Walter's Song: A short story

By Isabella Muir

Christmas 1962.  The beginning of the Big Freeze, when rivers wouldn't melt until March. But that Christmas Eve one little boy isn't dreaming of Santa or snowmen. Six-year-old Walter has only one Christmas wish, to uncover the secret treasure that is hidden in his dad's shed…

 

In Walter's Song we meet Walter when he is just a lad, but the story gives us a real insight into the man he will become. Walter – all grown up – appears again in the novel, The Forgotten Children, the emotional story of a young woman, Emily, who is searching for her son. Emily travels to the Isle of Anglesey, where she meets a gentle stranger – Walter – who helps her with his kindness and words of wisdom.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Outset Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Mar 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201012359

Isabella Muir

Isabella is never happier than when she is immersing herself in the sights, sounds and experiences of the 1960s. Researching all aspects of family life back then formed the perfect launch pad for her works of fiction. Isabella rediscovered her love of writing fiction during two happy years working on and completing her MA in Professional Writing and since then has gone to publish five novels, two novellas and a short story collection. Her first Sussex Crime Mystery series features young librarian and amateur sleuth, Janie Juke. Set in the late 1960s, in the fictional seaside town of Tamarisk Bay, we meet Janie, who looks after the mobile library. She is an avid lover of Agatha Christie stories – in particular Hercule Poirot – using all she has learned from the Queen of Crime to help solve crimes and mysteries. As well as three novels, there are three novellas in the series, which explore some of the back story to the Tamarisk Bay characters. Her latest novel, Crossing the Line, is the first of a new series of Sussex Crimes, featuring retired Italian detective, Giuseppe Bianchi who arrives in the quiet seaside town of Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, to find a dead body on the beach and so the story begins… Isabella’s standalone novel, The Forgotten Children, deals with the emotive subject of the child migrants who were sent to Australia – again focusing on family life in the 1960s, when the child migrant policy was still in force.

Book preview

WALTER’S SONG

By

Isabella Muir

WALTER'S SONG

They called it the Big Freeze. Temperatures plummeting, lakes and rivers freezing. You had to go back as far as 1740 or thereabouts to find anything like it in the record books.

It came on suddenly at the start of December. I was coming up for my sixth birthday. Although looking back I don’t reckon my six-year-old self was so different from the man I am now. In one respect at least. I didn’t care about the cold then, just like I don’t care about what the weather brings now. Cloud, sun, wind or rain, they are all nature’s way of conversing with us, reminding us who is in charge. At least that’s the way I see it.

As a child though I was barely aware of the weather - no sense, no feeling – that’s what they say, isn’t? Because if it had been left to me I probably would have perished some time around midnight on Christmas Eve, 1962.

Now I’m racing ahead. I need to slow up and tell you what happened a couple of days earlier.

My dad was a builder. A bricklayer by trade, but he could turn his hand to most things to do with construction. Working outside in all weathers meant Dad didn’t feel the cold either, at least not so you’d notice. I never once saw him do up the buttons on