The Midwife's Border

About this book

Judith Ashworth spent thirty-four years teaching English in a Shropshire market town and knows exactly what a lie sounds like in a quiet room. Retired now, with a husband in the care home up the hill, she runs the Wychcombe Garden Society, which is a gossip engine with better biscuits. When a new member inherits a cottage in Pound Lane and finds a tin of letters written by the district midwife between the wars, the club adopts them as a reading project: births, deaths, and what Nurse Cadwallader planted for every baby she brought into the lane. Then Ivy Marchant, ninety-two and the last of the old lane, is found dead in her own chair, and the village settles on natural causes with practised relief. Judith is not so sure. The letters are starting to read less like heritage and more like a pattern, and the people who could explain it are people she thought she already understood.