 978-0-9571874-2-9

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780957 187429

Open your eyes – before it’s too late

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POD – first published in Great Britain 2014 by Tony Wardle. © Copyright Tony Wardle 2014 The author has asserted his moral rights A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-9571874-2-9 This book is sold subject to the condition That it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, Be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without both the publisher’s and author’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Cover design and layout: The Ethical Graphic Design Company Ltd. Printed and bound in the UK by Stephens & George, Goat Mill Road, Dowlais, Merthyr Tydfil CF48 3TD. Registered in England, Company number 411176.

All characters in this publication – other than the obvious historical characters – are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely conincidental.

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To my gorgeous children, Niki, Jazz and Finn.

(I told you I was writing a novel)

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Author’s Note The idea for POD first came to me decades ago when I lived in Brighton within sight of the sea. Having been brought up by the sea in Cleethorpes and sailed across its surface in the merchant navy, it has always been a source of wonder. What I lacked back then was the ability to quantify the devastating scale of humankind’s influence on the globe, which is central to this book. It seems that all the wondrous influences that have coalesced to produce myriad life forms are irrelevant and can be trashed at will in a pointless race to produce ever more things ever more quickly.

And then I met Juliet Gellatley, we loved, we married, we had children and, sadly, we then divorced but continue working together. I stood cheering when she founded the vegan campaigning charity, Viva!, and inevitably became drawn into its work. I saw first-hand the sickening reality of factory farming, the brutality and fear of slaughter and I researched the reasons behind our collapsing environment. I then had a surfeit of knowledge with which to complete POD. Although a fictional novel, every assertion made in this book, every claim presented as fact, every reference to research, every comment on the state of our nations is scientifically accurate.

Yes, the book is fictional but its essential driving force is factual.

It is a sobering thought that the human race has become something of an evolutionary aberration – and nature does not tolerate aberrations indefinitely.

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Chapter One Charlie Mottram hated chickens. It wasn’t a passing dislike – he actually loathed them, which was a little unfortunate considering he owned something like a hundred and eighty thousand and they surrounded him every day of his life.

Of course, he wasn’t aware of it but the feeling was probably reciprocated.

Charlie stuck his hands deep into the pockets of his green boiler suit and shuffled across the yard in his wellington boots.

‘Yard’ wasn’t really an adequate description for over the years it had expanded remorselessly and concrete had flowed over the old meadow in stages until it had obliterated every blade of grass, weed, sapling and flower. As each of the six huge, systembuilt, windowless broiler sheds had sprouted, every one a monument to his growing affluence, so the concrete had increased accordingly and now linked all the sheds together in one huge apron of ridged aggregate covering several acres.

After his wife left him, Charlie even dispensed with the flower garden that had once surrounded his house on all sides, providing the only visual relief in a remorselessly stark landscape. When that had disappeared, the house stood like a piece of masonry jetsam cast up on some paved foreshore. It was neater that way, required less work, he told himself. The truth was, he hated flowers almost as much as he hated chickens. Or rather he hated the memories their prettiness invoked, the sudden, stabbing reminder of loss their perfume wrenched from him when he least expected it. He hated that hollow feeling in his stomach that could strike without notice, triggered simply by a place name, a piece of music, the aroma 7

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of a particular flower or almost anything for that matter and which had the power to suck the air from his lungs and leave him momentarily breathless. The feeling of helpless despair, of hopelessness and of mind-numbing emptiness that followed lasted far longer than it should.

There were trees and fields off in the distance, beyond the twelve foot-tall chain link fencing with its razor wire topping but Charlie had rented these out long ago. He saw no irony in the name of his concrete and pre-fabricated surroundings – Willow Bank Farm.

He was a chicken grower – not a breeder but a grower. And he never referred to his chickens as a flock; not as animals or even birds, they were a crop. And like a crop they were sown and harvested, not according to the seasons but to a strict timetable laid down by Golden Promise International. The US multinational corporation processed and sold prime whole table chickens, chicken portions and a huge range of processed chicken products from pies and pasties to gourmet ready-made meals. More importantly, they bought every one of the chickens Charlie cared to produce.

