THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

At a time when energy prices are disgustingly hight the girl next door has a solution.

Ian had known the girl next door in a sort of distant not-really- knowing way since he’d been so small he could only toddle because his family had always lived next door to her. She wasn’t a great deal older than him, but just enough to make the difference.

When he was five and started school she was considered old enough to babysit him occasionally, and she did that, earning pocket money that her hard-pressed parents couldn’t afford to give her. Ian quite liked it when she babysat because she totally ignored his bed time and at the same time teased him about being too young to watch the more interesting television programmes which were shown a great deal later than even she let him stay up.

It was when he was about ten that Ian began to notice a little more about her. The girl next door, Jane she was called, was pretty. She was more than easy on the eye and he put her in a compartment inside his mind which included other easy-on-the eye things like steam trains and footballers.

It wasn’t that he was any good at paying football himself, but there was something about the expression on the faces of famous footballers that told him a story. It told him they were successful because what they did took effort. And as that year passed and he celebrated his eleventh birthday it crossed his mind that Jane must be putting quite a lot of effort and concentration into life because she had a boyfriend called Dick, and Dick played football, albeit at not quite the same level as his heroes

When he was at last a teenager with the word teen after the number of his age it became more than Jane being just pretty but she entered a new group: she was beautiful and he wanted to hold her hand and stroke her hair, but couldn’t because it seemed that she was still obsessed by Dick (who seemed to call on her all the time, wearing a sotr of white and blue uniform which probably meant he was on his way to or from work, and a rumour went around that he’d marry her if her family wasn’t so poor.

And no sooner had Ian heard that rumour than Dick stopped putting in his near daily appearance altogether. So Ian decided to find out why. Maybe, he wondered idly, she wanted a new boyfriend and, well, wasn’t he a boy?

He caught Jane on the way out of her gate, going to work, dressed for the summer (which it was, though autumn wasn’t so far away} in a blue denim dress which looked smart from the distance but a little ragged round the edges when seen close to, and her shoes also gave the appearance of being well-worn.

She was quite old enough to work and get paid for it, something that still lay beyond the rainbow for Ian, who was still at that dreaming of being a train driver stage even though steam trains were rapidly being consigned to history and to him they were the only kind of train worth driving.

“What’s happened to Dick?” he asked, and she turned to face him and smiled that what he had once thought was a pretty smile and now saw was a beautiful one.

“You are nosy,” she said, “why, do you want to take his place?”

And he saw the frown on her face.

“I’m sorry, Jane,” he replied, “I should have thought.”

She gave him a nearly-smile, one that played around the corners of her mouth before collapsing, and walked on.

Which made him pop into his own home and accost his mother.

“What’s wrong with Jane?” he asked.

“You mean Jane next door, Ian?” his mother asked, “well, you won’t have noticed because you were at school last week, but there was a funeral next door. Her father died a week or so ago. He’d been ill for ages.”

It was then that Ian remembered that he hadn’t seen the man next door for, what would it be, as his mother had said, ages.

“Oh dear,” he said, “and I asked her why Dick wasn’t calling any more.”

“Dick? Who’s Dick?” asked her mother.

“Her boyfriend,” Ian told her, “the man who was always going round to see her, the man she was going to marry,”

“Oh dear. You’ve got it quite wrong, you’ve listened to too many rumours,” smiled his mother as she tidied the kitchen table, “Dick wasn’t going to see her! He was going to see her father. He was a nurse!”

“But aren’t nurses all ladies?” asked Ian.

“There are male nurses too,” her mum said, “and it was only right that Jane’s father had a man for a nurse, what with him being a man too.”

“Oh dear,” thought Ian, “I’d best apologise to her then.”

“And be careful what you say. Her father hasn’t worked for ages and her mother couldn’t go out to work because she needed to look after him. They’re really quite poor, you know.”

“Oh dear,” mumbled Ian, and he waited to see Jane when she returned from work. Thankfully it wasn’t a school day, and he busied himself weeding the borders of their own front garden.

Jane came by just as he’d hoped, wearing that same blue denim dress, and singing quietly to herself. He went up to the fence that bordered the pavement and said, as she walked past, “I’m ever so sorry.”

She paused and that nearly smile returned to her face.

“What for?” she asked.

“Being a prat,” he said shyly. “I didn’t know… mum told me … I’m so sorry.”

“When you were a little boy and I used to babysit I thought you were a really nice little fellow,” she said, “and maybe you still are.”

“Is there anything I can do?” he asked, “you know, to help you like you used to help my parents when they went out”

She giggled. “Look, I’m twenty and you want to babysit me?” she asked.

“I thought with your dad, you know…” he mumbled weakly.

“Oh Ian, you’re so sweet!” she giggled again, “but yes, if you want, you can wait here until I get our wheel barrow and then you can come with me down to the woods and help me pick some kindling. That would be kind of you.”

“Kindling?” he asked.

“Yes. Wood that’s fallen from trees. I’ll bring an axe as well as a sack too, and you can help chop up big bits. You see, Ian, we don’t have much money coming in at the moment, only what I earn, which isn’t much, and it gets cold in the later evening even though it’s quite warm now. But we’ve got a fireplace so we can burn kindling. It helps to keep mum warm, and we can’t hope to afford to switch the central heating on.”

“Of course,” he said, wondering how come a person like Jane couldn’t afford to keep warm when the weather turns cold. “I’ll bring a sharp saw if it helps,.” he added.

The woods weren’t very far, just round a couple of corners and over a rickety fence that couldn’t keep a mouse out, and they easily managed to heave the wheelbarrow over a low section.

It wasn’t easy finding her kindling, though. Others had been foraging in what wasn’t a huge area of woodland, but there was one fairly substantial fallen tree, and Ian set to sawing and chopping it with a will, whilst Jane filled most of her rather small sack with scraps of dead wood that she found lying around.

After a great deal of hacking with Jane’s thankfully sharp axe Ian more than half-filled the wheelbarrow with quite large chunks of fairly dry wood, and the two returned the long way round having to go through a gate rather than climb the fence they’d entered by on account of the barrow being so heavy.

“That’s been sweet of you,” Jane said when they got back to her front gate, “I can put some of this in the coal shed for another day.”

“I’ll come again if you want,” he said.

“That’s so sweet of you,” smiled Jane, using the word sweet again, and she did the impossible. She leaned towards Ian, and kissed him on the cheek, which sent all his newly developing hormones coursing through his young body until he blushed scarlet.

“Crikey,” she said, noticing, “I’ll have to do that again!”

Maybe she did and maybe she didn’t, but that autumn and winter she and her mother survived without freezing to death, which was a positive outcome for the 21^st century.

© Peter Rogerson 21.09.22

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