The Hurlingstone
Spinsters

The land upon which the Edwardian houses now stood had once been owned by a peer of the realm.  Gladys reproached herself for not being able to recall his name, not least because her elderly grandfather had tried to drum it into her often enough as they strolled hand-in-hand through the Lord’s picturesque parkland years earlier.  At that time, Gladys still lived in town, in a house of her mother’s choosing not hers.  A dark, cluttered, early Victorian affair, it was a place Gladys never really warmed to.  Not so the new houses her excited eyes contemplated now.  Coinciding with Edward the Seventh’s arrival came a change in architecture that charmed the moment she set eyes upon it.  Clean, bright, and with tall sash windows to both front and rear, light seemed to stream into the rooms from just about everywhere.  Equally refreshing were the nearby meadows.  Visible from where the top of the road under construction would eventually form a T-junction with the existing thoroughfare, their sprawling fields and varying hues of green offered a welcome change from the grime-laden, dingy streets Gladys had always known.

         It was still there, the park, smaller in acreage than it used to be when she walked its intricately woven pathways with her grandfather, but still a sizeable area nonetheless.  The new house she liked the most was an end-of-terrace, which is how Gladys’s mother insisted it should be called when anyone asked.  The most recent in a long row of recently completed homes, Gladys had watched the building come out of the ground long before her mother’s decision had been made, the one that meant they would actually be moving there!

         Gladys still lived in the town at that stage, but would come up with her mother on one of her many excursions to her friends in the country; that was how her mother always referred to them whenever they were mentioned or letters were exchanged; never Mr and Mrs Roberts, always our friends in the country.  Gladys would occasionally poke fun at her mother, referring to the Roberts’ as the rich friends in the country, but only within the privacy of their own four walls, and only when at a safe running distance from her mother.

      The excavations first caught Gladys’s attention just after her sixteenth birthday.  Ardent eyes watched mountains of earth being shifted around by countless numbers of workers, endless groups of toil-hardened men digging out what seemed to be holes as wide and as deep as the icy crevasses she had read about in books.  Tons of stones went in next, all of which seemed to vanish into the mud and filth below until, one day, amid mounds of soil and heaps of bricks and sand, it all started to make sense.  Shapes were forming, rectangles of mortared bricks whose red-fired faces sneaked their first, darkened glimpses of the world, and whose roots lay buried in hidden caverns far below.  These would be the cellars, she realised, skeletons of masonry that would eventually form the foundations of other people’s homes, other people's lives.

       When during her next visit, she saw the long line of roof-tiles laid atop the recently completed brickwork beneath, everything fell into place for Gladys.  She knew exactly how this road would be and could quite easily imagine how it would look when complete.  There would be smooth-topped cobble-stones along its centre, bordered by neatly laid, sliced-granite paving slabs either side of the road.  A row of ornate cast-iron street lamps would break the monotony of the cement-grey pavements, their funnelled glass lenses lighting the way at night for ladies such as she.

        Gladys smiled at the notion. 

​

​Look inside on Draft2Digital: