Dutch Farm style of Architecture.
A Garden to every House
Hot and cold water to every House
Good cheap Day Schools on the estate
Peace assured by the Vigilance Committee
Also: St Nicholas’s Church
A Club for Ladies and Gentlemen
General Stores and Provisioners
Tennis Courts
Masquerades every month
Regular Dances
A School of Art
The Tudor Theatre
A Ladies’Discussion Society
A Natural History Society
Weekly lectures on Scientific, Literary and Political
subjects
Several new houses now available at reasonable prices
These attractions were listed around a picture of a woman dressed very much like the milkmaids in the nursery rhyme books of the period, with a spotless long apron tied around her tiny waist and a pretty white cap pulled low over her hair, although a few curling wisps escaped to frame her little upturned nose. Two smiling infants crowded at her skirts, the boy dangling a wooden soldier, the girl cradling a doll, both gazing adoringly up at their mamma, and behind this Madonna-like tableau billowed a garden of flowering shrubs and a tree-crowned hillside. The actual houses, Ted noticed for the first time, were not pictured at all.
He took it out to the living room, intending to find a place for it on the brand new, freshly plastered, papered and painted wall which had never been pierced by a picture pin before.
‘Look at this,’ he suggested to his newly extended family.
‘Oh, that’s so pretty,’ Molly sighed.
‘It’s so bullshit,’ her mother retorted.
‘But it is a really pretty picture,’ said Flora.
‘It’s old,’ sniffed Chalice.
‘It can’t be old, its Princess Di,’ protested Cherish.
‘No, it’s old,’ Ted told them. ‘It was the original advertisement for Maple Grove, printed in a newspaper before our house in Church Vale was even built. It must be – oh – seventy years old at least. Where shall we hang it?’ He was happy that he was getting the hang of hands-on parenting at last.
‘Nowhere,’ ruled Topaz. ‘It belongs in a museum.’
In a few more years, Whitbridge swallowed up Ambleford, and the stone circle at Strankley Ridge was allowed to decorate the central reservation of a new traffic interchange. A leisure consortium took fibreglass casts of the standing stones and made them part of a new theme park, The Stone Age Experience.
Westwick did not change. Westwick never really changed. New families moved in and barbecued together in summer. The thrush in the flowering crab in New Farm Rise built a nest every year and successfully launched its young into the sky. The Oak Hill site was dedicated to an experimental green-tech project exploring the ability of trees to absorb soil pollutants. Groves of willow, poplar and alder were planted, with the intention of felling them in due time to enable the land to be profitably utilised.
Copyright
First published in 1998 by Little, Brown
This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world
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Copyright © Celia Brayfield, 1998
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