Valley Saga

Paul works hard looking after his tenants and helping with their problems and modernising their farms. Claire produces 2 sons and 2 daughters, then war breaks out. Many of the Valley young men go away to war and never come back and eventually Paul joins up as well. He gets injured and is reported missing and is believed by most to be dead. Claire has another baby, born after Paul's last leave and she refuses to accept that he might be dead. She names the baby Jill, and goes on with her work on the estate and helping to run a hospital for injured men. After a long time, Paul is found in a hospital in France and invalided home. Claire is happy that her belief was justified. He wants her to name their new daughter Claire as she was born at such a difficult time in Claire's life. He is glad to be back in Devon, though saddened by the loss of so many young men from the estate and he plants a wood, French Wood, in their memory. During his time in France, he had run into Grace who was driving an ambulance, and then was upset when she was killed by flak in a raid. He reinvests in the estate, wanting to make sure that the estate will be able to hold its own during the post war years. His scrap business has done well during the war, and he wants to make use of the money. However in the years after the war, as his children grow up, he finds that apart from his oldest daughter Mary none of them share his love for the land. His twin sons want to go into business collecting scrap metal like Paul's father, and his eldest son Simon is a left wing thinker who seeems to have no ambition at all. Then Claire becomes pregnant again at 50 and is very depressed, because she had thought she had given up having babies.