Nobody notices the lollipop lady. That's rather the point of her.For nineteen years, Maureen Tranter has stood at the bottom of School Lane in a hi-vis tabard, stopping traffic for the children of Sandhaven, a faded seaside town that the tide, and the rest of England, has quietly given up on. She is invisible. She prefers it that way. It means she sees everything.So when she finds Daniel Pryce, once a gap-toothed boy who held her hand across the road, now an ambitious young...

She runs four hundred acres, a car park, a tea room she despises, and a barn that's been condemned for four years. She is the most overlooked woman on the Devon coast. Which is why she notices everything.Ruth Kerslake has been the National Trust warden at Stonecombe for twelve years. She knows the wording of all thirteen interpretation boards. She knows which step on the cliff path is loose, which gull is which, and exactly how the car-park machine likes to jam.So when a ma...