In Search of Love, Money & Revenge by Hilary Bailey

Author:Hilary Bailey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

14

The Savernake War Begins

The following Sunday, Vanessa, Alec, Joanne and Melanie and her friend Viv and Annie all went for a picnic in Savernake Park. The temperature was in the 90°s and the grass was covered with little groups of people, some lying getting suntans, playing the radio, or tapes. There were children eating ices, playing on the swings further down, people walking dogs, losing control of dogs, all in bright sunshine.

‘There must be hundreds here,’ Vanessa said. ‘Oh – get away!’ Alec was crying because an Alsatian was trying to eat his ice-cream. Vanessa looked round for the owner. No one seemed to be in charge. ‘Oh, God, look at that!’ she appealed as the dog stopped four feet away, squatted and trotted on, leaving a pile of steaming excrement.

A small girl in a baseball cap and party frock sat down beside her. ‘Disgusting, isn’t it?’ she said.

A boy swinging a big ghetto blaster walked past calling, ‘Charlie!’ above the music. A boy and two girls in shorts and T-shirts shouted back from the plaid rug on which they were reclining. Annie lay on her back, looking at a bird flying overhead.

‘I like it a little bit better at Froggett’s,’ Joanne said to her. ‘You can’t get ice-creams, but the animals are nicer and it’s more quieter. It’s sometimes nice when it’s really quiet and you can only hear birds.’

‘This isn’t bad, for the middle of a city,’ Annie said. She turned her head, glimpsing the two white towers of the Savernake Estate to her right, across the huge sweep of grass covered with people. When the great house of the Rodwells had been torn down in the fifties it had been derelict, one corner sheared off by a war-time bomb. No one at that time had questioned the decision to pull down a stately home in order to build the Savernake Estate on the site. Now, the house would be preserved. In the fifties, Annie imagined, people were accustomed to the idea of bombed buildings; reconstruction was a priority, the whole city must have been full of sites ripe for redevelopment.

Ben Gathercole was putting a print of the old Savernake House in the Kenton Post. It had been a long, low, eighteenth-century building with big windows all along the ground floor, a porticoed entrance and a semi-circle of stone in front for the carriages. It had been built broadside on to the river and Annie wondered why they’d placed it deliberately to avoid facing the water. The Thames wouldn’t have been banked by then. Was it to discourage people who might see the lighted windows and come ashore to rob them, to avoid direct blasts of the smell from the sewage-filled river in summer, or fear of facing that disease-carrying miasma said to come from such rivers?

It must have been nice in summer, Annie thought. Not so jolly in winter, with fog coming thickly from the water, and wet, dank fields all round. Today you could hardly see the river for vast office blocks.

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