He saw her for the first time since returning from the war out on Cartwright’s Track. He’d hitched a lift home with Nat Fish. She was walking. He didn’t get Trout to stop for her because she was almost home but he waved, and she waved back.

She was two years older since he’d last seen her, and her fair hair was longer, and in her green summer dress she seemed more a full-grown woman. They were friends, he and Beth, if friendship were applied in a broad way. He had always chatted with her down at the Almond Tree shops, where she’d run a stall each week selling donated odds and ends—jams, teddy bears, potted plants—to help support the strugglers of the town. The commitment to charity must have come down to her from her mum, Lillian, who knitted jumpers for pensioners. It didn’t show up in her other daughters.

Gus and Maud, both older than Beth, were more devoted to marathon arguments with their husbands and Franny, the second youngest, to marathon flirtation…

Continue reading the extract here…