Read Online The Wedding Cake Tree by Melanie Hudson - Free Book Online

the first time anyone had noticed me as a young adult rather than a child. Annie had invited Ted. I noticed him look twice in my direction when he arrived at the party, so I flirted with him a little that evening – more than a little in fact – but he never really took his eyes off Annie. Every time he tried to move away from me I found another reason for him to stay. I knew how it looked, the little sod that I was. When the party was over Annie grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the front room. She was hysterical and started to sob. ‘Why must you always ruin everything for me?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you already have everything you could ever want? Why can’t you just leave Ted alone?’ I tried to explain that I hadn’t thought I was doing anything wrong, that I thought Annie saw Ted as a brother – she knew I was lying. She knew I had gone out of my way to flirt with him. The truth was I wasn’t remotely interested in Ted. All I wanted was Annie’s attention. It was a stupid, childish thing to do, but I suppose that was the point, I was only a child.
     
    Anyway, the damn stupid folly was a major miscalculation on my part. In my quest for Annie’s attention I failed to consider her unforgiving nature – not just towards me, but Ted too. She felt betrayed, even though it wasn’t his fault. As a result, despite years of inseparable friendship, she cast him off. He tried to make her see sense, but she wouldn’t listen. Mum told me later that Annie had expected Ted to propose at my party. I was devastated. Why had no one told me, or pulled me to one side? Ted eventually gave up on Annie and married a woman from Leyburn. My foolish prank cost Annie a great deal, although her bloody-minded attitude didn’t exactly help.
     
    In the months after the party I would take myself off for long walks, just to keep away from the house – which is why I spent so much time sitting where you are now, trying to hold a school book down in the wind, or, in the summer, stretched out across the heather reading a romantic novel. It’s also where I dreamed up my future life away from the farm.
     
    Royal Air Force aircraft flew up and down Wensleydale quite often in those days, they probably still do. I would lie on the heather and watch the aircraft whistle past in the valley below or gaze at them practising aerobatics. I fell head over heels in love with the idea of joining the RAF, imagined myself walking around an air station in my glamorous uniform. I even practised saluting. On one particular day I made up my mind to join, tripped down the hill and announced my intention to the family. Annie just scoffed, but Mum and Dad were surprisingly encouraging. And so, I stayed on at school to gain the qualifications required to join directly as an officer.
     
    There is no denying the fact that my decision to leave home was based, in part, on Annie’s untiring wrath in the aftermath of the party, but I also wanted to leave her the farm. I knew the day would come when Mum and Dad would no longer be able to run things, and two sisters inheriting one farm would never work. One of us had to go and it seemed right that I should be the one – I think they secretly felt this too. I was no martyr though. I had much more of a sense of a world beyond the Dales than Annie. I found living in such a remote farming community terribly claustrophobic; everyone knew everyone else’s business and Yorkshire folk can be brutishly frank to a daydreaming teenager like me.
     
    I trotted off to the RAF in the April that followed my twenty-first birthday. Mum and Dad sobbed as I stepped onto the train at Northallerton Station. Annie chose not to see me off and stayed at the farm. Although I would pop back to see them from time to time, I didn’t go home as often as I should have because I became completely absorbed in RAF life.
     
    Tragically, nine years after I left, my father died of a heart attack. It was shearing time and he’d been halfway