The Kindness Club on Mapleberry Lane - Part One: A Summer Surprise

Contents
Title Page
About the Book
PART ONE: A Summer Surprise
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
About the Author
Copyright


About the Book
This is part one in a heartwarming four-part serial from Helen Rolfe, author of The Little Village Library.
A little kindness can go a long way …
Veronica’s cottage is the neatest house on Mapleberry Lane. A place for everything, and everything in its place – that’s her motto. But within her wisteria-covered walls, Veronica has a secret: she’s hardly left her perfect home in years.
Then her teenage granddaughter, Audrey, arrives on her doorstep, and Veronica’s orderly life is turned upside down. With a little help from the residents of Mapleberry Lane, Audrey forms a plan to help her gran reconnect with the community: a kindness club, carrying out one generous action a day to make their world a better place – and perhaps help each other at the same time.
As their small acts of kindness begin to ripple through the village, both Veronica and Audrey find that with each passing day, they feel a little braver. There’s just one task left before the end of the year: to make Veronica’s own secret wish come true …
The Kindness Club on Mapleberry Lane is an uplifting story with community at its heart, about the little kindnesses that make the world a better place. This is Part One.


PART ONE
A Summer Surprise


Chapter One
Veronica
A knock on the door would once have had the power to turn her legs to jelly, make her palms clammy and root her feet to the spot. But not anymore. And that, Veronica Bentley guessed, was what you called ‘progress’.
She put down the knife she was using to butter her sandwich and went to see who it was. As always, she peeked through the sitting-room shutters – the tilt of the wooden slats was a great invention, letting you spy without being seen – but when she saw it was little Layla from number twenty-five, she rushed to answer the dove-white front door to her home.
Through the open door came the smell of summer – freshly cut lawns, floral scent from the flowerbeds, birdsong – and the chirpy voice of Layla, an eight-year-old filled with more confidence than Veronica had been able to muster for years. ‘It’s me!’ said Layla from behind an enormous box.
‘I’m only seventy-one – my eyesight isn’t failing me just yet, thank you.’ Veronica ushered her inside. ‘And what do we have here?’
‘I’ve brought you carrots, onions, a lettuce and tomatoes. All grown at home,’ Layla added proudly. She rarely waited before she launched into colourful conversation.
Veronica took the wooden vegetable crate with VEG stamped onto the side. ‘It’s heavy – how did you carry this all the way?’ She went through to the kitchen and set it onto the round wooden table.
‘I’m stronger than I look.’
She was so serious, Veronica had to stifle a laugh. If there was one thing this girl brought to her life, it was her effervescent personality. ‘What’s your dad up to today?’ Veronica knew Charlie would have stood at his front door, watching his daughter walk all the way along the pavement to the garden gate of number nine Mapleberry Lane, and waited for her to go inside to know she was safe. It was the usual arrangement.
‘He has to fix my wardrobe door, which came off its hinges again.’ She added a theatrical eye roll.
Veronica was already inspecting the produce. ‘You should be proud of yourself for growing all these. Veggie patches aren’t always easy – I had a terrible time trying to grow lettuces over the years, they’d never work. And when they did, the butterflies got to them before I did.’
‘I looked after the carrots mostly, onions too, but Daddy took charge of growing the traffic-light tomatoes in his greenhouse.’
‘I don’t think I’ve heard of that variety.’
She pointed to a collection of rich red tomatoes. ‘They’re the red ones,’ she pulled out orangey heirloom tomatoes, ‘then we have amber…and finally, green.’ Beaming, she pulled out a couple of questionable-looking varieties that Veronica thought she’d have to ask Charlie about when she saw him to make sure they were fine to eat.
‘I have something else to show you,’ Layla grinned, the bottom of her dark ginger bobbed hair that wasn’t fixed in place with an Alice band swinging to and fro as she jumped on the spot in her excitement.
‘And what might that be?’
‘This!’ She proudly held out the curled-up fabric diamond she’d been clutching in her palm. With a purple background and a little pot plant embroidered on the front, along with the words ‘Grow Your Own’, it was another Brownie badge to add to her collection.
Veronica enveloped Layla in a hug. It felt like the right thing to do, even though until now she’d never held the little girl close. The feeling it gave her took Veronica quite by surprise. She hadn’t had affection like this in a long while. But Layla seemed to simply go with the flow.
Pulling herself together, she told Layla, ‘You worked hard, well done you.’ It was moments like this she should have cherished more with her own family before it was too late, before she pushed everyone away. Having Layla in her life felt like a blessing, the second chance she wasn’t sure she deserved. She’d become a surrogate granny without even realising, but that was fine by her. It somehow lessened the pain of not seeing much of her own daughter and granddaughter.
‘Brown Owl was impressed with the different things we’ve grown,’ Layla carried on. ‘She said she still hasn’t managed to grow carrots successfully. She called them her ne-me-sis.’
‘Is that right?’ She swore the little girl’s maturity and vocabulary came from all those books she read. She’d already plucked anything remotely suitable from Veronica’s bookshelves and devoured them at home before returning them to the shelves lining one wall of the lounge and another at the end of the kitchen diner. She’d raced through classics like Alice’s Adventures