Man Overboard by Monica Dickens

semi-detached respectabilitywhere housewives fought the railway for the whiteness of their curtains, to bomb-scarred, untenable slums with boards nailed across the broken windows.
    He had watched the progress of the lean man and his muscular wife as they painstakingly landscaped a garden neglected for years, and then created a model turkey farm at the end of it. He had sorrowed over another garden, once beautiful, but gradually reverting to weeds and jungle, because the gardener left during the war and the old man in a flat cap who used to potter with a trowel had disappeared, presumably to the grave, and the old lady who used to sit and watch him from a wicker chair retired behind her curtains and was never seen out again. Did she live alone? She was still alive, because her bulky shadow could occasionally be seen on the blind of a dimly lit downstairs room. As the train racketed by the unheeding house, Ben looked anxiously to see if there was a collection of unopened milk bottles on the back doorstep.
    There was one house on the London side of Basingstoke which never changed. The same family had lived in it for as long as Ben could remember, and the house itself remained the same, neither prosperous nor down at heel, unaffected by wars or weather or the growing up of the family whose biography Ben had constructed from glimpses snatched as the train crossed the bridge over the road which ran by their front gate.
    The house had first begun to fascinate Ben when he was a boy, making the journey to London and beyond to the second-class public school preferred by his father to the local day school, which could have provided a comparable education, but not the cachet of “sending my boy away to school”, Matthew was away at Dartmouth. Ben must go away too and learn to stand on his own like a man. Once when Ben had had pleurisy and was not man enough to go back to school without his mother accompanying him to warn the matron about his chest, he had tried to share his interest in this house with her.
    The little wood went by, the huge elm in the middle of the field, the sides of the bridge rose up—“Look, Mum, there it is! ”
    “Where, dear?” She peered out much too late as the train took the curve and the house was gone. Stimulated by a glimpse of the two girls in the garden—the boy would be at school, for Ben was late going back this term—he told his mother some of the thingshe knew or had made up about the family. Sitting back in her corner, with her gloves on and her ankles crossed, she had wagged her head at him, marvelling at his imagination without making any effort to share it.
    “You always were a fanciful child, Benjy,” she told him, and when he paused in his enthusiastic story, she began to talk about where they would have lunch when they changed trains in London.
    Ben did not point out the house to her any more when they went to London together. She did not remember about it, but Ben went on watching and noticing and imagining until he built up a sort of distant intimacy with it and the family who lived there.
    It was an early Victorian house of darkening red brick, with many gables, ill-matched chimneys, and weathered white paint round the windows. The side nearest the train was bulky with ivy. Once they had stripped it all off, but it grew back again in two years, up to the crooked iron S which held the top part of the house together.
    There was a garden all round the house, lawns and shrubs and evergreens, with a small, neglected orchard where the washing lines hung, and a group of tall trees near the road where the children had made a ramshackle house among the branches. There was a moss-blurred driveway, some outbuildings at the back, and two untidily hedged fields with the gateways trampled to mud or caked earth according to the season.
    The house had obviously been built before the railway, perhaps by the great-grandfather of the present owner. What bad luck for the first generation to have their