Fox Wedding and Other Tales

By Judy Peters

An suburban ghost story with foxes; an alternative account of Ned Kelly's last stand, with robots; what might have happened on Jane Eyre's wedding night, but probably didn't; a young adoptee learns her place in her new home, which turns out to be at the bottom of her garden; an alternative history of Tasmania including an epidemic which was written before COVID; a tribute to one of my favorite, late writers of fantasy; dystopia with dogs; dealing with the death of an unloved and unlovable parent.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Judy Peters
• Release date: Oct 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223772293

Judy Peters

Judy Peters has studied history, librarianship, textile art and literature. One day she will embroider a book and catalogue it. She is interested in the female gothic, speculative fiction and alternative history. Occasional poetry is published under the name Judy Edmonds.

Book preview

FOX WEDDING

‘I n the autumn flames

And mountains, there is rain

Of fox’s weddings’

Kobayashi Issa

(1763-1827)

ANNIE

1948

Harkaway Farm

Balyshanasy

Victoria

Jan 4th, 1948

Dear John,

Thank you for your letter. Please thank Helen for her lovely note, and tell her I will reply separately. I will try to persuade her that you will be better off bringing her back to Australia to live, especially if you have children! I imagine you are terribly cold there right now. But even though we are supposed to be in mid-summer, it has been cloudy and cold, raining half the time. All my washing has to dry indoors and there is no fuel for heating any more than the kitchen at present, so I am living in it all day together with the wet washing! I expect it will be hot again soon enough. At least the rain is good for the orchard and the apples continue to grow well.

John, if you were to come home, you could run the farm? It’s so hard now with your father dead and you on the other side of the world. I know it was meant to be Jimmy’s farm, and we know how much he wanted nothing more than to be a farmer like his father. Frank never wanted to be a farmer, of course. But with them both gone a few years now, it really should be your farm. You can run it your own way, too, and not have to worry about your father dictating how you should do it. I will tell Helen when I write to her how nice it will be for both of you and your children to live the farming life. (I presume there will be children!) And it’s not as if she would be cut off from ‘civilisation’. We are sure to see the end of petrol rationing in a year or two and then it will be easy for her to pop to the big shops whenever she likes.

The men aren’t doing too much in the orchard at the moment because of the rain, but I am so grateful to have them. You have no idea, dear John, how hard it has been to keep this farm going through the war, with everyone away. Those ‘land army girls’ were worse than useless – and no better than they should have been, most of them! But even as your father was getting more and more sick and frail, I was determined to keep it going for you. You will find it has survived quite well under the circumstances.

The rain means I am indoors most of the time too. I keep myself busy of course. I can never let any little thing slip out of place, so I am always jumping up to straighten things out. I am sewing and knitting for the Red Cross all day too – I read that there were still 69,000 Australian ex-servicemen receiving medical treatment, and the Red Cross urgently needs to raise funds. The little clothes I am making will allow them to help needy families as well.

So I sit in the kitchen and keep warm and make little dresses and jumpers and socks, just like I will do for you and Helen when your children come. I keep myself amused looking out at the garden, which is growing completely out of control in the rain! The trees are often suddenly full of flocks of screeching cockatoos, then they take off in a huge flurry making enough noise to wake the dead.

The rain was almost tropical yesterday evening. I was preparing tea and peering through the rain coming down in TORRENTS, and I’m sure I saw someone at the bottom of the garden. Just for a second, I could have sworn I saw a young woman, about Helen’s age. But we only have a couple of men working here, and they have no reason to come into the garden, so I must have been imagining it. She didn’t look anything like Helen’s picture – the hair was wrong – but obviously I was seeing things in the rain.

Don’t worry about your silly old mother, dear John. Just hurry up and get yourself organised to come home and run your farm – for it is YOUR farm now.

Much love to you and Helen,

Mother

HARKAWAY FARM

Balyshanasy

Victoria

Jan 30th, 1948

Dear John

Well the rain cleared up and it has been baking hot ever since I last wrote. I hope you got my letter. The post is so unpredictable these days. I don’t expect you to have the time to answer every letter I write, so don’t feel obliged to. But I feel I must write to you, it is like talking to you – it is the closest I can get to talking to you. It is a lonely life here right now. Your father annoyed me even more than usual in his last years but at least he was someone to talk to. And it is SO long since I last saw you!

Now we are suffering a strong hot north wind, which sets the leaves in the trees scratching and scraping. After all that rain and then the heat, the garden has gone haywire. Don’t even mention the weeds! I’m getting a bit stiff to be out weeding all day, and it’s been so hot that I haven’t had the energy. Not like the old days when I could happily spend so much time in the garden that your father used to get cross with me not helping him in the orchard. I don’t feel that I can ask the men to weed the garden for me – that’s not what I pay them for! Does Helen love gardening as much as I always have? I can’t remember if she has told me. I suppose she won’t have had much chance to garden, really, what with all her war work, and the state of accommodation in London since the war. Where are you going to live when you get married? I read some awful things. Young people who have got through the war and found good jobs are only too eager to get married nowadays, but where will they live? One reads about so many engagements in the papers that say that the actual wedding date will not be announced until their house-hunting has been successful. And that’s in Australia, where we are so much better off than in poor old England! The only young couples who are finding it easy to get a place are those on the land, who can usually move in with his or her parents in the big house, or have a cottage somewhere on the property. Which leads me to – coming back home would make so much sense, John! You and Helen can live here – there’s plenty of room now it’s only me – and there’s space for children and a readymade job for you, and fresh air and sunshine! You can’t possibly be getting any of that in London.

Since I last wrote about it being so unseasonably cold and having to sit in the kitchen because it’s the only room I can manage to heat, of course I don’t need to heat it any more now that the cold weather went away, but I’ve taken to sitting in the kitchen anyway. The living room depresses me. It reminds me too much of times when your father felt he needed to be ... well, ‘formal’, if you know what I mean... The kitchen reminds me of when we were all together, before

Reviews for Fox Wedding and Other Tales

[deadeyeconstance · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent mixture of stories including magical elements and alternative history