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The spherical woman sat at a table adjacent to and just below the raised wooden platform at the end of the village hall. Constructed to make a stage for visiting acts, it was now all but redundant. Acts rarely visited. The village was too remotely placed and so removed from decent roads that enterta

Three men asked me to marry them. I said yes to them all. Vernon March whisked me to the altar in the month which matched his name. His courtship had soothed me like a breeze, flattered me into a flutter. I wore a green gown with a wreath of violets and primroses. They wilted nearly as fast as th

The most painful time is not the day you leave home. It is the one before when you know that you’re going the next day. That day you want to take in as much as you can of your home, both in terms of comfort and the sea of emotions you experienced during the few days you’ve spent there. A homesic

At the Gilberts   The Gilberts were eating pasta with their three children in the kitchen-diner of their newly built red-brick house in West London the evening I met them for the first time. They asked me to join them but I said I had already eaten. Sarah Gilbert made me a coffee, using fre

At the Hewitts   The Hewitts live in North London, in a big old house with high ceilings, long windows and a garden that has been photographed for a magazine. The carved oak dining room table came from the refectory of a French monastery and the teak four-poster bed was made in Goa. Mrs Hew

Every Tuesday and Thursday morning at ten o’clock before closing the front door Bill would call out: ‘I won’t be long’. The supermarket was a short walk to the end of the street. The grocery list hardly changed. He was a creature of habit in his eightieth year and he would always take his ti

‘Hiya Margery,’ the young woman called over the back-garden fence. ‘How’re you feeling?’ ‘Morning Tracey. I don’t feel too bad today. The pills help. I must be taking so many now it's a wonder the pharmacy has any left for anyone else.’ Margery paused, took off her gardening glove

I drive. You said you were tired, hadn’t slept all night. The journey to the Lakes takes longer than I remembered. There are more cars on the road, the lorries are bigger; they conspire to keep me in the slow lanes, and new underpasses baffle me. Between the shrug of a shoulder and a sigh, you

It was Chubby Checker who did it, as he has done many times before. As soon as The Twist started, the dance floor filled up. There were hoots and squeals, gyrating hips, flailing arms and a competition amongst some to see who could master the ‘round and round, and up and down’ manoeuvre. Most we