WRITE ACROSS SUSSEX: THE DECISION WASN’T EASY

Another entry in our Write Across Sussex competition.

There are few things more heartrending than watching a friend and neighbour slowly succumb to the corrosion of clinical depression. I know because I’ve been there and lived through the lot: post-natal, for a start: not improved by the antics of a drunken abusive husband. That man has long since been driven out of my life –“in thought word and deed,” as our vicar would say. I count myself lucky to have settled in Lower Woodfield in the Sussex Downlands: population four hundred and six and can juggle a life of single-mum and broadsheet journalist. So that’s me, Alison Strettle, stupid surname I know, but it’s the best my family could do for me. I’m forty-two years young with no ties, apart from one teenage son away at uni; probably laying girls and making a nuisance of himself in a dozen ways I’d rather not know about.

You have to be patient if you buy a house in a place like Woodfield. I’ve heard it takes five years of impeccable behaviour before the locals will start to like you and at least twenty before they will accept you as their own. I had one good friend, our local celebrity, Nadine Williams, the television weather presenter. She lived in Mole Cottage, a quaint little place; all oak beams, uneven floors and thatch. If I speak of Nadine in the past tense then perhaps I’d better explain. The standard village joke, proclaimed her to be a witch. It was tongue in cheek of course, “just a bit of a laugh down the pub”, they said. But the joke died when Nadine was found on Woodfield Common her head beaten to pulp with an iron bar.