by Elisabeth Bruce

Created on: July 08, 2008

A quiet Man.

Chapter 1

It's best I start with the many years of happiness I had with Janine and the home we created with love and shared respect. We had known each other through childhood and happy school years, into teen years of little turbulence.

We started going out together. Weekly, to the local picture house where we cuddled and kissed in the back row, far away from the piercing torch of the sour-faced Usherette.

Slow walks home, scarce lit by weak yellow lights along the streets. A quick peck on the cheek from her at her gate, a frantic last fumble from me with urgent hands. A promise to meet again next week at the Pictures to do the same again. So it went through lazy, bumblebee summers and crisp, russet autumns. Biting, windswept winters gave way to promising springs, burgeoning with new life.

A soft, contented courtship of gentle passion and knowledge that we would marry when I had completed my studies to be a solicitor. My nights were filled with dry books and articles, relieved by weekly evening delights with Janine.

Janine, working as a secretary, I as a junior solicitor in the firm that I had trained in, were frugal; saving for our house and for our wedding. A small wedding and small house for us to live in. Punctuated with a week's honeymoon in Devon, touring in the little car I had bought. Staying in small, country inns perched upon the craggy coastline.

Janine and I, arm in arm, laughing and loving our touch, our electricity. Walking along the cliff tops to gulls' cries as they swooped and swept around us. Janine laughing, rich auburn hair tossed about by the swirling winds that rose from cliffs below; her hand constantly sweeping the fronds of her hair away from her face, and mine so close to hers.

Our house was at Birdlip, viewing down into the Stroud valley, where the pretty town carried on its busy Stroud ways. It was neither a new house nor a very old house, but it suited us and we set about at weekends, creating it into our own special home of love. Busy days of paint and nails. Of fixing pipes and cleaning drains. Tiring days of dirt and dust made sacred by warm tender nights with Janine.

She was happy when we had enough income from my solicitor's practice, to stay at home. She set about the tangled mess that was our garden, digging and cleaning away the years of neglect; stray locks of auburn hair around her neck. I would come home from the office to find her, dirty and weedy, in our garden. I would creep up behind her and gently lift her glorious

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