The Legacy: Trouble Comes Disguised As Family (Unspoken Book 2) by T. Belshaw (the best books to read .txt) 📗

owner of the picture house, a Mr Wallington, even offered to pay me to stand outside the cinema greeting prospective movie goers whenever one of her films was on show.

Future wise, I knew that financially, the farm would be better off. The government tended to look after us during times of conflict. They would almost certainly subsidise the crops and give us more money per ton for producing it. That wouldn’t necessarily transmit to farm worker’s wages and if we lost any of our men to the fighting, we might have to recruit from the elderly residents of the town, then again, the local factories would almost certainly switch to war production and that would mean the skills of the town’s women and elderly men, would be much sought after.

I could never understand the government’s attitude to farm workers. On the one hand they wanted them working at home producing for the country, but on the other hand, they were reluctant to pay them a little extra in order to keep them in our fields instead of fighting in foreign ones.

Amy, as a mill worker, wouldn’t be allowed to leave to do any other work. Her skills would be needed in the manufacture of uniforms, parachutes or anything else the forces might require.

‘I do hope this thing doesn’t go on as long as the last one,’ she said, sipping at a fresh mug of tea. ‘I promised myself I’d be married before I was twenty-five and there will be a severe shortage of eligible bachelors once this bloody war gets going.’ Amy was just coming up to twenty-two.

‘You’ll be all right if the Americans do come in,’ I replied. ‘Imagine Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart turning up at an army camp nearby?’

Amy rested her chin in her upturned hands and sighed.

‘Imagine,’ she said.

Chapter 15

On Friday afternoon, Jess sat on her new bed with her laptop and queried a couple of magazine editors with ideas for articles before typing up the notes she had made whilst reading Alice’s 1939 memoir. Yesterday evening she had begun to formulate the outline of her novel and had made some brief character notes.

Checking her watch, she left the laptop open on the bed, stripped, and walked through to the upstairs bathroom to get a shower. Twenty minutes later, she returned wearing a bath sheet and a smaller towel around her head. The bath sheet slipped as she stretched to remove the towel turban. She let it fall and sat in front of Alice’s old dressing table mirror to brush her shoulder length chestnut hair.

As she got up from the pink, padded stool, she noticed a blue light on her laptop. The screensaver had loaded, so she pressed a key to allow her to see her desktop. The blue light normally only came on for a Zoom or FaceTime meeting, or when she was recording a short video for one of the occasional podcasts that she was asked to appear in.

Puzzled, she checked the running programs, but nothing that required the camera was in use. Jessica closed the lid of the computer and opened it again. The light remained on so she restarted the laptop to find that the blue light had disappeared. Thinking she had rectified the error she got to her feet, and standing naked in the bedroom, began a stretching routine she had learned at the gym.

After ten minutes of exercise, Jess stopped the stretching, and flexing her shoulders in a circular motion, turned back towards the bed, only to find the blue light had come on again.

‘Dammit,’ she said to herself.

She could do without the laptop playing up. It wasn’t a new model by any stretch of the imagination but she had hoped it would see her though for another year or so. If it was beginning to develop faults it might be time to replace it. She couldn’t risk her precious new novel being irretrievably lost. Wrapping the big towel around her again, she picked up the laptop, walked down the stairs to the front room and dug out her portable, back-up hard disk from the drawer under the coffee table. She made copies of all the files she had added since her last backup, then sent the new notes she had made the previous evening to her wireless printer.

Satisfied that her data was now secure, Jess left the laptop on Alice’s old writing desk and went back upstairs to get ready for her evening out.

She chose a scooped neck, Shamrock green dress that hung just below the knee. Anything shorter than that could get her a ticking off from Martha. She still vividly remembered her twenty-first birthday party at the Old Bull, when she had turned up wearing a mini skirt and a sheer blouse and had been subjected to the most embarrassing lecture about modern day standards.

‘I can see what you had for breakfast, Jessica. Now, go back home and change before the rest of the guests arrive. We don’t want them thinking we’ve booked a stripper, do we?’

With the memory of her grandmother’s stinging rebuke still echoing around her head, she grabbed her shoulder bag, coat and car keys and stepped out of the house.

It was only a short drive to her mother’s terraced house on Burnett Road. Although the street lamps glowed dimly in the misty, autumn air, there were no lights showing through Nicola’s front window. After attempting, but failing to lift the rusted, lion’s-head door knocker, she rapped on one of the dirty, fan shaped, glass panes at the top of the door. After a full two minutes, her mother opened it with a gap just wide enough to peer through.

‘Ah, it’s you. That’s good, I thought it might be the old witch from the shop wanting me to do extra hours. Mandy hasn’t turned up for the evening shift, she texted me to say that she’s ill. She isn’t, she’s out with that new bloke of hers.’ Nicola opened the door and