Читать книгу The Oaken Heart онлайн

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The Lion lies up at the other end of the village, on the way to the church. That's a very popular house, and was even more so before Cis joined the W.A.A.F.'s. There used to be another house called the Wheatsheaf, but the village sold the licence a long while ago and invested the money, so that since then we have been one of the few parishes in England which possess a little capital of their own. In our case this is not a large sum. It represents three or four thousand pounds at the outside, but it means that we have our own row of council houses up past the school, and it also means that we're not quite so beholden to the Rural District Council or even to the County Council as we might be. Parochially, we have money in our purse.

Our other public possessions include a railway, composed of one derailed coach (which quite recently contained a poster which enquired fatuously, "Why not winter in Prague?") and a very small train indeed which goes there and back in the morning and there and back at night. This train, or rather the line upon which it runs, and which links us with the main track five miles away in one direction and Flinthammock-on-Estuary one and a half in the other, was the subject of a tremendous battle in the 'eighties. Since then, what with the petrol engine and one thing and another, the Auburn Flyer has not been quite so important; but it still runs twice a day, a memorial to the public spirit, enterprise and unconquerable obstinacy of our grandparents in the wars of the council rooms.