Читать книгу The Oaken Heart онлайн

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Reg's grocer's shop, the Auburn Stores, is in the Square too, and so is the Queen's Head, which stands back in its own yard with a great sign swinging on a rather nice post which the brewers put up.

The Post Office is next door to the Queen's, and it does look a little as if it had come off a toffee tin. It has bow windows with small panes, one of which has been taken out to let in a red tin letterbox, and at one time it must have been a very important shop. Auburn is perhaps a little like that; not degenerate or decaying, but "retired." Most of the medium-sized houses used to be shops in the days when the ten miles to the town meant ten miles on foot or astride. Norry says that when he was "a little owd boy" the man who had Reg's shop had five assistants, each with a clean white tablecloth apron every Monday morning, and it was "Forward One, please" and "Two, are you serving?" which sounds mightily impressive and, considering the size of the building, astonishing.

As well as the Queen's there are two other pubs, which is plenty, since there are only six hundred odd of us counting the outlying farms, and a large percentage of the population is elderly and stays at home. One of these inns, the Thatcher's, is kept by Norry's brother Jack and their two sisters, Miss Vic and Miss Susie, and there they've got the ham in the glass case. This ham was cured for the christening of one of Norry's uncles, but never cooked or eaten because of a word or two over Church or Chapel which delayed the ceremony indefinitely. The ham has been there for ninety years and has shrunken till it is no bigger than a brown leathery hand, which it resembles.