Millie woke early as was her habit but on this morning she lingered before climbing out of bed. This was a special day. She had known it would come ever since she had received the letter more than six weeks ago. The people at the council offices had been nice about it but there was nothing they could do. It was called progress they had told her gently.
Millie let her eyes roam around the so familiar bedroom. There wasn’t much furniture left now. Just the double bed, its walnut head board a warm yellow from years of polishing; the chest of drawers with its burnished brass handles and in the corner the small chair with its sagging cane bottom. Her eyes rested on the bright patches of wall paper where up until a few days ago pictures had hung, they hadn’t been worth anything but she had liked them, Victorian prints of children. She and Bert had not had a family and Millie had come to think of the children in those pictures as her own somehow. The other furniture that once filled the tiny cottage had been collected the day before. Carried away by two brash young men who had told Millie; not meaning to hurt her feelings, that there was just no market for ‘old pieces’. They had given her thirty pounds for the lot.
As Millie lay looking around the room, starched white net curtains hung at the small window though which, even from her bed she could see the spire of the church where she and Bert had been married more than sixty-five years ago.
Finally with a sigh Millie swung her legs out of bed onto the cold lino, like the furniture the rag rug had been scooped up and removed. Millie’s thoughts wandered back to the winter evenings of fifty years ago. That was when she had sat, fingers cold in spite of the fire that burned close by, and made rag rugs for all the rooms in the cottage. On her husband’s meagre pay she had learned lots of ways to stretch their money, compared to gathering drift wood on the seashore and wading through rock pools at low tide to prise winkles off the seaweed draped boulders making rugs had been one of the more comfortable ways to make the money go further.
As Millie dressed she looked back the bed, ‘If only it could talk,’ she thought with a chuckle remembering nights she had spent in her husband’s arms, warm, secure and very much loved. Her Bert had also died in that bed, but it held no ghosts for her, her husband had died as he had lived, with his only love by his side, secure in the knowledge that he would see her again sometime.
Millie knew it was silly, after all the bed and indeed the whole cottage would have ceased to exist by this time tomorrow but she tucked in the sheets, tweaked the eiderdown straight and puffed up the pillows, no one could say Millie Baker didn’t leave things in good shape. Downstairs the gas popped and the kettle soon started to ‘sing’ while Millie spooned two scoops of tea into the old brown pot. With the tea set to brew Millie sat down at the kitchen table. She thought back over the years and the meals that had been eaten at the old wooden table. In good times and bad she and Bert had always managed. If their stomachs were not always as full as they would have liked they had each other and that counted for a lot.
Millie sipped her tea, her thoughts disturbed by noises from the street. Her cottage was the last one to be demolished, soon a row of smart town houses would line the street all with fitted kitchens, double glazing and parking space for two cars. She had seen the enormous bill board at the end of the street advertising the new development. Carpenters Court they called it. Carpenters Court indeed thought Millie, her Bert had been a carpenter, a good one too yet each of the new townhouses was going to cost more than he had earned in a lifetime of hard work.
Her tea finished Millie washed the cup and saucer and set them to drain on the wooden board beside the shallow sink. Through the small window Millie watched as workmen slung pieces of old timber onto a bonfire. She saw one young workman drag the remains of a wooden kitchen dresser across the ground and carelessly add it to the flames, sparks rising up in the spring sunshine as another piece of her neighborhood was destroyed and lost forever.
