New Directions (1)

Although almost midday the inside of the car was full of dark shadowy corners. I could hardly make out the shape of my shoes resting in the spaces between the pedals. It was one of those November days that threatened an early dump of snow exciting people about the prospect of a white Christmas only to melt away as fast as memories of last summer’s holiday.

Heavy cloud in fashionable grey spread from horizon to horizon leaching the colour out of greens of any remaining foliage and reds of brickwork. I opened the window to stop the car misting up while I checked the address and practised the accent I use for posh people. Cold still air outside muffled the sounds of the day.

I’d parked in a convenient space looking across a wide oval of tailored grass awaiting a March trim. A narrow road sliced what was little more than a hamlet into two halves separating the village green from a row of late-Georgian, stroke, early-Victorian farmworker cottages built several yards back from the road’s gentle curve.

To their left behind a sagging wire fence a narrow field covered with scrubby grass stretched out of sight behind the terrace. A few timeworn oaks looking too tired to hold their branches up lived on it – bare except for a few stubborn orangey-brown hangers-on . . . few enough to be counted on a pair of hands. Next to that separated by a low brick wall topped off by triangular stone slabs, a flint-faced buttressed church tower supporting a red tile roofed knave and about a dozen lop-sided grave stones, all slightly masked from view in air filling with half-hearted wispy snow.

A slightly more prominent building in a similar style to the cottages stood to the right. Its wide window suggested it might be, or had been, a general store-cum-post office. Some sad looking greenish-beige wooden racking displaying nothing squatted below the bare shop front. Twenty-five yards further on, separated by some conifers looking like Christmas trees dressed in lank green fur, a white painted pub behind an uninhabited parking area. Houses and cottages of various sizes or affluence set out the rest of the settlement gradually disappearing in the increasingly adventurous snowflakes

I read the address: 17, Walker Way, Lower Maplebury, Berks.

Maplebury turned out to be typical of the red-roofed villages on a section of the Berkshire downs trapped between the M4 and A4. A place estate agents love to refer to as: an affluent village in the Royal County of Berkshire safe in the knowledge royal will provide several more grand to their commission and top-end rental values.

Number seventeen stood at the right end of the line. One in a terrace of five tiny dwellings which had not yet been knocked into two cottage style luxury homes for London commuters. Built with red stretcher bricks interspersed by blue half-stretchers, the walls had a chequered appearance. Like its neighbours, it had two white painted wood-framed windows, one next to the front door and one above in the centre. Its hipped end of a roof that covered the whole row in terracotta tiles attractively patinated from years of scrubbed off moss and lichen had one of the five narrow chimney stacks poking out of it. I rated it at over a grand a month.

I walked up the short path at the side of a small garden neatly laid out with low hibernating shrubbery. Beneath the window a patch of brown raked over soil, no doubt ready for next summer’s flower display. Three rose bushes in need of a spring prune grew out of the end, their remaining leaves rusting at the edge. A couple of soggy pink too-late flower buds hung on to the end of spiny stems by their finger nails.

I stood at the recently re-varnished oak door. It had a weird porthole window which looked like a magnifying glass that’d been fished out of a blacksmith’s furnace just before it melted. I pushed the bell button hoping not too much mud from my trek across the grass clung to my shoes. There was no coconut whiskered welcome mat to clean them on. This shouldn’t be a problem I thought. Just an old lady who’s got behind with the rent.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St_Mary%27s,_Bmithucklebury_-_ge...