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Harry and Hope
Sarah Lean
Some friendships are meant to be… A story about family, friendship and belonging, from bestselling author, Sarah Lean.Hope lives with her artist mum in the Pyrenees. It’s always been just the two of them… until Frank – a free-spirited traveller – arrives with his donkey, Harry.Hope and Frank form a close bond, so it’s hard for both of them when Frank decides it’s time to move on. Hope questions what she is to Frank. He’s not her dad, but he was more than just her mum’s boyfriend. Except, there’s no name for that kind of pair…Hope promises to look after Harry and, slowly, another special pair is made – one that makes Hope realise that some friendships become part of you and, even when someone is far away, they are always near to your heart.
Copyright (#uf27b165c-17f4-558c-a97c-e76aa4aac4d5)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2015
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
Copyright © Sarah Lean 2015
Illustrations © Gary Blythe 2015
Cover photographs © Mark harris (dog), Cavan images / Getty images (boy), Shutterstock (all other images)
Sarah Lean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.
Gary Blythe asserts the moral right to be identified as the illustrator of the work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007512263
Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007512256
Version: 2015-02-05
Praise for Sarah Lean (#uf27b165c-17f4-558c-a97c-e76aa4aac4d5)
“Sarah Lean weaves magic and emotion into beautiful stories.”
Cathy Cassidy
“Touching, reflective and lyrical.”
The Sunday Times
“… beautifully written and moving. A talent to watch.”
The Bookseller
“Sarah Lean’s graceful, miraculous writing will have you weeping one moment and rejoicing the next.”
Katherine Applegate, author of The One and Only Ivan
For my little sister
Contents
Cover (#u067e440f-8f5a-5399-a5aa-65ba4d5b86ba)
Title Page (#u0f192faf-33f2-5a4c-8741-6ba25c67cd63)
Copyright
Praise for Sarah Lean
Dedication (#u8f144424-3392-5bb8-a264-863594ac8878)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Sarah Lean
About the Publisher
(#uf27b165c-17f4-558c-a97c-e76aa4aac4d5)
It must have snowed on the mountain in the night.
“Have you seen it yet, Frank?” I shouted downstairs.
“You mean did I hear?”
“I know, funny, isn’t it? The snow’s so quiet but it’s making all the animals noisy.”
We didn’t normally see snow on Canigou in May, and it made the village dogs bark in that crazy way dogs do when something is out of place. Harry, Frank’s donkey, was down in his shed, chin up on the half open door, calling like a creaky violin.
Frank came up to the roof terrace where I’d been sleeping in the hammock. He leaned over the red tiles next to me and we looked at Canigou, sparkling at the top like a jewellery shop.
And it’s the kind of thing that is hard to describe, when snow is what you can see while the sun is warming your skin. How did it feel? To see one thing and feel the complete opposite? I only knew that other things didn’t seem to fit together properly at the moment either; that my mother and Frank seemed as far apart as the snow and the sun.
“Frank, at school Madame was telling us that the things we do affect the environment, you know, like leaving lights on, things like that,” I said. “Well, I left the lights on in the girls’ loo.”
Frank smiled. Frank was my mother’s boyfriend, but that won’t tell you what he meant to me at all. He’d lived in our guesthouse next door for three years and he wouldn’t ever say the things to me that Madame had said when I forgot to turn the lights off. In fact, what he did was leave a soft friendly silence, so I knew I could ask what I wanted to ask, because I wasn’t sure about the whole environment thing.
“Did I make it snow on Canigou?”
“Leave the light on and see if it snows again,” he whispered, grinning.
He made the world seem real simple, like a little light switch right under my fingertips. But there were other complicated things.
“Remember when the cherry blossom fell a few weeks ago?” I said.
He nodded.
“How many people do you think have seen pink snow?”
“Only people who see the world like you.”
“And you.”
I looked out from all four corners of the terrace.
South was the meadow, and then the Massimos’ vineyards that belonged to my best friend Peter’s family – lines and lines of vines curving over the steep mountainside, making long lazy shadows across the red soil paths. I thought of the vines with their new green leaves twirling along the gnarly arms, reaching out to curl around each other, like they needed to know they weren’t alone; that they’d be strong enough together to grow their grapes.
North were the gigantic plane trees with big roots and trunks that cracked the roads and pavements around the village.
East was the village, the roofs of the houses stacked on the mountainside like giant orangey coloured books left open and abandoned halfway through a story.
West were the cherry fields, and Canigou, the highest peak that we could see in the French Pyrenees. It soared over the village and the vineyards, high above us.
I touched the things I kept in the curve of the roof tiles, the wooden things Frank had carved for me. I whispered their names and picked them up, familiar, warm and softly smooth in my hands: humming bird, the letter H, mermaid, donkey, cherries, and the latest one – the olive tree knot made into a walking-stick handle that Frank said I might need to lean on to go around the vineyards with Peter when we’re ninety-nine. Always in that order. The order that Frank made them.
“What you thinking about, Frank?”
“The world,” he said quietly. “And cherry blossom.”
When you’re twelve, it takes a long time for the different sounds and words you’ve heard and the things you’ve seen to end up some place deep inside of you where you can make sense of them. It was that morning when I worked out what my feelings had been trying to tell me; when I saw Frank looking at our mountain like he was remembering something he missed; when I saw the passport sticking out of his pocket.
It felt like even the crazy dogs had known before me, as if even the mountain had been listening and watching and trying to tell me.
Frank looked over.
“Spill,” he said, which is what he always said when he knew there were words swirling inside me that I couldn’t seem to get out.
“Why did you travel all around the world, Frank? I mean, you went to loads of different countries for twenty years before you came here, and that’s, like, a really, really long time to be travelling.”
“Something in me,” he said.
