The Hills and the Valley Read Online Free Page A

cared more about her fees than the school’s much vaunted reputation. But she would certainly tell Amy – and Amy was going to be furious …
    Barbara straightened her shoulders and tucked an irrepressible curl behind her ear.
    Oh well – trouble in store.
    But she knew it had been worth it and that given the same circumstances she would do the same thing again.
    In her office at the yard which served as headquarters for both Roberts Haulage and Roberts Transport, Amy Porter signed the last of the day’s mail, replaced the cap of her Parker fountain pen and tucked it away in her bag.
    As usual the depot had been a hive of activity and it seemed to Amy she had scarcely had time to draw breath since she had unlocked the office at 8 o’clock that morning. Never mind, she liked it that way, liked to see the lorries busy and the diary full. She would willingly have worked out estimates and costings until the figures sang in her head and written dockets till her fingers blistered if the need arose. She could remember all too clearly the days when things had been very different – the days when she had first inherited the tiny struggling business from her first husband, Llew Roberts, who had been killed in this very yard when he was crushed by a lorry he had been working on. Roberts Haulage had been a two-vehicle concern then, employing only one driver and two mates, and she had fought long and hard, not only against the day-to-day problems but also against the prejudice she encountered as a woman, to turn the business into the thriving I concern it was today – six lorries, two of them artics for working long hauls such as Llew could never have imagined when he brought his first small lorry home from Birmingham in 1922, a coal haulage company and a charabanc business which was run from a separate depot in Purldown, some three miles away.
    There had been times, and plenty of them, when Amy had wondered just what she had taken on, times when she had fought the seemingly endless battles with more desperation than fervour, times when she had not been able to see how she could pull the business out of a downward spiral of cancelled contracts and mounting expenses, but there had never been a moment when she had admitted defeat. At first, it had all been for Llew’s sake to make certain the dream for which he had lived – and died – did not die with him. But later she had to admit it had not only been for Llew but for herself too. They had thought she would fail, all of them. Charlotte, her mother, who disapproved of her stubborn stand whilst failing to realise Amy had inherited that very same stubbornness from her; Eddie Roberts, Llew’s brother, who had thought the business would automatically become his on his brother’s death; the whole town of Hillsbridge, standing by watching and waiting for her to fall flat on her pretty face because she was a woman dabbling in a man’s world, a woman daring to step outside the bounds of convention.
    Only Ralph had believed in her – Ralph Porter, who was now her husband. ‘Oh I knew you could do it. Amy,’ he had once told her casually. ‘The day we first met, when you took that lorry for a drive and ran into my car, I told myself you were a woman to be reckoned with’, and his eyes had twinkled wickedly as he said it. But at the time she had believed even Ralph was against her, deeply involved in his own expanding timber empire, joining with the other men of the business clique to keep her out.
    Amy signed the last letter, blotted it and pushed the pile across the desk.
    It was the same desk that Llew had bought secondhand when he had started the business, scratched and inkstained but also large and comfortably solid, but there was another set at right angles to it now, a light modern desk topped with a typewriter and a stack of efficient looking wire trays – the desk which accommodated Violet Denning, her