Day old chicks were put into the sheds on the precise date decreed by Golden Promise. Exactly forty-two days later – not forty-one and not forty-three – the crop was harvested. Local lads from the Barley Mow pub earned a few extra quid as catchers, grabbing the terrified birds by their legs or wings and stuffing them into crates. The crates were loaded onto lorries and transported some forty miles to the nearest of eight Golden Promise processing plants.

Once the birds were hung on the overhead conveyor by their feet, they were virtually untouched again by human hand until they were slipped down a metal cone into their plastic bags ready for sale. Throat cutting, scalding, de-feathering, gutting, beheading and feet severing were all carried out by machines that someone, somewhere had got out of bed one morning specifically to design.

They had, at some time, sat down and faced the intellectual challenge of how to sever a chicken’s head from its body safely while the corpse trundled remorselessly along its overhead track – never stopping, never slowing and never deviating.

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The solution was an Archimedes screw which gradually stretched the head and neck until – POP – the head was simply torn off.

As a simple farmer – which was how he always described himself – Charlie was impressed by the innovative mind of the designer. He wondered what he would have come up with had he been given the brief but felt sure it would not have been an Archimedes screw, of that he was certain. Ingenious!

The production line ran almost non-stop, which was why the timing for growing birds and delivering them was so crucial.

Lorries needed to arrive at pre-determined times with birds which all weighed exactly the same 2.4 kilograms. The only way the system could function, churning out chicken flesh at less than the price of tomatoes, was through uniformity and economies of scale. Golden Promise had to dictate the exact date and time that every lorry load of chickens arrived in the unloading bay – which meant they had to control the timing of the growing schedule, also. Birds were merely commodities in a meticulously planned flow chart.

It was an irony that only after their lives had been taken was anything remotely nice said about the chickens and then it was emblazoned all over their plastic wrappers – ‘Farm Fresh’, ‘Prime Quality’, ‘Premium Grade’.

Charlie negotiated his way around a huge pile of fresh litter comprised of chopped straw and wood shavings, dumped on the concrete outside number four shed, adjusting his flat cap to shield his face from the bright sunlight as he did so. The birds inside the shed had only two days to go before slaughter, when the flooring would be cleared out, the shed sterilised and new litter laid down prior to receiving another batch of thirty thousand tweeting little balls of fluff. They were fine at a day or two old but their crime was, they grew into chickens, reckoned Charlie.

It was these next two days that would determine his profitability. He opened the door into the shed and waited unil his eyes grew accustomed to the dim interior light, especially designed to reduce aggression amongst the birds. He no longer noticed the extraordinary babble of thirty-thousand chickens’ 9

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voices nor the stench of ammonia from their excreta, nor did he register the warm and fetid atmosphere that seemed to fill his mouth and lungs like soup. Charlie’s task was to scan the shed for dead and dying birds and that was all that preoccupied him. Pinned to a board on the wall beside the entrance was a list which Charlie scanned before turning and walking in amongst the chickens. It was his death list.

The floor was half the size of a football pitch and was covered entirely by a sea of white-feathered birds. Charlie Mottram ploughed through them and the animals separated before him like a feathered bow wave, clambering one on top of the other in their panic to escape. After almost every pace Charlie stopped, bent down and picked up a dead bird, dangling it from his hands by its scaly feet. Before long, both hands were full of corpses and he dumped them in a pile. Things did not look good and he felt the usual anger bubbling up inside, a reaction to the precarious nature of his life.

Golden Promise had made him wealthy but at a price. It was like the relationship between a junky and his supplier. Charlie had been lured in, seduced with money and a sense of importance. The quid pro quo was that he had been stripped of initiative, deprived of the need to make decisions – they had deskilled him.

The old days may have included endless hours of boredom in a tractor cab, traversing fields back and forth but he had had to make decisions which were based on weather, temperature, wind and rain and gut feeling. They were all decanted from a reservoir of experience which had begun to slowly fill when he was probably no more than four or five years old.

