The lovely bestselling author Claudia Carroll has written a wonder ful short stor y just for you!
Sometimes being determinedly nice really can turn the tide of sniping and pettiness…
the cash was flying in. The future looked rosy, so when the chance came along to upgrade their house and move into leafy, affluent Larkview Crescent, Martha jumped at the chance.
“It’s got wonderful schools for the kids,” she’d said, “and just think of the lovely new friends they’ll make!”
“I don’t want them to get posh accents and start wanting to go off on skiing holidays,” Len had grumbled, but Martha was having none of it. And Len adored his wife, so if that’s what she wanted, that’s what they did. So they’d sold their humble two-up, two-down house on the street where the kids were born and upped sticks the minute they got the go-ahead from their bank manager.
However, the family had moved more than house and Martha knew it. They’d moved up a whole social class, and now all to give a hand with setting up for a street party to be held that evening, in honour of the new Prince and Princess of Wales.
It was 10.45am, and Lady Diana was just leaving Clarence House for St Paul’s Cathedral, when the doorbell went.
“Katherine! Emma! Come on in!” Martha ushered her two distinguished visitors into the living room, where the TV was on full blast and the canapés were dotted around the coffee table on paper doilies, with tiny Union Jack flags.
Katherine and Emma were essentially the social queens of the area, so it was important to get off on the right foot. The ladies looked as if they were off to the Royal Wedding themselves, in pastelcoloured power suits with scarily high shoulder pads. Just like Sue Ellen and Pamela Ewing wore in Dallas.
“It’s so good of you to drop round,” Martha gushed. “A glass of Asti Spumante, ladies?”
“Asti Spumante?” Emma repeated, sneeringly. “I though that was something only impoverished students drank.”
“Do you have any Bollinger?” said Katherine, plonking down on the sofa and lighting up a cigarette. “Anything else gives me a headache.”
Martha didn’t, but she distracted her guests by passing around the vol-au-vents, and served each of them a glass of wine. They sipped disdainfully.
“Warm white wine,” she heard Emma snipe, as she was on her way to the kitchen to take garlic bread out of the oven. “Did you ever?”
“And served out of a wine box too,” Katherine had replied. “Utterly vile. Interesting to see how the other half lives.”
Martha bit her lip, tried not to get upset and instead bustled back into the living room, just in time to see Lady Diana step out of the glass carriage on the arm of her father, Earl Spencer.
“Oh, doesn’t the bride look stunning?” she gushed. “What a gorgeous dress!”
But Emma and Katherine guffawed. “Ha! Don’t be ridiculous,” Emma said. “That dress simply looks like a big old bag of washing.”
“Look how crumpled it is!” Katherine
chimed in. “A designer disaster, if you ask me.”
Martha didn’t get a chance to reply. Just then shouts were heard from one of the houses on the Crescent, and she smelled smoke.
“Quick!” she heard one of her own kids cry out, hammering urgently on the front window. “Someone come quick!”
“Help! It’s an emergency!” she heard a man’s voice shout.
At the sound of that voice, Martha’s heart stopped. It was Len. No question, it was her Len.
And for him to roar like that, something very, very bad must have happened.
Nobody remembered much about the royal wedding afterwards. For a long time on the Crescent, no one even talked about it.
The whole of number 47, Katherine’s house, that unutterable snob who’d been so nasty and cruel and cutting to Martha, had pretty much been razed to the ground.
Martha thought she’d never forget the stench of acrid smoke, how it stung her eyes and made her want to cough her lungs up. The fire, apparently, according to the fire brigade, was started by a cigarette left burning in a bedroom.
As soon as they realised what was happening, all of the neighbours on the Crescent, led by Martha and Len, leapt in to help. Len was completely fearless; he went into the building, to make sure that Katherine’s husband, who had been in bed when it happened, was safe. Then, when the fire brigade eventually got there, he and Martha led the rest of the neighbours in forming a long line, passing out everything they could, from paintings to china ornaments and family photos.
The next day, Martha overheard people talking about it in the supermarket.
“Did you hear about that terrible fire at number 47?”
“A miracle no one was killed, I heard.” “The house is destroyed,” said someone else. “Seemingly that Katherine Walker has to take her family to live with her mother for the foreseeable future.”
“Well of course, I wouldn’t wish ill on anyone,” said the first neighbour, “but Katherine always was the most vile snob. Always so condescending to everyone – she and that friend of hers, Emma, they think they’re the queens of the area….”
“…certainly brought her down a peg or two, didn’t it?”
Martha didn’t join in. She was too
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