Downton Abbey gardens, 1965.
Two women sat together on wrought iron chairs in the shade of a great oak, drinking tea in comfortable silence. The sun was shining and birds sang prettily from above them. The women were elderly and taller of the two's hands shook as she lifted her cup to her lips. In the short distance of air between them stretched decades of friendship, distorted and morphed by time but all the stronger for it.
Etched into the women's faces was the individual experiences they had endured – survived, even. Loves won and lost, tear-provoking laughter, wars lived through, losses felt keenly beneath one's breast. It all surfaces eventually, into these deep wrinkles.
The smaller of the two out her cup down on the matching wrought iron table between them and sighed.
"Our last days alone with the grand house, milady," she said. "How strange...time to change for dinner?" She turned to the other woman with a small smile on her face.
The woman addressed as 'milady' laughed. "Oh, Anna. How times have changed..."
"So quickly..." Anna agreed. "Though we'll still be allowed it at Christmas – not even The National Trust can win when Lady Mary wants to spend Christmas at home."
"Quite right," Mary replied with mock-haughtiness. Suddenly her face changed earnestly and she turned to Anna, face pleading. "You do promise me you'll come and spend Christmas with us don't you? The children would love to see you and Matthew told me you had to come or else he'd drive to London himself to fetch you."
"Oh goodness, that boy has been giving me cheek since the day he started waddling around in that nursery!" Anna gestured to the grand house they were facing. "I suppose I'll have to come – my own grandchildren have been harassing me as well. They just want to play hide and seek again. And to think, we didn't find little James for two hours last year!"
Both women laughed together in reminisce. When silence fell again, it was to allow the two friends to get lost in their own memories.
Time had moved on so greatly. How dynamics had changed. Two women of the same generation evolved from servant and mistress to friendly employee and employer, then to eventual friends. No stairs of society separated them now; only titles remained to identify the difference. They remained a Mrs. and a Lady. But in all ways that mattered, they were two women, bidding farewell to a beloved old home.
Traditions had started slipping during the second war. The absurdity of dressing for dinner, wearing corsets and forbidding women trousers became apparent in the national upheaval that was World War Two. It was much like the first war for Downton – the Abbey became a hospital, this time almost immediately and the family moved out for the duration.
It was after the war that the differences became apparent. Things began to stick. The Crawley family had been flung far and wide by the war and not all of them came back. In fact, almost none did. The amount of staff that Downton usually employed not only became unnecessary but also ridiculous. Higher class people were beginning to get ordinary jobs and lower class people became more capable of working their way up.
Anna and John Bates had stayed with the family until Lord Grantham died, at which point pursuing an almost lost but never forgotten of dream opening a hotel by the sea. They had three children – two girls and a boy – who had all married and had little ones of their own by now.
Anna's leaving service at Downton became more of a farewell of friends than a parting of fond servant and mistress. During the war, Mary didn't need a lady's maid, but she did need a friend to help her with her fast growing son.
Lady Mary inherited the Abbey on behalf of her son, as Lord Grantham died before he was of age. Once he became of age, he didn't want it in favour of London's city life. So Mary kept it.
She re-married a perfectly ordinary man – an American journalist – inspired in no small amount by the great love she had once observed her sisters experiencing. They had no children but continued to live happily at Downton until they could no longer afford to. The National Trust had been approaching them for years but it would have only ever happened entirely on Mary's terms; she became more and more like her grandmother as time went on – a fact she was not unaware of, or particularly happy about.
And now the two women sat, lamenting the loss of such a home and the years of memories that would be lost upon the many visitors trawling through the Abbey's many rooms.
"Oh, Anna," the once-lady sighed. "D'you think we might freeze time? Or perhaps turn it back and live it all again?"
"I wish we could, Mary, dear. I wish we could."