Dr Ibbotson

Hi just thought I'd introduce myself as only just joined the Forum to be a part of this group. I love writing, mainly factual pieces, but thought I'd try my hand at fiction. The same goes for my reading interests which range from factual sports and history books, to horror and supernatural fiction.

Paradise Lost and Found Tom’s walk always took him past the old sandstone columns that once marked the entrance to the Longshaw Estate. He liked the way the dew clung to the roughly cut grass in the morning, catching the dull, low morning light. But this time there was something different. He couldn’t tell what, not exactly. But as he peered through the small break in the hedgerows surrounding the old hall grounds, he was sure something had changed. Ah! He thought, in the kind of sudden, depressingly familiar moment of realisation he’d become used to since his mind had got slower and his bones had got older. The hedge has been cut back. Must be pruning season he thought. But no, there was something else. And as he left the path and walked past the gate post onto the thick grass surrounding the ruins of the old estate he saw another small track. The track had always been there of course, just covered by the gnarled and sprawling rows of laurel, privet and blackthorn. He started down the path in the kind of nervous excitement he once had as a young boy, when he went into old Sam’s house to collect his football. It wasn’t long, no more than 30 paces or so. At the end of it, barely visible through the brambles, was a small gate. Blue paint had long since flaked away from the wooden slats, but the latch was still there. It hadn’t crumbled into dust and rust just yet. Tom lifted the latch and opened the gate and at once his eyes were filled with green. Most of it weeds, brambles and long, long grass. But the acres he was now staring at hadn’t always been this untamed. No, just looking at some of the trees and shrubs, now wild, had once been cared for, nourished, planted. As his eyes adjusted to his new surroundings he began to take in more. Immediately in front of him, piles of old clay cylinders. Rhubarb forcers maybe. There must have been 20 or more. Leant against the gate he’d just walked through, a pile of rotten bamboo canes. Amidst the overgrown shrubbery, huge, flowering rhododenrons. And then, in the distance, a glass house. A beautiful steel frame, windows barely intact, but almost certainly late Victorian. It was the kind he’d seen in books about the great gardens of the 1800s. And in that moment he realised he was probably the first man to have stood in this once great, now lost and hidden garden in maybe 100 years.