The Broomstick Collection: Books 1–4. Nathan Reed

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      Miss Strega’s shop was not like its smart neighbours. For one thing, it didn’t have a large plate glass window with eye-catching displays of toys or trainers or books or mobile phones. On wintry afternoons, when bright lights blazed in the other shops along the High Street, Miss Strega’s shrank back into the shadows. And if anybody ever popped in to buy some clothes pegs or jam pot covers – and hardly anybody ever did – old Miss Strega bustled out from behind the counter and more or less chased them back out on to the street.

      “Just closing up,” she would say. “Come back tomorrow.”

      Children, hurrying home from school, were never tempted to stop and peer in to the shop’s shabby, overcrowded window. If they had, they would have seen what a heap of junk it sold; hurricane lamps, mousetraps, bird scarers and flypapers dangled on hooks above a stack of black iron cooking pots and an untidy jumble of balls of twine. Ancient-looking fishing rods and rusty garden forks leant against the door as if they had just been dumped there for the binmen to take away.

      So no one noticed when a small broom was propped outside the door on the thirty-first of October. It had a short handle and a bunch of spiky birch twigs tied together at one end. A notice scribbled on a piece of cardboard was tucked into the twigs: