The Bird in the Bamboo Cage. Hazel Gaynor

       Copyright

      Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

      Copyright © Hazel Gaynor 2020

      Cover design by Caroline Young © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

      Cover photographs © Jelena Simic Petrovic / Arcangel Images (woman), Seb Oliver/GettyImage (girl), Shuttershock.com (all other images)

      Hazel Gaynor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      Excerpt from ‘Caged Bird’ taken from Shaker Why Don’t You Sing by Maya Angelou © 1983. Reprinted with permission from Little, Brown Book Group.

      Girl Guide Laws taken from Girl Guiding by Robert Baden-Powell © 1918.

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      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: 9780008393632

      Ebook Edition © September 2018 ISBN: 9780008393656

      Version: 2021-04-29

       Dedication

      For Damien, Max, and Sam –

       my favourite story of all.

       Epigraph

      ‘Girls! Imagine that a battle has taken place in and around your town or village … What are you going to do? Are you going to sit down, and wring your hands and cry, or are you going to be plucky, and go out and do something to help?’

      Agnes Baden-Powell, co-founder of the Girl Guides

      ‘The caged bird sings

      with a fearful trill

      of things unknown

      but longed for still

      and his tune is heard

      on the distant hill

      for the caged bird

      sings of freedom.’

      Maya Angelou, ‘Caged Bird’ from Shaker Why Don’t You Sing?