Walking north along Mill Lane gives a comprehensive view of the Weaver Hills, a final outcropping of the Pennines before the land descends southward to the Trent valley. In the years I’ve lived here I’m sure I’ve never seen them look so bare and brown, presumably because we’ve had the driest spring in Britain for sixty nine years.
Paradoxically, however, the barley growing in several fields alongside the lane is a very healthy bright green and growing well, with fully formed ears and beards. The blue-green wheat in other fields is showing no sign of ears yet, but it looks happy enough. And the maize seed which was sown a week or two ago is already germinating.
The hawthorn trees and bushes have been unusually heavily stacked with May flowers this year – in Mill Lane and everywhere else (which fact would be worth a post of its own, given the magnificent sights it’s produced.) What’s odd is that second showings are appearing which I don’t remember happening before. Maybe hawthorn likes dry springs. If I’d been aware of that sort of thing as a young lad I would have kept notes and would probably know by now.
And then there’s the mystery maid of Mill Lane who I’ve now seen twice. I first saw her about two weeks ago and at first thought it was the Lady B: same slender build, same height, same elegant, upright walk, same shoulder length dark hair. We were walking in opposite directions, and as we passed I saw that she was probably about fifteen years younger than said Lady. I intended to offer a greeting but she declined even to look at me, much less speak. And so I walked on (because gentlemen don’t accost young ladies – unless they have a dog with them, of course – but merely invite them to speak if they so wish.)
Today I saw her again, only she was following me this time. And she continued to follow me almost to the end of the road. When I stopped to talk to the sheep in the little paddock where the white pony used to be, I looked over my shoulder to see that she’d turned tail and was walking back the way she’d come. Evidently she had no intention of entering my orbit and saying ‘isn’t it a wonderful day, and did you see the three swallows flying above the lane earlier?’ Maybe she dislikes men. Maybe she dislikes old men. Maybe she’s been told that I’m the village weirdo and might behave unpredictably (though surely not inappropriately, surely not that; I’ve never given anybody the slightest hint of a reason to suspect I might be that sort of weirdo.)
The fact is, I’m familiar with most of the people who live at the bottom of the Shire where Mill Lane is situated, but I haven’t a clue who this young woman is. Maybe she’s a ghost, or somebody come through a dimensional or time shift. I thought the same about the young Chinese woman I saw wandering aimlessly around the environs of Mill Lane a few years ago, with no vehicle in sight. We don’t get Chinese women in the Shire – ever.
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