***chapter 24***
***Regal Gardens***
The week before war broke out, the Turner family, in their Sunday finery, had attended as usual the old Whistledown church that, with its stone gargoyles crouched above the arched entrance, its ancient headstones and twisted spire will be so familiar to many of you.
It was a bright, sunny day and Jimmy and Rose decided what did it matter if best clothes got muddy from last night's downpour, they would take advantage of both the warm sunshine and what little time they had left together and take the children for a long stroll before dinner. Back then, before exceptionally harsh winters and, in particular, the great floods of 1947 destroyed much of it forever, there was a place that was hugely popular with walkers of all ages and ability. Now nobody could recollect how Regal Gardens had ever acquired such a grand name, but over the course of a century, and as if to prove they could do just as well as any city dweller, the Yorkshire folk had created their very own park in the Yorkshire countryside!
Stone walls surrounded the sizeable area. Here could be found a children's playground complete with swings, slides, seesaws and climbing frames, wooden benches carved out of fallen logs, and a two-seater swing covered by a glorious bower where many a love-smitten youth proposed to his sweetheart. Regal Gardens even boasted its very own bandstand that doubled too as a draughty "theatre" where village schools performed summer shows and, good, bad or indifferent, amateur actors/singers/comedians, indeed, anyone, with or without a talent, entertained anyone who might or might not want to listen.
At the heart of Regal Gardens was a chattering, sparkling brook, called simply, and with a peculiar lack of imagination, The Beck, across which had been built two wooden bridges known as, for reasons long lost in the mists of time, Queen's Walk and King's Walk. It was rumoured that the bridges were magic and granted wishes to the favoured, for they led to a small copse in which were dozens and dozens of wooden sculptures of characters and creatures from every fairytale and many children's stories. It had long been a Yorkshire tradition to carve and hide the sculptures in the copse and a superstition that, once placed, they should never be removed or bad luck would follow.
The ornaments, it has to be said, were not always good and sometimes they were downright unrecognisable, being made as they were by amateur craftsmen and women, but this only added to the fun. It was charming to see parents and grandparents taking children over "the wishing bridges" to search for, and try to identify, the sculptures just as they had once done themselves.
It was here, on the King's Walk wishing bridge. that the Turner family bumped into Davey and his pretty young wife, Beth.
"The very people!" cried Beth in delight.
"Now didn't I tell you wishes came true on these bridges?" Davey winked at his wife, as he held out two tiny wooden horses painted black. "I don't rightly know if they counts," he added, to Peggy and Johnjo; "seein' as they was never in a story like Black Beauty and they never was famous like 'Opalong Cassidy's 'orse Topper, but if anyone asks we could always pretend they was two of the king's 'orses tryin' to put 'Umpty Dumpty together again."
He was a talented artist and had captured their very essence. Anyone who had ever seen Follyfoot Farm's Beauty and Magic, even if only once, would have known them immediately…