The village of Marston-on-the-Green was one of those quintessential English villages, situated in the home counties about forty miles north of London, and about five miles from the nearest town. It had all the usual village essentials, notably its church which could trace its history back well over seven hundred years, a combined shop and Post Office which also had a solitary petrol pump outside and the public house, The Fox and Hounds, which could trace its history back even further than the church. Its main asset though was the huge village green from which the village took its name and on which in the summer months of years gone by, cricket matches would be played between various teams of landed gentry from the surrounding villages on Sunday afternoons.
It was also the sort of village where everybody knew everybody else, and lots of people knew everyone else's business...or thought they did! Most people had lived in the village all of their lives, or like me, had married someone from the village and moved in.
I was a relative newcomer according to some in the village and had lived there during most of the nineteen fifties, through the swinging sixties and into the seventies. I was forty-five years old; my husband was born and brought up in the village but had sadly passed away when my only daughter was three years old. She too had grown up in the village but had married and now lived in the nearby town and I was now a doting grandmother of a two-month-old granddaughter.
Newcomers were often a subject of conversation with the various village gossips trying to outdo each other to find out all they could about the new interloper. Jenny Carrington was the latest addition to the village and had recently moved to the village with her daughter Lisa. Tongues were wagging fast and furiously as she had moved into a small cottage round the corner from me opposite the pub and there was no man in her life, and more importantly, no ring on her finger either!
I can well remember the first day that I met Lisa and Jenny. It was just after twelve o'clock on a warm Sunday lunchtime back in June 1976. It was on the twentieth to be exact and just before the start of what was to be two months of continuous hot weather in the UK, which in turn led to a drought in August of that year.
I was returning home from my usual Sunday visit to Church. As I turned the corner back into the street where my cottage was, I could see the pair of them waiting at the bus stop which was almost opposite my gate.
At first sight, I presumed Lisa to be around fourteen or fifteen years of age. She was not very tall, around four feet ten inches in height and she was wearing a dark blue jacket, not unlike a school uniform blazer and which was fastened with two buttons, a blue and white check dress, nude hosiery and black Mary Jane shoes. She had blond collar length hair which had a slight curl at the ends, and she wore a large straw hat with a blue band around the rim. She also had brilliant blue eyes and wore a pair of gold rimmed spectacles. She was standing next to her mother and as I approached, she moved closer and stood behind her.
Jenny on the other hand was a smart slim attractive brunette in her late thirties. She was around five feet seven inches tall with naturally curly hair which was a similar length to Lisa's, and she was dressed in a smart summer dress and white high heeled shoes.
"Good Morning!" I said cheerily as I reached the bus stop. "It looks as though it's going to be another scorcher today!"
"Good morning, yes it does, doesn't it, and they say it will get hotter during the middle of the week," said Jenny.
"I know," I said. "Still I'd rather have this than rain!"
Little did I know then that a couple of months later we would be crying out for it!
Lisa was standing quietly clutching the strap of a small brown shoulder bag which was on her right shoulder. She was looking down at the ground but every now and then, I would catch sight of her looking towards me. If our gaze met, she would quickly look away and down again.
"Hello," I said to her. "Are you enjoying the nice weather too?"
Lisa said nothing and continued looking down at the pavement.
"Say hello to the nice lady, Lisa," said her mother.
Still there was no response.
"She can be like this sometimes," said Jenny. "There are times when she can talk for England and then when you want her to shut up, she doesn't, and yet another time when you want her to talk, she'll come across all shy."
"Children are like that sometimes," I said. "My Caroline was the same when she was your daughter's age. She could be very quiet, moody even, then when she turned sixteen, she became a different person. She's married now with a young baby so I suppose she will have the same issues with my granddaughter as I did with her."
"Lisa is older than that," said Jenny. "She will be twenty in September this year."
I was quite surprised to hear that, given her height, mode of dress, and the fact that she had nothing of any size visible in the breast department, hence my mistaking her for a younger schoolgirl.
Lisa has a height impediment," Jenny added in a low voice so that Lisa couldn't hear her. "She'll never grow any taller and it's so difficult to get adult clothes in her size that most of the time she wears young teenager's clothes. Lots of people think she's ten years younger!"
We stood chatting about nothing in particular for a few minutes until the bus came and they boarded, and I crossed the road to my cottage. The following week, Lisa and Jenny were there once more and over the next couple of weeks Jenny opened up a little more to me. She was thirty-nine years old and was a single mum. She had had one brief drunken encounter when she was eighteen with her boss after a Christmas party and Lisa had been the result. He was a married man who had two grown up children at the time. He had made sure that both Jenny and Lisa were both well provided for and they were always impeccably turned out in smart summer dresses whenever I saw them.
As a child, Lisa had also suffered from behaviour problems and had mild learning difficulties which resulted in her being taken into a children's home for much of her young life. She was now considered 'well enough' to be allowed to live at home with Jenny but would be collected by a special minibus to attend a Day Centre during the week to enable Jenny to go to work. Every Sunday they would catch the bus to visit her grandmother in the nearby town and have lunch with her.
When the bus arrived, we would say our goodbyes. Often Lisa would say nothing, although she did manage a little wave on one occasion as the bus set off and I waved back to her. I would often think about the pair of them. Life could not have been easy for Jenny especially having to cope with her daughter's issues and with her being taken into care at a young age.
About a month after we first met, the local council installed a seat at the bus stop in memory of a village resident who had passed away earlier in the year. I came past one Sunday lunchtime and Lisa was sitting on it, swinging her legs back and forth and with her hands either side of her on the front of the leading bar while Jenny stood at the bus stop looking out for the bus. I said my usual greeting to them both and stood talking to Jenny. Once or twice, Lisa would give me a glance and then look down again.