He thought back on the old days with longing. The isolation of a tractor cab, wind shaking and rattling the plastic, a force six westerly, its rain made tangy with the salt whipped from the crests of tumbling rollers of the Irish Sea and dashed against the water-tight housing of his grumbling machine. Inside – a flask of tea, sandwiches and Radio Two. And, of course, a wife to come home to, a wife to share inconsequential conversation with, a wife to relate experiences to no matter how unimportant they might be. It was as though recounting the 10

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days happenings was what gave them form and made them tangible and feeling the warmth of someone else next to you beneath the privacy of a thick duvet was what gave life its purpose and made the repetition of tomorrow and the day after seem worthwhile .

Without that process of sharing Charlie felt as though nothing had any importance and he was denied a real life.

Of course, it probably had never quite been like this but distance and defective memory had smoothed away the rougher edges.

And now? He was instructed on what birds to rear, exactly the right temperature at which to keep the shed, what level the lighting had to be for each stage of the birds’ growth – and it had to be kept on for exactly twenty-three and a half hours in every twenty four.

Again, the ingenuity of big business left him almost awe struck. Someone had worked out that keeping the lights on almost constantly encouraged non-stop eating and rapid growth, given a little supercharge with the daily administration of growth promoting antibiotics in their feed. Actually, growthpromoting antibiotics had been banned by Europe but with the compliance of his vet he had simply substituted them for ‘therapeutic’ antibiotics and their ability to produce growth was identical.

Why were the lights switched off for just half-an-hour?

Charlie had shaken his head in disbelief when he had been told – if the lights glowed constantly and a power cut plunged the sheds into darkness, the chickens would panic because to them it was an entirely alien experience. The panic would result in frenzied crowding near the doors and suffocation, which could wipe out thousands of birds. Just one half hour of darkness a day, however, allowed them to become accustomed to it should the unexpected ever happen.

Charlie was also told what to feed them, what therapeutic and prophylactic antibiotics to use and in what quantities and what supplements to administer. Golden Promise had seduced him with cash and in return they required much the same from him as they did from the birds – conformity, uniformity, 11

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obedience and subservience. It wasn’t the birds he hated so much, he realised, as what they had done to his self-esteem, his pride.

The only element of chance remaining in the operation was how many birds might die before they could be sent to slaughter.

That was the only imponderable in an equation dictated by world-wide supply and demand and it was in the last few days of their forty-two day life span that the answer came.

Despite still being chicks – albeit muscle-bound travesties of a real chick – none of the birds would be physically capable of living much beyond their allotted time thanks to the skills of the selective breeders, geneticists, feed manufacturers and climate controllers whose skills had all been used to bring the birds to their most profitable peak at precisely forty two days and get them to slaughter before they died. What happened after forty two days was of no concern to anyone.

Rapid growth produced cheap chicken meat but it also resulted in dropsy – a potentially fatal disease triggered because their tiny hearts could not pump sufficient blood around their ballooning bodies and it pooled in the lower parts of their torso. It also produced jelly-like bones, rendering some birds incapable of walking to the feeding and watering points so they sat where they collapsed and quietly died from thirst and starvation. These were the ‘starve outs’.

Charlie could sustain a death rate of around one thousand five hundred birds – about five per cent of his production; a percentage that was anticipated and expected and therefore built into the margins. His chart told him that the death rate had already passed the two thousand mark and was heading up towards seven per cent. If and when it hit ten per cent, with three thousand birds dead, he would barely cover his costs.

Twelve per cent and he would be out of pocket. Things weren’t looking good.

Charlie noticed that one of the feed conveyors, which ran the length of the shed some six inches from the ground, was juddering and jolting from a displaced roller or worn bearing.

He knelt down to examine it and immediately felt the wetness of the faeces-sodden litter dampening his knees. The problem 12

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was underneath the conveyor and much as he hated doing it, he had no option but to lie down on his back and crane his neck to see beneath the belt. A roller had become dislodged and he would probably need tools to replace it.

It was then, as he was about to stand up and go in search of his toolbox, that he noticed a chicken standing alongside his head, intently watching his movements, like a plumber’s mate awaiting instructions. Normally the birds came nowhere near him when he was in the shed but this one stood close to his face, cocking its head first to one side and then the other as though helping him to evaluate the situation.

“Fuck off,” Charlie said without anger as he made one last attempt to free the roller, grabbing it firmly and twisting it away from its spindle.

