Drawn to THE MOORS

For as long as she could remember, Sally had gazed up from her bedroom window to the moors over the mill town where she’d lived all her life, spellbound by their vast emptiness. They never looked the same two days in a row.

She wasn’t sure how old she’d been when she realised that what she’d imagined were sequins stuck to a dark sleeping beast every night were, in fact, lights. People actually lived up there, albeit few and far between. It piqued her curiosity even more, as it seemed a world away from her family home, which sat somewhere between the rows of terraced houses and the ‘grander’ places on the edge of town.

Dad worked in a bank and Mam was a dinner lady at the local church primary, dishing out meat pie and Manchester tart. They had an allotment, and chickens, which on the one hand meant extra chores, but on the other that they didn’t go short, something not to be sniffed at when rationing had been around.

With better times, her family had got a car. Drives on the moors became a Sunday treat, parking at the highest point with views towards the Irish Sea, its surface shining on the horizon.

With all that, it was perhaps inevitable that she’d fall for a man from the moors, even if their first meeting was in the town, in her father’s bank, where Sally was now a junior secretary.

Joe had come in with his father to see the manager about a loan for new farm equipment. Normally, she wouldn’t have been there, but Mr Roderick’s secretary was off sick and Sally had been drafted in.

‘You’d never survive up here’

Soft grey eyes,