DON smiled. Chris Rea's 'Driving Home for Christmas' was playing on the car radio and he was ready, very ready for Christmas.
Just the two of them, Don and his wife Jan, cocooned inside their smart, four bedroomed detached house.
THE faces looked out at him from the photograph. All six of them. But it was the girl on the left that had him transfixed.
Who was she, he pondered? A stupid thought really. Judging by the clothes the photograph was taken sometime in the 1920s. She would almost certainly be dead now or if not extremely old and wrinkly.
THE first time I saw Billy must have been about six years ago.
I’d just moved to the area to take up a job as a reporter on the local evening paper and I’d had to do a vox pop – getting quotes from people on a particular subject.
She was one of those pretty and charming girls, born, as though fate had blundered over her, into a family of artisans. She had no marriage portion, no expectations, no means of getting known, understood, loved, and wedded by a man of wealth and distinction; and she let herself be married off to a little clerk in the Ministry of Education. Her tastes were simple because she had never been able to afford any other, but she was as unhappy as though she had married beneath her; for women have no caste or class, their beauty, grace, and charm serving them for birth or family. their natural delicacy, their instinctive elegance, their nimbleness of wit, are their only mark of rank, and put the slum girl on a level with the highest lady in the land.