Yesterday, when it had been gusting and showery, Georgia Giacopazzi had put on mackintosh, walking shoes and tied a scarf round her head and, unrecognizable as the Giacopazzi of a million dust-jackets, had gone to search the town to see if her memory had played her any tricks.
What she had not expected was the way Markham had become ‘Yaah’d’ as the young ones at home would have called it – meaning, that instead of Yes or the rural Oh-ah, Yaah was the affirmative ‘in’ word of the moment, and of the dominating class of present-day Markham. By the end of the war, there had not been more than a handful of cars about the place, now they were everywhere, side-lighted Volvos, BMWs, Mercedes, G-registration Sierras, and ‘limited edition’ shopping cars by the score. The traffic of an affluent community which parked on double yellow lines and took the ticket rather than carry a box of vegetables.
Station Avenue was now pedestrianized and heavily draped with restless frizia trees. What had been the boys’ school, facing the terrace which had included the Kennedys’ and the Wiltshires’ houses, was now the core of an IBM and media-person enclave which, having discovered the simple unspoiled country town, changed its simple nature by living in it.
Monty’s house was the local office of a computer software manufacturer. She had glimpsed the Capability Brown park and outwardly unchanged Oaklands estate from a bridge over the river. Its days as a hospital long over, the mansion was now part of the brown, signposted tourist trail. Also unchanged was Markham’s other estate, where Dolly, Marie, Pammy and Trix had lived.
She did not go to see what had happened to the site of The Cedars.
One of the terrible consequences of wars was what happened to families like the Partridges and the Hardys… not that the two families had ever had much in common – except that in 1939 they had been intact.
Mrs Giacopazzi’s mind drifted as it often did when she was engaged in writing. By that last Christmas of the war, there wasn’t one of the women who had not had their heart broken. Only Ursula was not touched directly – her anguish was in seeing what had become of the women who had come and gone through the Town Restaurant kitchens.