Character Showcase: Tuppence Sparrow

Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice.

In my seasonal offering this year, the heroine, Tuppence Sparrow, works in the family confectionery shop. Started by her grandfather many years before, and situated in the quiet, out-of-the-way village of Hunsford Green, “Sparrow’s Confectionery” is something of a local institution, but new customers are rare. It’s 1892 and since the advance of the railway in England, many coaching inns — and towns that grew up around them—are much less busy, and that goes for The Cock and Bull in Hunsford Green, which was once a bustling gateway for travelers up and down the north road from London. As a consequence, strangers are much less frequently seen about the village than they once were and business is slow.

But this Christmas, Tuppence Sparrow, is inspired to make a new product for their shelves – white fondant snow birds, each filled with a surprise center. Her step-mother thinks the idea will never take off, but her father is willing to experiment and give her creation a chance to take flight.

Neither of them know where she came by her inspiration, but Tuppence has a wild imagination and as long as she saves it for the shelves and jars of their shop, all is well.

It’s only when her imagination spreads its wings

further afield and her creations begin to take a more solid form that the trouble really starts.

What, or who, is Tuppence Sparrow’s real snow bird with the surprise soft center? And is her new creation really Everything Nice, or is it secretly Everything Naughty?

Tuppence is the middle child of the family and the last to take flight from the nest. With her elder and younger sisters both married and moved three miles away, she is now her father’s “right-hand man” in the shop and behind the scenes. Her step-mother wants her gone too and is taking steps to have her removed as soon as possible. But Tuppence worries about her father and she is determined to keep “Sparrow’s Confectionery” as it has always been, despite her step-mother’s aspirations to change, expand and “improve” the premises.

Tuppence likes things to stay as they are. She is fearful of the world outside the shop and is only brave in her mind, where she imagines herself living far more exciting and daring lives. In reality, she prefers the safe and the familiar – never speaks up or complains. But her imagination is where she goes to get away from her loneliness and her sorrows. And where she wreaks revenge on her enemies.

One day a strange man walks through the door of the shop and he bears a shocking resemblance to somebody she keeps tucked away in a biscuit tin. She can’t understand how he got out; which of her many lives he belongs in — or why he’s so intent on making her smile.

It’s thirteen days to Christmas and Tuppence Sparrow is too old to believe in Father Christmas. For her, the season lost its magic long since.

But this year she is about to rediscover the enchantment of Christmas, for she will come face to face with romance and with destiny— both of which she has given up believing in too. 

Get your copy of The Snow Birds now.

Image:  Photo my own and 'Always Busy' by Charles Spencelayh (c. 1901)