“Laurel, where are you?”Īnd it’s as if a spell has been broken. “Laurel!” A child’s impatient voice, some distance off. When every possibility stretches ahead and fate has not yet been sealed by circumstance, and then. A wheelbarrow loaded with pots waits patiently by the shed.ĭespite its stillness, perhaps because of it, the whole scene has an expectant, charged feeling, like a theater stage in the moments before the actors walk out from the wings.
A teddy bear with an eye patch and a look of dignified tolerance keeps watch from his vantage point in the peg basket of a green laundry trolley. A pair of white hula hoops, last year’s craze, stand propped against the wisteria arch. The house is quite alone, sitting at the end of a long, dusty driveway, invisible from the country lane whose name it shares.Īpart from an occasional breeze, all is still, all is quiet. Through the knotted trees a stream trickles lightly over stones, flitting between sunlight and shadow as it has done for centuries, but it can’t be heard from here. It’s something in the way the vegetable patch has been laid out, just so, at the back of the house, the proud gleam of the leadlight windows, the careful patching of the roofing tiles.Ī rustic fence hems the house, and a wooden gate separates the tame garden from the meadows on either side, the copse beyond. The chimney pots are steaming, and you know, just by looking, that there’s something tasty simmering on the stove top beneath. The house is unassuming: half-timbered, with white paint peeling gently on the western side and clematis scrambling up the plaster. RURAL England, a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, a summer’s day at the start of the 1960s.