The bird took a step closer and remained looking at Charlie only inches from his face, its head moving towards him in short, jerky movements. When it pecked it did so with such extraordinary speed and force – so fast, so powerfully that Charlie had no hope of warding it off. Its beak struck him in his left eye and he involuntarily jerked his head to one side, banging it sharply on the unyielding metal of the conveyor and pain shot through him like an electric current.

Strangely, it was his head which hurt, not his eye but when he felt liquid running down his cheek he instinctively knew it wasn’t blood but aqueous humour, the fluid which filled the eyeball and that he would be now permanently blind in that eye. He touched it with his hand and squinted through his one seeing eye to observe the liquid and, as he thought, no trace of blood.

It was as he staggered to his feet that the pain hit – like a red hot poker had been forced into his eye socket and he cried out as he staggered across the sodden floor of the broiler shed.

Unusually, the chickens rushed towards him and he felt the soft resistance of packed, feathered bodies around his legs, pliable but nevertheless resistant like balls of cotton wool entwining his feet, obstructing his legs. Through his one eye, Charlie glimpsed the daylight which outlined the access door and lurched towards it, his upper body inclined forwards, his 13

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arms stretched out before him like someone impersonating a Halloween ghost. He tried to run and as he did so he shouted meaningless, disconnected words at no one and nothing in particular as anger and fear swept over him.

Charlie felt himself on the point of losing balance and so thrust his feet and legs forwards desperately, trying to make them work to catch up with his falling body, kicking out at the chickens as he did so, desperately trying to clear a path through the living bodies.

It was a fruitless effort and almost in slow motion, he lost his equilibrium and crashed to the floor full length. As his head hit the sodden litter, the stench of ammonia from forty days of accumulated chicken shit stung and blinded his other eye, filled his nostrils and made him gag.

It was that which prevented him from seeing the chicken which struck his right eye. Its aim was unerringly accurate, picking a space between the fingers which covered his face.

Now completely blind, he could feel the weight of the birds as they clambered over him and sensed the insulating warmth of their feathers which began to clog his mouth and nostrils, suffocating him. His eyes burned with pain and he felt none of the other pecks which rained all over his body. Death was extremely slow in arriving but it was inexorable.

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Chapter Two Josephine Aldous hated her husband. When the realisation came it allowed no room for doubt or change of heart. It was as sudden and conclusive as if her prize crockery dresser had collapsed amidst the designer splendour of her kitchen – a few seconds of terrible fear and apprehension as it wobbled, a metaphorical crash and clatter and then the unavoidable survey of the damage. She had looked at the broken pieces of her life which were strewn around her – the shattered certainties, the death of expectations, the metamorphosis of love into something much more destructive – and had no idea what would replace them.

Jo wandered slowly across her garden, smiling involuntarily at the trill of bird song, holding her face up to the warmth of the early evening sun. Had there ever been real love? She wasn’t sure. The unequal nature of their relationship in the early years had made it impossible to judge. He had led and she had followed, trailing behind like a puppy. It was a union of unequals and the certainty of his emotional supremacy had made him arrogant. He had taken her for granted.

But, god, he had been handsome. Tall, big, with a hug that could engulf you, that promised safety from everything and anything threatening. Hair dark, almost black and shiny, huge brown eyes – and teeth, a bit uneven but oh so white. He was the catch of all catches in her teenage years – the leader of the pack.

He was the reckless one – but always reckless with control, with the brakes lightly applied. He was always the outrageous one – but an outrageousness that never really outraged anyone.

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He was so devil-may-care – but in reality cared just enough to avoid opprobrium. He was, Josephine realised, already a consummate politician before he had even left school.

Now they role played – she the dependable (although becoming increasingly less so) wife and mother, he the generous provider. Perhaps she should be grateful. Her lifestyle was privileged and comfortable – a beautiful house, a wonderful garden, all the money, travel and self-indulgence anyone could ever use and, most seductive of all (to some), a position of importance within a privileged and cloistered community. She was someone who, albeit second hand, wielded power. She was a politician’s wife – a politician headed for the top. She found Stephen’s political ambitions difficult to embrace and when she thought of him as a future prime minister the only emotion she felt was contempt.

She knew she had started down the final straight of their marriage when she began to view herself as a whore. After that, she ended their sex life and moved into a separate bedroom.

