Ian Whitwham revisits the village where he grew up...
My mother must be turning in her grave.
Or it's turning round her
I had a note to this effect from the Parish Council.
"The headstone has tipped badly," it observed. I must "arrange for your stonemason to straighten it up to keep the Garden of Rest looking Neat."
I didn't know I had a stonemason.
So I zoom off to where my family were born and buried - for the first time in years. A proper English village of the fifties, with greens and vicars and cricket and a big conker tree and the church I was married in. Full of apple-face folk, rosy infants and Family Values dancing round the maypole.
Where you could leave your front door ajar without crackheads looting the Hovis.
The high street is now all estate agents and delis and software emporiums. And the lovely chestnut tree has fallen and turned into a car park full of chunky fat wagons and plump trucks.
I stop at the top of my road, and there's the house. My house.. A light goes off in my old room. A figure who is not my mother moves across some curtains. I should go down the path and knock - or just walk in. Sorry, you're time's up/ That's your lot. I just went down to the shops for thirty years.
I peer through the privet - smarter than when I used to attack it with a chainsaw. The law too is more crisp. Neater. My mother spent fifty years in the summers on this lawn knitting woollies, unitil one day all her hair fell off.
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