Human Croquet Read Free

tract of land where Fairfax Manor once stood and making a country park where the people of Glebelands could clean their sooty lungs and exercise their rickety limbs. He was hoping that this would be his living memorial – Fairfax Park , he murmured happily as he looked over possible designs for the massive wrought-iron entrance gates and just as he pointed to a particularly rococo pattern (‘Restoration’) his heart stopped beating and he fell face first on to the pattern book. The park was never built.
    Gas lamps were overtaken by electric ones, the Fairfaxes failed to see the new technology coming and grew slowly poorer until, in 1880, one Joseph Fairfax, grandson to Samuel, realized where the future lay and put the remaining family money into retail – a small grocery shop in a side street. The business gradually prospered, and ten years later ‘Fairfax and Son – Licensed Grocers’ moved into the High Street.
    Joseph Fairfax had one son and no daughters. The son, Leonard, wooed and won a girl called Charlotte Tait, the daughter of the owner of a small enamelware factory. The Taits were of stern Nonconformist stock and Charlotte was not above lending a hand in the shop when required, although she soon fell pregnant with her eldest child, an ugly girl named Madge.
    The villagers of Lythe meanwhile waited for Glebelands to crawl across the remaining few fields towards them and swallow them up. While they were waiting a war happened and took three-quarters of the young men of Lythe (three to be precise) and as the war drew to a close no-one cared very much when most of the village, along with the land where Fairfax Manor had stood, was sold to a local builder.
    The builder, a man called Maurice Smith, had a vision, the dream of a master-builder – a garden suburb, an estate of modern, comfortable housing for the postwar, post-servant world of small families. Streets of detached and semi-detached houses with neat front gardens and large back gardens where children could play, Father could grow vegetables and roses and Mother could park Baby in his pram and take afternoon tea on the lawn with her genteel friends. On the land that once housed Sir Francis and his household, Maurice Smith built his streets of houses. Houses in mock-Tudor and pebble-dash stucco, houses with casement windows and porches and tiled vestibules. Houses with three and four bedrooms and the most up-to-date plumbing, porcelain sinks and efficient back boilers; cool, airy larders, and enamelled gas cookers.
    Streets with broad pavements and trees, lots of trees – a canopy of trees over the tarmac, a mantle of green around the houses and their happy occupants. Trees that would give pleasure, that could be observed in bud and new leaf, unfurling their green fingers on the streets of houses, raising their sheltering leafy arms over the dwellers within. Different trees for every street – Ash Street, Chestnut Avenue, Holly Tree Lane, Hawthorn Close, Oak Road, Laurel Bank, Rowan Street, Sycamore Street, Willow Road. The forest of trees had become a wilderness of streets.
    But at night, in the quiet of the dead time, if you listened carefully, you could imagine the wolves howling.
    The Lady Oak grew on, solitary and ancient, in the field behind the dog-leg of Hawthorn Close and Chestnut Avenue. Points of weakness in the tree had been plugged with cement and old iron crutches propped up its weary limbs but in summer its leafy crown was still green and thick enough for a rookery and at dusk the birds flew caw cawing into its welcoming branches.
    At the end of Hawthorn Close was the master-builder’s first house – Arden – the one he built as his showpiece, on the long-lost foundations of Fairfax Manor. Arden had fine parquet floors and light-oak panelling. It had a craftsman-built oak staircase with acorn finials and its turret follies were capped with round blue Welsh slates, overlapping like a dragon’s scales.
    The master-builder had intended