I heard a story that started slowly. There was a small street in a small town. The street was unregarded, and the town ignored. Things were old, but not broken, houses were dusty but not dirty. It was a quietly useful street, with a shop or two, a small school, a little police station, a doctor's surgery. One could live all one's life on such a street, die on such a street having almost never needed anything one could not get on that self-same street.
It was the sort of street that plays host to the recurring dramas of resident families, generation after generation. Nothing much had changed there in living memory, and no-one really suspected that anything much would change, except for a couple of nay-sayers who spent all their time in a corner of the pub that lay almost at the heart of the little street, and no-one had listened much to them for a long time. Not that anyone would mind much if change came, you understand; they just didn't think it would, and weren't particularly bothered one way or another.
One day, an old man who lived near one end of this street passed away, mourned mostly by the grocer and his fellow bridge-club members; he was the last of an undistinguished, hard-working line whose history in the town could probably have been traced back several centuries, if anyone had cared to try. He died intestate; after a broad search, a distanced half-sister was found somewhere on the other side of the country. She didn't want his possessions, gave them to a charity shop, where other people bought his memories for their mantelpiece and his garments for their uncles; she didn't want his house, which she put on the market. The house might as well have been granted bona vacantia to the Duchy of Lancaster, said the nay-sayers down the pub, but no-one knew what they meant.
A young couple with a young son bought the house. They were the first new people to move onto the street for some years, not that anybody really noticed. The watery-eyed locals carried on as before, flotsam and jetsam on life's tide. The new couple sent their young son to the school on the street. The husband was a lawyer, ran his own practice. After a while, they bought one of the shops; the wife ran it, worked in it, had some small plans. Sometimes the son helped.
They were bright and cheery and polite and unfailingly private. They went sometimes to the pub, but talked only in general terms of general things. The husband played on occasion for the football team, when he had the time; he played well, and was well liked. No-one knew his age, or hers. The son was eight, the other parents said. They only knew this because of the class he was in at school, though he looked young for eight.
A daughter with grand plans moved to the capital, leaving a single father, a widower, who could no longer justify such a large house; it had two bedrooms, and one other converted into an office. He moved away to another part of the town, and a new doctor, hired to work at the surgery not a month before, moved in with her lover, who, in turn, took a job at the shop owned by the lawyer's wife, with whom she became firm friends.
And so it continued. No flood gates opened, but those who had lived on the street for their whole lives noticed a circular tide. Over years, not months, maybe a decade or more, the population of the little street changed more than it had in anyone's hazy memory. There were new teachers, new children too, at the school; new nurse, new pharmacist, eventually even a new publican. These people almost always made their business in the street, not outside. New young police officers moved in with their families, transferred from bigger cities. A lot of these people talked happily of looking for a quieter life. Most of these people became friends. The complexion of the pub's football team changed a great deal. The nay-sayers had seen it coming, they said.
All these people were private, like the lawyer's family, though not so private, it seemed, between themselves. The divide between those who had lived there before the lawyer and the shop owner, and those who came after, was clear, but the street had come to depend so quickly on so many of the newcomers, and they were so polite, that there was never any trouble over it. Once or twice, a man raised on this street would get drunk and mouth off, but the efficient young police constable would take him away to cool down and he would be very apologetic the next day.Under the supervision of its new owner, the shop had grown a little; the school too. Life on the street was continuing quite amiably, in fact. There was almost no crime there now, everyone noted. Those who had lived on the street before the lawyer and the shop-keeper came thought that things had got better, even if their own numbers appeared to be dwindling; the old neighbours moving, dying.
The lawyer's son achieved the best exam results in the little school's history, and went away to study at a prestigious university. The tide continued, chipping away at the pebbledashed old face of the street to reveal something else. None of the new people who came ever went away.
A woman stood at the bar one day, six years or so after the Lawyer's boy had gone to university (he had come back and gone into business with his father), and realised that there was almost no-one she really knew there. She had been born of parents themselves born to life on this street, and had gone to the little school with many similar children; they were all gone now, and she did not know where. In perhaps fifteen years, all the people she had known on a street that had barely changed all her life were gone. It was nice now, but she had no friends here. She resolved to move away and put her house up for sale the next day.
A few months after that, the postman was astonished to arrive for his morning round to find the street blocked off – as it happened, from both ends. Large barricades had been erected; several small signs stating such things as 'no through road' had been posted, dwarfed by the large board nailed to the centre of each barricade that said, simply, 'Closed'. The barriers were ten feet or so high; surmountable, yes, but somehow forbidding. The postman noticed that someone had inserted a post-flap into the barrier. Shrugging, he deposited all the mail for the street and went away. He did the same the next day, and the next, and so did his successor.
All deliveries to the street worked this way; the shops, the surgery, the school received packages at the barricade and slipped back inside. Those inside the street were unstintingly polite with those from outside; their fiscal dealings were impeccable. It was simply as if the privacy that locals had felt spreading inside the street had extended its boundaries to enshroud the whole length of this one, little, street.
There hadn't been a plan, really. Here or there someone who had moved to the street would invite someone else they knew and trusted, but mostly people had just felt called to the place by the promise of something different and better and away from the tumult of life outside. The barricade was not forced shut in the way that many outside imagined; people sometimes moved away (always through necessity, however), and other people, unfailingly bright, polite, private, took their place. A slow tide of people had noticed, and then accelerated, and then successfully affected a sea-change of tiny proportions and earth-shattering magnitude. Quietly, patiently, they had created something that was their own, and exactly as they wanted it. Over the many years that were to follow, a disproportionate number of great men and women would come from their tiny school; the street was a seed for a great change, but no-one knew that yet. For now, everyone outside presumed they were all a little mad; but the little street had little to offer them, so they thought, and so why should they care what happened to the little street?
