A lovely coincidence

On Saturday, at the Mt Eden Craft Market, I sold a copy of The Boltons of The Little Boltons to a dear lady who bought it because she 'got married in St Mary The Boltons in 1971'. The Boltons is the posh street in Kensington, next to The Little Boltons, and we could see the spire of St Mary The Boltons from our bedroom window. 

A couple of relevant extracts from The Boltons of The Little Boltons follow: 

"The Boltons, running parallel to The Little Boltons, was one of the most elegant avenues of the record reign. Its houses were mansions, on land more generous than the properties in The Little Boltons, with driveways and stables and detached cottages for servants set in spacious gardens. At one end, in the measured middle of its width and within a courtly iron-fenced ellipse, stood Saint Mary The Boltons, the little church whose grey spire we could see from our top-floor room across the ways. There was a chipped and faded sign wired to the church’s black iron fence. This fence was a relatively recent replacement for the original which was removed during the war by churchly patriots as a contribution to the country’s drive for metal. Who knows into what great machine, armament, ordnance, ship, aeroplane, weapon or missile went that iron in the cause of war? And did anyone care, I wonder, that church materials were used for such an awful purpose?

"There was only one window, much smaller than those on the other floors, but it looked down over the back garden — the same garden I had been looking at from the ground floor — from a great height providing a long view across the neighbouring gardens, through a forest of leafless trees, to the sharp needle steeple of Saint Mary The Boltons. I paused there: it was a beautiful and tranquil scene. Beside the window stood a porcelain sink, with old brass taps and exposed plumbing below. But the room was spacious and yet had an intimate and friendly atmosphere, quite different from the other rooms in the house; I felt comfortable in it at once. 

"This was the time, too, when I most appreciated our high position looking out over the garden, and those adjacent, to The Boltons beyond. Although at ground level the garden walls were high, they appeared insignificant from our great height. By ignoring them it was easy to imagine being in the country, looking across and through a lightly wooded coppice to a street of houses in a sleepy but prosperous village. The effect was heightened by the sharp needle of Saint Mary The Boltons which pierced the leafiness of the tall horse chestnuts; on hot still days it looked like a pretty picture of Nutwood from a Rupert Bear book."

The Boltons of The Little Boltons is available on my website here. It's also available from Amazon and Kindle.