Summer at Little Beach Street Bakery by Jenny Colgan Read Free Book Online

wind, which whipped high this close to the sea and this far off the ground. Polly wished she had Huckle’s hand to hold, or that her best friend Kerensa was back from whichever ridiculous holiday she was taking right now, but no such luck. She stayed close to Muriel, who ran the village shop.
    ‘This is awful,’ Muriel was saying. Her baby, Marina, popped her head out of her sling and looked around with a worried expression on her face. ‘I know. It’s okay, baby. She should be having her morning nap in the storeroom,’ she confided. ‘She can only get to sleep to the smell of cumin and aniseed.’
    ‘Is there anything you
don’t
stock?’ said Polly. ‘Apart from bread, obviously.’
    ‘Well, that frees up a lot of space,’ pointed out Muriel.
    The old churchyard was beautiful in a strange way. The graves were very old and overgrown, the ancient stone crosses tilted on their sides, nearly all the writing eroded by the years and the wind and the sea. A few names repeated again and again: Perranmor; Tarnforth; Kirrin. It was mostly women and children. In Mount Polbearne, the men died at sea, and the sea held their bones and their histories and their stories for ever more.
    The freshly dug grave looked grim in the shadow of the ruined church. This was not a place for new burials; it seemed strange and odd, as if all the ancient skeletons were bunching up to make room.
    ‘Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was,’ said the vicar quietly as the men, with the help of the sturdy undertaker from the mainland, tried not to fumble lowering the large coffin into the ground. Gillian had, Polly thought, always been big.
    ‘And the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.’ And she made the sign of the cross over the grave.
    At this, Polly stepped up with the bag she had brought specially, and everyone took a handful of flour from the sack and threw it on to the top of the coffin, as Mrs Manse began that long journey from which there is no return. And everybody there hoped with all their hearts that her husband and her son would be waiting to greet her at the end of it.

Chapter Five
    Polly was staring out of the window expectantly whilst trying to pretend that wasn’t at all what she was doing, even though she knew it didn’t matter as they were so ridiculously high up anyway: no one could see in. She’d changed her clothes, put on a nice flowery shirt. She was slightly out of the habit of getting dressed up, didn’t really know what to wear for meeting a member of Huckle’s family. She’d spoken to his parents on the phone, of course, but this was something different.
    She knew Dubose was younger than Huckle, and that they got on, but he’d never really held down a job or stuck to anything in the same way as his big brother, and now he was working on a farm in between travelling stints. But he sounded like fun. Polly couldn’t believe how important it was to her that he liked her. Both her sister and her mum had fallen in love with Huckle in about ten seconds flat. She hoped it worked both ways.
    ‘And don’t poo.’
    Neil was sulking because Huckle hadn’t taken him to the bus station. Polly had tried to cheer him up by bringing home his very favourite thing in all the world, a box full of polystyrene packing pieces. When he thought she wasn’t watching, or when she left the room, she could hear him jumping into the box and stomping up and down, kicking at the pieces with his little webbed feet. When she came back in, he’d immediately flutter out of the box and stand facing away from her, staring out of the window.
    The sky was pink-tinged when she saw the causeway gradually emerge, and soon after that she heard the roar of the motorbike banging up the cobbled streets. It was the noisiest thing on the island by far, but Polly could never hear it without smiling in anticipation. She nervously touched up the lipstick she didn’t normally bother with, and descended the stairs.
    A tall, slim figure