The Forge at Ashby Parva, by Dorothy Kimber

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

When Haydn Loveridge went off with the Pals in 1915, the village expected the forge at Ashby Parva to close, and the farmers began taking their horses six miles to Kelby. Within a month they had stopped. Nell Loveridge had worked the bellows for her father as a girl, and she knew the trade better than she had ever let her husband see. She cut her hair short above the collar, borrowed his leather apron and took in the waist with a bootlace. She could not hold up the shire horses’ heavy hooves for long, so she paid the Dawson boy twopence an hour to hold the hoof while she worked, and she taught him to whistle to a nervous horse to keep it still. She never charged a widow for mending a gate. Her letters to Haydn, which she wrote by the light of the forge fire after dark, said nothing at all about the work; she told him the forge was shut and that she was managing on his allowance. The vicar, who knew better, kept her secret, and had his own pony shod on Thursdays when nobody was looking.

List five things you learn about Nell Loveridge in this extract.