A Home On Bramble Hill: A feel-good, romantic comedy to make you smile. Holly Martin

watched her jaw clench but she didn’t say anything.

      ‘It’s an odd thing to lie to your dog.’

      Her eyes flashed. ‘It was my farm. I was born there, lived there till I was eighteen. I still consider it my home, even though it belongs to some arsehole now.’

      ‘Oh.’ Oh crap, thought the arsehole. The woman that had been trying to buy him out – the woman that had made repeated calls, sent many letters and emails asking him to sell his farm to her, the woman he had largely ignored for the last few months – was sitting next to him. ‘Why did you leave if you still consider it to be home?’

      ‘I…’ She stared back down at the farm, pulling her knees up to her chest. ‘I didn’t have much choice.’ She bit her lip, clearly considering whether to tell him or not, and every part of his brain was screaming at him to get away before she unburdened herself with her story. By the look on her face it wasn’t going to be a happy one. He was trying to ignore the need to put his arm round her and comfort her right now and he hadn’t even heard the story yet. If she started crying, that would be it, he’d be lost for good.

      ‘My parents died, they were killed in a car accident when I was nine.’

      And there it was, he was lost, beyond the point of no return.

      ‘My brother raised me after they died, but there was seemingly very little money. Alex didn’t know a lot about farming, I was always the one that followed Mum and Dad around, asking loads of questions about the dairy cows. Alex was always building stuff, robots, animatronics. He did a course on it at college and was set to go to university to study special effects in film.

      When they died, he had no clue how to carry on what they had started and though he had a part time job it wasn’t enough to pay the bills. I know, in the first few months after they died, he started working more hours, though he was always there to take me to school and pick me up at the end of the day. I know that he was worried about money, I heard him on the phone talking about how he was going to keep a roof over our heads. Slowly, over the years, he sold off pieces of land to neighbouring farms, sold the cattle, the crops, the machinery. The only thing we had left in the end was the farmhouse.

      I found out that he had sold everything when I was about fifteen, after I had spent the last six years tramping over ground that wasn’t mine, stroking the cows that were no longer mine. I was so angry that he had practically sold everything without telling me. The other farmers never said anything, even when I’d see them working in the field I assumed they were doing it to help Alex. I was so stupid.’

      ‘You were a child.’

      ‘A child that had no idea how much things cost. I just took it for granted that there would always be electricity in our farm, that there would always be food on the table. And there was. Only looking back now I realise how hard Alex must have worked to ensure that.

      When I was eighteen I applied to go to university and Alex sat me down and told me there was no money to do it. Tuition fees, rent in halls of residence, food – all that would cost money that he simply didn’t have. He told me of his dreams to go to university too, that these dreams were put on hold when our parents died. He told me that if we sold the farm, there would be enough money left over to pay for us both to go to university, to pay our fees and rent and maybe even a small deposit on a house for us once we came back out the other side. As much as I wanted to go to university I wanted my home more, I wanted to live there for the rest of my life, raise my children there. But I knew that Alex’s life had been put on hold for the last nine years, that he should have travelled the world, gone to university, got the job of his dreams… and he couldn’t because of me. As I was eighteen, I knew he should start living his life again. We sold the farm, but I vowed one day I would come back and buy it.

      I’ve lived in many places since then, a few months here, a year there, but nowhere has been my home. I don’t know what I’m looking for if I’m honest, it’s just a feeling I suppose, a silly sentimental feeling.’

      ‘You spend eighteen years in the same place, nothing else is going to compare to it. It’s not silly at all.’

      ‘I was going to buy it back last year when it came up for sale but I dithered. I didn’t want to take a step back. It felt somehow that I wasn’t moving forward but still living in the past. But I decided that even if I wasn’t going to live in it, I wanted to own it. It’s belonged to the family for over seven generations and it feels wrong that it now belongs to someone else. Unfortunately I was too late, and despite very generous offers to the idiot that’s now living there, he won’t budge. Sorry if the idiot is your friend.’