Ellen walked up King Street, head bent into the punishing wind, one gloved hand clutching the collar of her coat to keep it closed around her throat. They were told on the wireless their part of the country was getting off lightly.
It was past midday and the girls had come out of the clothing factory in which Ellen herself had worked before her marriage. They scattered into the web of lanes and yards, sucked from the streets for their dinner-break. There were few men other than the dole brigade, propping up the Vic and the Vaults, congregated at the mouth of Meeting House Lane, leaning against the railings of the George Moore Memorial Monument, better known as the Fountain, from where they chronicled the daily history of their town in pedagogic detail. Everybody knew Ellen. Most greeted her, no hello, how do? how are you? just plain, even gruff, ‘Ellen’ and a nod. Her name chimed her up the street.
There was a queue outside the Co-op and normally she would have enquired and almost certainly joined it but time was tight between the morning cleaning job and the afternoon work in the chemist’s shop and she had a mission.
She forced herself not to glance into the cobbled yard where the house of her dreams stood, still empty and for ever out of her reach. It was just too bad. That was that. ‘Ellen’, ‘Ellen’, ‘Ellen’ as she ran the gauntlet between the Fountain and the King’s Arms. She wondered they had not turned to stone, the men, in the deep cold of the day. Every single one, she smiled, had their hands in their pockets. Not one pair of gloves between the lot of them. ‘Ellen’. ‘Ellen’. She liked their knowing her that well.
Ellen had always admired West Street. There was something grand about it - the pillars outside the Mechanics’ Institute and the columned doorways of the houses opposite. And just beyond, the sandstone simplicity of the Quaker Meeting House. Ellen had been at school with some of the Quakers and, privately, when she took a view of the religious sects in the town - the Roman Catholics with their nunnery at St Cuthbert’s down the East End, the Primitive Methodists in New Street next to the police station, the Salvation Mission between the factory and Ivinson’s stables in Station Road, the Congregationalists in Water Street beside the pig auction, the Methodists in Southend next to the girls’ grammar school, the Salvation Army in Meeting House Lane right down at the bottom, the Plymouth Brethren in George Street up some steps, the Adventists next to the river Wiza, in Union Street, and beside the ancient market-place, still used seven hundred years on, the centrepiece, her own church St Mary’s, C. of E., where she had sent Joe to be in the choir in response to a call for trebles - when she considered all these competing houses of God, interpreting His word to the Wigton five thousand in so many different ways, not only dominating Sunday but colonising every day of the week with morning communions and evening youth clubs, seasonal rummage sales, whist drives, dances, outings, choirs, football teams, flower arrangements, Bible classes -when everything was accounted for, Ellen secretly plumped for the Quakers. She had been in the building once only when Noreen Morrison had broken her arm and they were stuck for someone to clean. Mrs Johnston, whose house she did twice a week, was a Quaker and asked Ellen for a favour.
She walked past it swiftly, on her way west, past the high wall of Wigton Hall, a place beyond dreams, no more than a peep over a wall, but the memory of the Quaker Meeting House stayed with her. Something about the recollection was tender. As she went down the hill from Wigton Hall, past Ma Powell’s field, which was the shortcut they used to take (but only when feeling bold) to get to the park, she visualised that Quaker cleaning. Such a silence in the room. As if it had been worked up, over the years, Ellen thought, and preserved, sealed in this place, its own private quiet. But no altar. She had looked everywhere - even opened cupboards. No altar. No cross. Just chairs. Not even hassocks to kneel on or cushions to soften the hard wood. Plain chairs. Books, a few books. There was little to clean.
Noreen had come in, for company, arm heavily strapped in a white sling. She explained that at a Quaker meeting people simply sat there and spoke ‘when the spirit moved them’. She told Ellen a little about their history and what an important part Cumberland had played in it and referred to Philadelphia and Pacifism and Quaker porridge oats, but it was ‘when the spirit moved them’ that had captured Ellen’s imagination.
There were fields which acted like a moat, between Wigton Hall and the next cluster of houses known as Western Bank. The old town had ended. Ellen passed the Famous Copper Beech at the bottom of Ma Powell’s field, which she had looked up to every time she sped by on her way to the park. The park had been the daily destination in school holidays and the Show Fields across the way presented the lure of the circus that came every autumn and then camped down for a couple of months - all familiar, familiar as the Fountain and just as ‘Wigton’, yet Ellen felt outside the walls of her town. As a girl she would scurry back up the hill from the park in the evenings as if afraid invisible gates would be closed against her.
The wind grew fiercer. On Western Bank she arrived at the settlement of houses built before the war. Sam and herself could have had one for ten pounds down and a just affordable rent but they had opted for rooms that had been dreadful. Yet it turned out for the best. When Sam joined up, Ellen had moved back into her aunt and uncle’s large semi-guesthouse where she had spent most of her childhood - a house in the heart of the old town. She had been happy there. And safe, with Joe.
Now on the last lap of her mission, the exposed part of her face cemented in cold, she went past unattainable detached houses: the Miss Moffats’, one of whom had taught her at school and was now teaching Joe; Mr Farrell's - he who owned the sawmill and had taken a fancy to Sam before the war, offered him a job she wished he had taken because there was no shift work; Glen Ritson’s newly-built house - he was her age, the solicitor’s son who had been sent away to public school and spent four years in a prisoner-of-war camp after having been shot down in a bombing raid, a fine big man, Ellen thought, always pleasant; and on past houses less grand but no less desirable to Ellen, until she came to a gate.
She looked through it at the field. In the foreground, a small herd of Jerseys clustered around some recently dumped hay. In the distance, machinery, a hut and a scattering of men indicated that work was starting up. This would be the next big council estate. Brindlefield, up Southend, which had already taken some of the irredeemably overcrowded Water Street residents, was already spoken for; the lists for Kirkland, to the east of the town, were reported to be full although her uncle Leonard, with his clerking and council contacts, had hinted that it was still a possibility; but this, to the west, was a clean start.
Ellen stared at it. She wanted to be attracted to it. She wanted something to happen as she looked at that field. Something which said, ‘Come and live here: it’ll be fine. It’s almost a mile from the town but the walk is one you like and you’ve done it hundreds of times. You can always bike it. Put a basket on the front. There’ll be other young families here. You’ll still go to the same shops up in Wigton, see the same faces, be part of the same town.’ But as the wind buffeted her and she felt the cold gripping her feet, she could not shake off, however hard she tried, a persistent fear that the burrowing, intense, common, close life and stories and net of the town would no longer quite belong to her. Even in prospect she already missed them.
Ellen shook her head in exasperation. After all that Sam had been through - and millions of others - how could she be so feeble? This bond to the old town had already put her marriage at risk, a risk of which Alex’s letter had again made her aware.
She stamped warmth back into her feet and made up her mind for this wintry field. They would live at the very edge of the town. She would beat down the childish fear. It had almost been a curse.
She turned and hurried away. The wind was behind her now and suddenly she laughed aloud as it pushed into her back and almost made her stumble. She had been thinking ‘as the spirit moved her’.
The new estate would be called Greenacres.