It faced the village green. Years before, there had been a butcher’s shop next door, and a hardware shop up the road towards the church. The older residents could even remember the days when there had been a ladies’ outfitters called Meryl Modes in a building that had since been flattened to create the pub car-park. These shops had long since gone. They had been reabsorbed into the cottages, leaving no trace except enlarged ground floor windows – in one case, regrettably glazed with bottle-glass. The hardware store was now the weekend retreat of a City solicitor whose intruder lights froze the local courting couples in its beam. This was just another irritant for the villagers who had seen their shops disappear and public transport reduced to two buses a day. Now, only the General Stores remained. In summer it did a brisk trade in ice-cream but the rest of the year it struggled to survive, relying on the elderly locals collecting their pensions and the other villagers dropping in for things they had forgotten to buy at Tesco.
