NOTE: This is my attempt at allegory. It's not exactly Orwell....
When you looked at an A-Z street map of Wilton, Laurel Close was in box A1. On its own there, too, apart from a tiny stretch of Geldof Street which it branched off from. It was literally the last street in town, or the first, depending on how you viewed things. Certainly the residents of Laurel Close saw themselves as A1 people. They looked down on the town physically too. A cul-de-sac of eight identical houses with a commanding view of one of the Midlands least interesting towns, Laurel Close was built in the late eighties when suddenly the house builders of Britain decided that what people really wanted was to live in a street that looked a lot like something out of a popular daytime Australian soap opera.
In the twenty or so years since, hardly anyone had moved from the street. The last people to move on were the Tebbits at No. 8. They were a nice, quiet old couple but they stood out a bit among the suburban professionals behind the other sets of net curtains. They kept themselves to themselves, which meant the district coroner had no blame to attach anywhere when they were found blissfully asleep in a carbon monoxide haze.
In their place had moved the Fields. A quiet couple, Ian was something in engineering apparently and Anna brought up the kids. Anna´s father was the late Mr. Tebbit and as he´d bought the house outright with his retirement package, it was only logical that his only child and her family should move into her inheritance.
The Fields seemed the perfect family. It was all the Committee could have dreamed of.
The Committee started out as a kind of Neighbourhood Watch scheme after a spate of attempted break-ins in the area back in the early nineties. These criminal activities served to break the ice as up to that point, the inhabitants of the street didn´t really know each other apart from the occasional nod of the head as they parked their cars in their drives.
It was the Freeman´s idea to hold a barbecue. They invited everyone in the street and it was such a success that it became an annual event, the Laurel Close barbecue.
Everyone liked the Freemans Simon and Carolyn. Simon was a deputy headmaster at the local comprehensive and was instrumental in setting up the Committee. Carolyn used to be a teacher herself until the twins, Toby and William, were born. The Freemans lived a life of harmonious order. Look, there´s Simon in his cricket whites, it´s Sunday. Look, there´s Carolyn in the Mandela with the boys in their judo kits, which means it´s Thursday, and Simon´s playing squash with Derek Ingle.
Derek Ingle lived at No. 2 with his wife Jacqueline. Although everyone got on fine in Wilton Close, it was generally but secretly agreed that the Ingles and the Freemans were the very closest of friends. They lived alone, now that Jason was at University. Derek was a solicitor and his wife stayed at home and did something called sugar craft.
Elsewhere in the cul-de-sac were the Chapmans, the Frenches, the Sandersons, the Fricks and the Russells. They were all wonderful people to know and be neighbours with.
It was the first weekend of summer and Simon Freeman awoke with something approaching excitement. The sound of synchronised mowers from the Frick and Chapman households spurred him into action. He went out of the front door, leaving it open, and into the garage adjacent to the house. There was his Supremow, gleaming with the promise of something called advanced blade performance. He wheeled it out on to the drive and then, lifting it over the terracotta tiling that bordered the lawn, placed it perfectly in the A1 position of his front garden.
At the exact moment he started the motor, his neighbours killed their own. They moved toward him across the semi-circle of road that they shared. Simon felt a rare discomfort, an uncertainty as to the right thing to do. He knew what they were going to ask him; it was a question he had spent the winter months mulling over.
The annual Laurel Close barbecue was always held the first weekend of the school summer holidays. It was a joyous, harmonious affair as only the residents of the street were invited. They always had A1 weather, not a cloud in the sky. No vegetarian option was necessary for the people of Laurel Close were carnivores to a man. Over the years, though the hosting of the barbecue changed hands, certain traditions had evolved. Music was always provided by Martin French, who made a cracking compilation tape of predictable summer themed rock music for the first barbecue and, even now, weeks before the next one was due to happen, could be seen of an evening looking for a copy of ´Summertime Blues´� to illegally download off the internet.
Michael Sanderson ran a vintner´s in the town. It was an off-license really, but he sold some expensive wines to justify his classification in the Yellow Pages. Michael always supplied the booze, never asked for a donation, and wrote it off as a promotional campaign for his Inland Revenue forms.
