Publisher's Synopsis
For Alice Pettiford, living near Gloucester in the late 1940s, leaving school and taking a job as a railway secretary made perfect sense. Her family had long been "railway servants", and the father of her best friend Hester would be working closely with her. What Alice had not expected was that she would fall in love with Joe Adair, a colleague, almost as soon as she met him. But Joe has to go overseas on National Service, and Hester's brother finds his fondness for Alice deepening. When he and Alice discover an old, abandoned railway coach hidden in a clearing in the Forest of Dean, Alice realises that it has been a very special, magical place. What she doesn't know is that the coach has played a secret part in the history of Joe's family, and that Joe's mother named it "the pumpkin coach". Now her own destiny will also be shaped by this enchanted refuge.
