The same eternal prospect had dominated her view for forty years, the grey huddle of urban sprawl spreading up the sides of the hills from the valley bottom, the timeless sweep of the hills which Freya had once thought would drive her so mad with boredom she didn’t see how she could stand the sight another minute. Ironic that she’d welcomed this dreary landscape at first as an escape; the contempt with which she now regarded it, the stoic endurance it had forced upon her, was the price she’d had to pay for security. My life’s been nothing but a series of escapes, she thought bitterly. Ever since she’d taken flight from the poverty of those early years. She’d been born Freda Cassidy, and her mother had died when she was still a child, leaving her to the care of her Irish father, a railway worker in Swindon. Only that hadn’t been the way it had worked out. She’d been the one who’d done the looking after, caring for her adored dad as if he were the child and she the parent.
