Re: Knowl Park

Postscript

Master Philip did not consider himself to be at all good looking. If asked, he would have replied that he thought his looks were at best, less than average.
As a result, he gave no thought to the notion that there might be some women who would find him attractive purely because of his character and good nature rather than because of his looks.
The image of the pretty girl from the tea rooms suddenly appearing in his mind had made him realise that it was in fact the case. Although he had not been the slightest bit interested in her, he realised now that the converse had been true.
In that instant, he had suddenly understood the anguish his young friend had suffered when he went off to college, terrified that he would come back with another woman on his arm.
Whilst it would have made no difference at the time, simply because of her age, he realised he could have told her some-time after she had turned sixteen, when he found that he was beginning to have feelings for her that were no longer just platonic. He could have told her he intended to wait for her as his father had waited for his mother after they first met.

On a beautiful moonlit Summer’s night, with his arms around her, four days before her eighteenth birthday, he had told Amanda for the first time that he loved her.
Her answer is known only to the two of them, and to the soft breeze that carried her words way.

As for those two words that changed Amanda’s life? The two words Philip had so softly whispered into her ear on the station platform? The two words she imagined emblazoned on her bedroom door? The two words he had given in reply to his former landlady when she had asked him if Amanda was his Sweetheart?

The tears on Amanda’s pillow that night had been ones of joy, not anguish, for those two words had been, “Not yet.”
She was happy because she knew then that he was waiting for her.

They courted for a year, became engaged, then were married two months before Amanda turned twenty.

They named their first two children William and Millie after their best friends, then named their third child Amanda after her mother.

Their friends married a few years later, and named their two children after William’s parents who had died when he was still young.

Both couples married in the small private chapel at the manor house, but not in secret.

The two couples had cottages built on the estate a short distance apart, and in time their children all became friends as well.


© February 2021

Re: Knowl Park

Author's Notes

The idea for this story originally came to me from a random thought I had about a year ago along the lines of, “I wonder what my life would have been like had I been born a hundred years earlier.”

During Lockdown 1, I then started to make up stories in my head to stop my brain from seizing up, based around this idea, gradually expanding on how I might have met my wife and friends, and the type of adventures we might have had.

All the surnames are made up, but many of the first names are based on real people from my family tree, and my life. For example,

Thomas and Albert were the grandfathers I never knew
Arthur and Samuel were my great uncles, and farmers.
Victor was a great uncle who won a medal for bravery as an unarmed stretcher bearer in WW1
William was a great uncle who was killed in WW1
Sarah was a close relative we lost to cancer a few years ago.
Amanda is a close platonic friend
Jonathan was a school friend
Kenneth is my brother’s middle name

Most of the story is pure fiction, fantasy even, but a few of the minor events are true.

Amanda and Philip are loosely based on my wife and me, how we met and became cousins when she was eleven and I was twenty-one, how for years she had a crush on me both before and after I realised it, and how we finally got together when she was seventeen.

My Mum was indeed a farmer’s daughter, and my Dad worked for a bank. They really did meet when mum was sixteen and dad was twenty-two, but not in the way I described.

Geoff Prentice the blacksmith/Amanda’s stepfather is based on my Uncle who was a toolmaker, and married a divorcee with two girls, including the one who had a crush on me, several years after his own divorce.
Rose Wheeler the blacksmith’s wife and Amanda’s mother is based on my second Aunt who is now also my Mother-in-Law.

I learned about the difference between lift pumps and force pumps from an illustrated general knowledge book when I was about ten.
My Dad witnessed a man being impaled by the shaft of a runaway horse and cart when he was a child, only to find when it stopped that actually the man had become trapped between the two but was otherwise uninjured.

I used to live in a house called Knowl.

Most of the rest though is just the result of a wandering mind trying to find things to do during isolation.

I’ve enjoyed writing it, and I hope some of you at least enjoyed reading it.

Had it not been for a couple of the regulars on this forum, I would never have written it, so to them I say a big thank you.

Fruity.

Re: Knowl Park

You should get that published Fruitcake. I really enjoyed reading it.

Re: Knowl Park

Again, thanks for your continued support.

It never occurred to me that anyone other than myself might be interested in what goes on inside my head.

Re: Knowl Park

Novel writers do it all the time, Fruitcake.