The Fox, the Goose and the Milkman

We drove through the village in John’s old Bedford van. To a Kiwi girl,  Broom was magical. With its stone cottages and well- kept gardens, it was full of old-worldy charm. Even the cricket pavilion and bus stop had thatched roofs. We turned into a winding drive between  hedgerows and came to a stop in front of Broom Hall.

We entered a grand foyer, resplendent with chandelier, and took the big sweeping staircase to the first floor. John’s bedsit had a high ceiling, polished floors and a fold away bed. A large wooden table took up much of the room; and the kitchen wasn’t big enough to change your mind in.   The bath room was no bigger than a walk-in wardrobe, and contained one of those old free standing tubs on legs. There was no television and the only telephone was in the down-stairs foyer. It’s one window, opened onto a croquet lawn and beyond to the grounds of  Old Warden estate.

I set to work turning this bachelor pad into a place we could share and call our own. Although I had known John only a short time in the scheme of things, we had communicated by phone and letter, and spent time together touring the countryside; the one thing that I had picked up, more than anything else, was that he was ready to share his life with another.

 The first thing I did was to remove an old car engine from under the sink.  I threw out old newspapers and begin to introduce food to the refrigerator.  The bed linen was washed, and the floors scrubbed. Only then did I truly move in and slowly the pad became our home.

 Our window got the morning sun and the uneaten toast went out onto the ledge where the birds gathered to preen themselves.

 Broom was much older than I’d thought, established in 1086 with a population of approximately fifty people and thirty pigs. When John lived there he was one of about 450. There were no pigs, to my knowledge, but there was a fox. It could be seen in the early evening trotting across the green and from a distance could be mistaken for a cat. At night in the winter, we could hear him calling to his mate.

Then there was the goose, a surly bird.  I had heard it said, never turn your back on a goose and now I knew why. From the village’s phone box,- clearly the centre of its world- it bailed the unsuspecting passerby. It was nesting season and though we never knew exactly where the broad was we regarded the phone box as her territory, using it only in emergencies.