Stephen had tried everything but tolerance, tenderness and love to re-ignite the passion – flattery, booze, lingerie, ridiculously expensive dinners – and often all at the same time but it usually ended in too much to drink and a demand for sex. Once she had given in and the smell of his body, the feel of his increasing weight and the same old, hoarsely-whispered fantasies made her want to puke and push him from her.

Jo pressed some dislodged turf back with her foot, happy to have the symmetry of her lawn disturbed by badgers digging for worms and cockchafer grubs. She saw them most evenings as the last vestiges of light disappeared and the great bank of Scots pines, birch and oak, which flanked one side of the garden, turned into a black and seemingly impenetrable mass.

Ironically, it was the fox that had been the final straw. There had been foxes in the remoter part of the garden since they had first lived there but only when the incredibly pretentious and camp choreographer from the next house complained about them did Stephen pay any attention. They had eaten his peacocks, the man claimed, and Stephen immediately went in 16

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search of a shot gun. Poor bloody peacocks in Surrey!

Jo had watched the vixen all Spring, first as she stretched out on the edge of the lawn, suckling her cubs in the early sunshine and later as they played like kittens, tumbling over each other in mock fight – possibly pretending to catch peacocks! And Stephen wanted to shoot them to appease his neighbour. It probably had more to do with his hopes of getting a donation from the man towards his leadership election expenses.

Jo had not shouted nor threatened, in fact she had not even raised her voice: “If you shoot just one of the foxes – if you even try to shoot them – I’ll leave you. Do you understand?”

Stephen tried to laugh it off but Jo said nothing more and when he had chuckled himself to a standstill he said: “You don’t mean it! Do you?”

Jo looked deeply into his eyes and replied quietly: “Oh yes!”

She saw the incomprehension turn to hurt then disbelief before changing to fear. For the first time in their life together she was conscious of a reversal of the power structure – she was in charge.

“Are you telling me that a bloody smelly fox, a scavenging piece of vermin is more important to you than I am?”

In the split second before she answered Jo was conscious of evidence tumbling through her mind, pros and cons cartwheeling in from deep recesses, memories of times forgotten, memories of times she had chosen to forget: “Yes, Stephen, that’s what I’m saying!” And they both knew she meant it.

“Bloody charming!”

He did what he always did when confronted with things emotionally demanding – walked out and never referred to it again. He left the foxes unmolested but it was the end of pretence for Jo. So what was she going to do about it?

Seemingly nothing because that was a year ago and she was still here.

Now, every time she stepped out into the wild and beautiful acres she looked at every flower, every tree and every shrub as though it was the last time she would see them, trying to store 17

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away the memories for a time when they would be gone.

As the year progressed, she first celebrated the arrival of snow drops as they hung their heads in the January chill. They were followed by clumps of yellow primroses, demanding to be looked at – pretty, old fashioned and never changing. Then came the bluebells, first smearing the shade beneath the trees with just a hint of colour before swirling the most beautiful blue wash into every corner of the copse.

Bright white blackthorn blossom was the first to bring the shrubs back to life and by autumn it would have turned into little black fruits with which she made sloe gin. It was followed by the heady scent of hawthorn blossom, smothering the bushes in cream before tingeing to pink as it aged. And in the height of summer, foxgloves and gloriously flamboyant hollyhocks speared the air, displaying their beauty unselfconsciously. She had grown the hollyhocks from seed gathered from a little restaurant in a Turkish village and she could never look at them without remembering it and happier times.

Perhaps things would get better! No, nothing would change by chance – she would have to make them better but she felt no inclination to do so. This was, she knew, the hiatus, the pause, the calm between one life and another. She knew she was about to enter the unknown but did not know when she would make the jump. It would presumably be when she could find the courage to leave that which she loved best – the beauty around her.

Jo placed the misted bottle of wine on the white, wrought iron table and poured herself a glass. She bent her head and spoke to it as she did so: “Okay, I know I said I wouldn’t today but – well, it’s such a nice day and it is after six.”

“It’s the first sign of madness, mum!” Danny’s voice interrupted as he walked towards her from the French windows dressed in his cub’s uniform. “Have you seen my neckerchief?”

