HEART of the community
It was a warm evening and as she walked home from work, Viv saw noisy drinkers crammed into small gardens and dusty terraces outside the bars.
What I wouldn t give for a cold drink in a lovely country pub,’ she thought. ‘Somewhere with green grass and a river with ducks.’
No chance of that in the crowded East End of London, where she’d lived all her life. Back in her flat, she kicked off her shoes and went to water the plants in pots on her balcony, wishing, as always, that she had more space for things to grow. Now her two daughters had moved away and had children of their own, her geraniums and gerberas were all she had left to care for.
Her phone rang and she saw it was Polly, her eldest. ‘I was just thinking about you,’ she told her.
Polly wanted to tell her about little George’s first day at nursery. ‘They said he was fine all day, but when I picked him up, he burst into tears,’ she said. ‘He announced he wasn’t going back and wanted Granny to look after him instead.’
‘Bless him,’ Viv laughed, but she felt a pang. She’d missed them all terribly since they’d moved nearly 200 miles away. Polly and her family lived in a pretty village, while Clara, her husband and twin girls were in a market town a few miles to the west.
Viv felt torn because, while they were always begging her to sell up and join them, her life in London, working in the bridal shop, was all she’d ever known. She’d started as an apprentice at 16 and now, 40 years later, she was the manager.
Her husband might have scarpered, but her parents had stayed in their little terraced house around the corner right until the end. She couldn’t pop to the shops without bumping into someone she knew. She loved being at the centre of things and in the
