Page 1 of Winter Magic on Railway Lane

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Libby Jacobs had always declared that the best part of being a flight attendant was the freedom and adventure that travelling the world brought her. The worst part was the occasional rude passenger.

But at least those passengers would never be rude to her ever again. Because she had just completed her last ever flight for the airline.

Libby angrily slammed the car into fourth gear as she headed out of Aldwych town and onto the narrow country lane towards her home village of Cranfield.

In the inky darkness before the dawn of an October morning, she could barely see any distance ahead, despite the car headlamps being on. Being in the middle of the English countryside, there were no streetlamps along the country lanes. Luckily, she knew this journey like the back of her hand. She had lived in Cranfield all of her life and knew every corner and crossing on the ten-mile journey ahead.

Which was a good thing, because she was barely concentrating on the road at all, such was her despair.

She groaned once more and shook her head, mainly at her lack of self-control. Ten years in the job and she still couldn’t control the rebel that she had been throughout her teenage years.

It wasn’t her fault that the budget airline she worked for had decided to branch out into long-haul travel. Nor was it her fault that the company’s expansion had been a complete and utter disaster.

However, itwasher fault that she had already received two written warnings for being rude to difficult customers in the first-class section of the cabin that she had looked after. That meant that when the airline had announced the previous day that they were stopping the long-haul route with immediate effect, as well as a wave of redundancies, Libby was first in line to be out of a job.

The panic on the loss of her job was huge. Her monthly wages really helped to keep paying the bills on the little cottage on Railway Lane where she lived with her dad.

But, despite that, a tiny part of her was actually glad to be finally stopping the exhausting cycle of jet lag and disturbed sleeping patterns. The fact was that she was tired. Tired of spending so long away from home in order to support her dad. Tired of enduring a job which she no longer enjoyed. Tired of the overnight stopovers in bland hotels which were barely distinguishable from one city to the next, desperate to be back in Cranfield instead.

This craving to go home would have astounded the much younger Libby, who had yearned for nothing else but to escape and run far away from her home village.

Growing up, she had had a turbulent relationship with her father. Philip Jacobs had been the headmaster of the local infants school and liked everything regimented and in order, both at work and at home. He had never hurt her and Libbyknew that her father loved her, even though they never said such things to each other.

However, Libby had inherited both her mother’s pale blonde hair as well as her nature. Her mother had been a free spirit who couldn’t stay within the constraints of normal limits either and drifted from job to job without a care in the world, preferring to be at home in the kitchen or the garden.

Love had seemingly overcome her parents’ different approaches to life. Her mother was the peacemaker, always soothing over yet another argument when Libby had been late home after playing too long in the fields or had ignored her father’s request to tidy her messy bedroom.

To escape what felt like his constant disapproval, Libby had rebelled against him every step of the way. Despite being bright, she had never taken her studies seriously and had often not turned up at all to most classes. To her father’s obvious disappointment, she had left school with hardly any qualifications and no ambition either, except to flee her stifling home life.

After a few years of trying out every job she could find in the area, the discovery that she could escape to the skies as a flight attendant had been too much of a lure to resist and Libby had signed up for training.

Of course, the reality was that there wasn’t an awful lot of glamour to being a flight attendant. The hours were long and hard, with the majority of time spent on her feet, especially when covering the long-haul flights in the past couple of years. She had been paid to go to some of the most amazing destinations in the world, but it wasn’t a holiday. Most of the time, she would arrive at the hotel booked for the flight crew, go to sleep and then head back on the next flight in the morning. It was a hard job and she had grown weary of it as the years had passed. Now in her early thirties, the despondency felt even worse.

She glanced at herself briefly in the mirror, despite the darkness inside the car. She could still make out her blue eyes lined with mascara and her make-up immaculate even many hours after she had applied it. Her long pale blonde hair was scraped back into a perfect bun.

Libby Jacobs, she silently told herself,you’re a long way from being a rebel now.

But some things had survived from her turbulent childhood and acting on impulse was one of them. Her quick temper and sarcastic way had ensured that she had just completed her very last flight. And with two written warnings, any other airline was unlikely to take her on either.

Libby sighed heavily as she turned a sharp corner down the dark country lane.

She had felt so differently about the job at first. She had attended the interview with the airline and it had gone so well that she could still feel the broad smile on her face as she had driven home that day ten years ago. She would finally have enough money to move out of home for good. She would be free of her father’s disappointed looks. She couldn’t wait.

But it had swiftly turned into a bittersweet day after being offered her dream job. Her mother had been unwell for a couple of years and the test results her parents had received that day had been the worst news possible. Her mother’s health had quickly deteriorated and she passed away only a couple of months later.

Libby and her dad had struggled on through their grief, trying to come to terms with the massive loss in their lives. Any arguments had been swiftly replaced with a stunned silence whenever Libby was home from her flight attendant training course.

They had managed to get through the funeral, to say their last goodbyes and Libby began to tentatively plan to pick up thepieces of her life and move out a short while later when she began to fly around the world with her new job.

However, the terrible series of events seemed set to continue when her father had a massive stroke one morning soon after the funeral. Whilst Philip had thankfully survived, the stroke had taken its toll on his physical and mental well-being. He had to give up work as he had lost some use in his right arm and right leg. Heartbroken from both the loss of his beloved wife and the abrupt halt from his life of teaching, he spiralled into a deep depression.

He effectively shut down to the outside world, rarely leaving the house. He became a self-imposed prisoner of his own home, cutting himself off from their friends and neighbours. A decade had passed and nothing had changed for the better for Philip. Apart from his daily walk to pick up the newspaper, it was a world mostly devoid of human contact too, apart from his daughter and church on a Sunday morning. She had gently encouraged him to try to find new hobbies outside of the house to no avail.

Libby had always blamed herself for her father’s stroke. It was all her fault, of course. If only she had behaved better growing up and not put so much stress and strain on him. If only she had taken better care of him, as she had promised her mum during those last wretched weeks. Now he was trapped inside his own insular world and Libby was trapped there as well.

As the main breadwinner for the household, there was no way she could have left him. She had briefly contemplated giving up her new job to look after her dad but the money had been too good an opportunity to pass up. But whilst Philip had recovered enough to be able to take care of himself, she felt too guilty to move out and so, ten years later, she was still there, at the age of thirty-one. But without a job to support them both, what on earth was she going to do now?