“Where’s it normally kept?” Jo asked.

“In the chest of drawers but it’s not there.”

“Did you look in all the drawers?”

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“Well… it wasn’t in the usual one.”

“Look in the others.”

He turned with a show of exasperation and headed back to the house: “I don’t suppose Dad’s around, is he?” he called over his shoulder.

“No, he’s gone to Horsham or Hove or Halifax or somewhere bloody boring to address the faithful. If you’re going down on your bike you’re to come straight home. Eight thirty at the latest. Okay?” Danny raised an arm in response.

She sat back on her chair and sipped her wine. From the elevated position of the garden, between gaps in the trees, she looked out over Weybridge. Apart from an occasional glimpse of a gable end in the far distance or the top of a chimney stack, all she could see was trees. But they were like markers and from them she could map the town in her mind – almost every road, every friend’s house and a jumble of memories. She was thirty six years old and had never lived more than two miles from where she now sat.

She reckoned she was still pretty and was quite happy with her figure – neat, compact, curvy and men still at times looked at her lasciviously. She was lazy about her hair and left far too long between renewing her streaks and having the roots touched up and could rarely be bothered to do anything but hold it back with a large clip but again, it usually looked good.

Her major fault was her foul mouth. She loved the expressiveness of swearing, loved the shock it could produce but mostly enjoyed the fact that it annoyed Stephen.

There was a formula for local moneyed girls, at least those devoid of any particular talent, and she had followed it exactly: St Bride’s Catholic girl’s convent – not just because her family was Catholic but because it was prestigious; courtship and eventually marriage to a boy from St Theobald’s Catholic College – also local, also prestigious. A teenage spent circuiting a select few pubs – the Flint Gate, the Greyhound until it was closed, the Hand and Spear and the Queens Head, loyalties altering as fashion or landlord changed.

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was always the same circle of friends, half of whom were related through blood and the other half through sexual liaisons or marriage and increasingly, as time went by, divorce.

Then came settling down, secure in the substance and wealth of an achiever and the ultimate prize – a house on St George’s Hill. From where she was sitting she could point exactly to where John Lennon had once lived – and Dick Emery. Over there was Eric Syke’s house, over to the right was Cliff, Sir Cliff, Richard’s old place and the house just there had once been Tom Jones’s.

This was probably the most exclusive estate in the country, walled and gated from the rest of the world, a rich and rambling oasis of huge mature trees, lakes, small woods, private roads and sweeping gravel driveways. What an irony that these privileged, spacious acres had been the birth place of socialism.

Edmund Winstanley had brought his band of Diggers here after the Napoleonic wars to build the very first commune, before being hounded out by the establishment. Now the establishment had made it its own, none more so than her husband who intended to be leader of the Conservative party and introduce policies that would erase the last vestiges of socialism from the statute book. Stephen’s philosophy was simple, although not for public consumption – if you’re poor you deserve to be.

Jo knew she had been betrayed, not by Stephen but by her parents, her school, her friends. They had all channelled her down the route that privileged little middle-class girls took – helped to lever her like a pea into a very predictable pod. And that’s how she now saw herself – a pea in a pod devoid of individuality. If she were to so much as hint that she might leave Stephen, her family would think she was mad. They thought she had done extremely well for herself and she blamed them all for their blinkered, suburban complacency – but most of all she blamed herself. Whatever the pod was, she was there by choice.

It had taken Jo a few years to realise it but she knew she had undersold herself. She lived with a man who aimed to be the leader of the country and the thought terrified her. He hoped to chart a nation’s destiny, something so enormous in its 20

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implications that she could never even contemplate aspiring to it yet knew she was more intelligent, more capable and had greater vision than Stephen – and it was that which frightened her. Not that she was particularly gifted but that he was not.

“Bye mum!” Danny waved as he rode down the drive on his bike and she watched him disappear behind a rhododendron bush on his way to the scout hut.

“Bye, Dan! No later than eight-thirty!”

Jo was overwhelmed with feelings of love and a desire to protect Danny. She rested her head in her hands and could feel her eyes filling with tears, partly because of her love for Danny, partly for what she knew lay in store but mostly for her lamentable cowardice.

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