A Nice Cup of Tea

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Peter James Barrett A Nice Cup Of Tea Len and Hilda were a very ordinary couple. They were retired and in their sixties and lived in a small one-bedroom bungalow. Len had worked for forty years as a warehouseman before he retired and Hilda had worked as a dinner lady at the local school on and off for almost half that time. They were proud of the fact that they owned their own bungalow. It hadn’t always been easy to pay the mortgage in the lean years but they had struggled through and could now enjoy a modest standard of living in the retirement. They never had children because none turned up and they had never been that bothered to go to all the trouble of finding out why. In the summer months, Len used to take great pride in his garden and allotment which were always in perfect condition and his skill as a gardener was such that he provided the two of them with fresh vegetables virtually all the year round. In the summer when the salad crops produced the inevitable surplus he would put a sign up outside the house offering tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers and so on for sale at a reasonable price and from this he made a little money to buy those little extras that make life worthwhile: chocolates, magazines and the occasional bottle of wine. The only small cloud on the horizon was that, in the winter months, when it was too wet and cold to work outside, Len used to become bored and frustrated and, to be honest, not very pleasant to live with. In the winter he’d sit at the window staring gloomily at the bare trees under a grey sky counting the days untill spring. But it was on one of these short winter days that Len chanced upon an idea that would eventually turn the cold months from an ordeal to be borne to a hive of activity and a passion that could compete with his love of the soil. A woman had moved into the house across the road. She was common looking and had
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