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road, some with single driveways while other properties had U-shaped ‘in and out’ driveways. Shaftoe felt, once again, particularly envious of the owners of houses on the northern side of the road whose properties backed on to the golf course and which would never be built on. Not in his lifetime, anyway. He walked on, up to nearly the very top of the lane and then turned right down a single driveway and let himself into the house. His wife greeted him warmly and helped him out of his summer jacket as he hung his knapsack on a clothes peg. ‘Good day, pet?’ she asked warmly.
    â€˜So, so, pet,’ Shaftoe replied, sitting down on a wooden chair in the hallway and tugging at his shoelaces. ‘I went in early, as you know, to look at a decayed corpse which had been pulled out of the river and, in the event, got called out to attend a recent corpse.’
    â€˜Oh, my …’ His wife sighed.
    â€˜Yes. He was quite a young bloke; forty … he’d been battered over the head. I was able to wrap that up before lunch, and then I addressed the decayed corpse which I had intended to do first thing. Unlike the first corpse, I couldn’t determine the cause of death. He had no identification and no distinguishing features. They’ll give him a name and bury him in a pauper’s grave.’
    â€˜I always find that upsetting.’ Linda Shaftoe shook her head slowly. ‘Dying … nobody misses you … nobody knows who you are … nobody cares … Just given a name and buried, and forgotten.’
    â€˜It happens, pet.’ Shaftoe slid his feet into an old and very comfortable pair of slippers and stood up. ‘It happens … especially in large cities. Folk come from all over to live in the cities looking for anonymity, and they find it. They find it all right.’ He smiled at his wife. ‘Do you feel like touching base, pet?’
    â€˜Oh aye … let’s do that,’ Linda Shaftoe replied enthusiastically. ‘We have not done that for a while.’
    â€˜Right, I’ll make a point of coming home early one day this week and we’ll go out somewhere for the night.’ Shaftoe beamed at his wife, pronouncing ‘right’ as ‘reet’ and night as ‘neet’. ‘I’ll leave before the crush hour – so long as I miss it, that’s the important thing. What’s for supper?’
    â€˜Cottage pie.’ Linda Shaftoe turned and walked to the kitchen. ‘I know it’s summer, but I also know how much you like your cottage pie.’
    â€˜Champion, pet,’ Shaftoe smiled at her, ‘just champion.’ Linda Shaftoe was the same age as him, also from Thurnscoe and also the child of a coal miner whose father had hoped his only daughter would marry a ‘lad with a trade’: a fitter, an electrician or a plumber – anything but a coal miner. He was subsequently a man who could not contain his glee when he found that his beloved daughter had ‘pulled’ a doctor, and not just a doctor but an ‘ologist’. Not only that, the ‘ologist’ in question was not ‘stuck up’ with a posh accent but a ‘right good lad from the next street’. So ‘our Linda had done herself proud’. Perfect. Just perfect.
    Early that same evening, Harry and Kathleen Vicary strolled contentedly arm in arm from their terraced house in Hartley Road, Leytonstone to the Assembly Rooms in the town centre. They sat near the back of the six rows of seated persons as the guest speaker was introduced. After being introduced the speaker said, ‘Hello, my name is Felicity and I am an alcoholic,’ upon which the Vicarys and all other persons in the room, save the person who had introduced her, replied, ‘Hello, Felicity’, and then listened as Felicity, a slight figure in a scarlet dress, recounted her journey from the gutter to her divorce, then to becoming a