Very much in the middle of the countryside, and at least one thousand years old, Thurcroft is remarkable for being truly unremarkable. It lies quite in between joy and melancholy, between industry and indolence, between power and poverty. The weather fastens it there, lashed to the rolling green hills. The weather holds it grey.
You might get the feeling that you’ve been there before, that it reminds you of home. Thurcroft contains, in some ways, a fragment of anyone’s home. First there are the stone chimneys smoking lazily in the mist, which, even for those unaccustomed to a wood-burning stove, or for the stranger trudging past at dusk, give a familiar feeling of warmth and coziness. The people of Thurcroft are forever shaking off their overcoats and leaving their boots to dry as they come home from a sodden walk, relieved to stoke those fires.
There are, secondly, the rolling pastures, familiar even to the city dweller from a long dormant memory of the land atop which their city was built. Inside each of us is the memory of what came before, and it resembles Thurcroft. In that way a certain nostalgia hangs in the atmosphere, clings like dew to the grass, felt but unseen.
And lastly, above all, is the weather. The weather that tamps down hope and expectation is the same which gives constancy, with its attendant comforts and securities. When one remembers Thurcroft, it is invariably during that gradual intersection of summer and autumn when the wind blows a little fresher and the rain falls a little stiffer. Green begins to give way to gold and ochre, but slowly.
Though most from Thurcroft never wander far from home and hearth, from the known and understood, there are still many from this middle place who travel far and wide. You will meet them at the ends of the earth; in the Atacama Desert, in the Satpura Range, rounding the Great Capes. They are searching, in those extremes, for an unrelenting sun or an inaccessible peak, to brave the deepest winter or to greet an uncontacted people. In short, they are searching for an uncertainty which is impossible to locate in Thurcroft.
Cows graze the hillsides casually, perpetually. Horses crop the grasses and gnaw at their fence posts, eager to escape into a gallop. Below, men play a slow game of cricket beside an idle brook. A bruised metal Land Rover slows to a stop at a fork in the road, the man inside watches the game for a time. Like so many of the travelers gone to the ends of the earth, he’s come back. He’s returned to find the Thurcroft of his memory, of his childhood, unchanged.
The clouds rolling over the scene cast all the players in a muted light that once so dulled the hazel in his eyes, but now soothed them. The returning traveler reflects to himself that, in some real way, Thurcroft is the center of the universe around which everything orbits. While Magnetic North has slid a thousand miles since it was first mapped, one can always take a true bearing from Thurcroft. At some point on the road, the traveler acquiesced to the vague feeling that his orbit was decaying; that he had unknowingly crossed some longitude where the compass needle swung abruptly around and rather than continuing precisely away he was instead hurtling directly back.
The rain picked up and the dusk fell down and the chimneys exhaled their woodsmoke like sighs, and the traveler was again home. The people of Thurcroft would of course not know how or what to ask him about his journeys, about the world outside their own. And that was a comforting thought, too. In that way, for him, the world outside would soon cease to exist, subsumed by the ageless and unremarkable middle territory where we all come from and where we all return to, in the end, if we’re lucky.