The last barbecue had been held at the Frick´s. Nigel Frick was a bank manager and his wife Nikki ran a training consultancy company that charged blue chip clients a fortune to get their staff to do things called �´profit visualisation exercises´ and ´mental ambition head storms´�. What a mental ambition head storm amounted to was getting bored junior managers and ambitious cashiers to write down their career goals on post-it notes and stick it on the palms of their hands for the day.
As usual, the sun had shone brightly on the Frick´s garden come barbecue day the year before. Children splashed in the little paddling pool, the mums talked about sun factors and school league tables whilst the dads took turns to burn meat for fun.
It was the first barbecue that the Fields had been invited to. They´d lived on the close a few months now and were on first name terms with nearly everyone. Ian would leave for the industrial estate at the crack of dawn in his respectably expensive estate and Ann did the school run. They seemed decent people, but seemed content to keep themselves to themselves.
The barbecue was a chance to get to know the rest of the close a little better and Ann was looking forward to it.
No one could recall exactly what had triggered the episode, but the closing of Ian´s firm in the interim had given weight to the theory that the man had simply snapped at a difficult time.
It had been late in the afternoon and one of the children had fallen, grazing their chin on the corner of a rather ridiculous birdbath at the back of the Frick´s. Ann volunteered to get her first aid kit; after all it was only next door.
´Besides´�, she said, ´I can rescue my husband from the telephone.´�
Ian had disappeared almost an hour earlier to take a call on his mobile. The other guests would later, when recalling this incident secretly amongst themselves, add a dash of descriptive drama.
´I´ll never forget, when he looked at his mobile, all the colour just drained from him,´ said Carolyn Freeman to Helen Russell.
´I´m presuming it was something to do with his work. He just looked so awful, didn´t he Nikki?´ said Nigel.
An hour after Ann disappeared in search of the first aid box, Ian appeared in the Frick´s back garden with it in his hand. Leaving the little white box on a table beside some Friends of the Earth napkins, he gestured to his children to follow him into the house and the barbecue slowly cooled in the growing shade. Martin put his cassette back on, louder than before, but it was an empty gesture and everyone was secretly glad of the rain when it came.
No one was certain what actually happened back at the Fields house but the Committee felt they knew the truth. The Fields had had a blazing row and Ann�´s migraines and sunglasses were covering up the traces of her husband´s temper.
Now Nigel Frick and Barry Chapman stood on Simon Freeman´s drive, flip-flopped and sunglassed.
´So, are we going to ask them?´�
´Barry, we´ve got to ask them. It´s their turn. If we let someone else do it, then we will cause offence.”
Nigel peered backwards over his shoulder, indicating the Fields house as he did so.
´Simon, he hit his wife.´
´We don´t know that. Besides, it´s on the website now. He emailed me this morning, confirming his interest.´�
Simon had started a website to celebrate the close. Birthdays, barbecues, Christmases, committee meetings and later today he planned to set up a Laurel Close blog for the residents to record their own little diaries. He´d titled it ´Laurel Close And Personal´� and smiled with genuine pleasure at the thought of everyone else´s delight at this pun.
And now it was official. The Fields would host this year´s barbecue. It was their turn and that was that.
When the day came, the weather was once more at its very best. Ann left the house very early to drive to the supermarket and was gone for the whole morning.
Soon after three, the first guests turned up at the Fields. The Chapmans came armed with some beer and some flowers for Ann. The rest of the guests followed at regular, almost precise, intervals over the next forty-five minutes. Beer flowed, meat cooked, voices grew louder and children splashed each other in the enormous paddling pool at the far end of the garden.
It was a wonderful day. The back lawn hadn´t simply been mowed; it must have been manicured. Simon and Nigel made a mental note to ask what mower Ian was using. Simon felt certain it must be the Hero 920; Nigel thought it might be the Lawnstud 550.
One of the children asked if there were any onion rings and Ann went deathly pale.
´I knew I´d forgotten something. I´ll pop back out and get some,´ she said.
Before anyone could interject, she claimed it was no trouble.
´Cracking do, Ian. Cracking do´� smiled Simon.
´Thank you. Thank you for coming´ said Ian, looking back over his shoulder at his wife limping slightly as she made her way through the polished house towards the waiting car.
It was a wonderful day. The hours simply flew by, Ann returned quickly with three large boxes of onion rings and everyone smiled as she opened one, placing five of them on to the hot griddle. As the rings began to brown, she exchanged glances with her husband, the first signs of bruising beginning to show in the evening sky.