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did not consort much with anyone. If they found themselves returning to the Green at the same time, they walked separately, or on opposite sides of the street. But then, so did the two Palings, who had proper ideas about indifference to one's sibling when released from the conventions of the home.
    The school was bright and airy and a credit to the system. The walls were covered with eye-catching examples of child artwork; witches and dragons vied with the life-cycle of the frog and what people wore in Elizabethan times, in cheerful evidence that the life of the imagination was not despised in these parts. The teachers tended to be young; some were male and bearded. The children gave every indication of well-being; the place buzzed with activity and the early morning influx showed no sign of reluctance. The school dinners were ample and nutritious.
    Not many of the children had a speech that could atonce be recognized as of the place: just a few. The Laddenham voice, subtly distinct from the Midlands but not yet opening out into the fullness of Gloucestershire and parts west, was confined to those few whose family names might have been found on the tombstones in the churchyard of St. Peter and St. Paul, and, in some cases, not even to them. Most children spoke the unplaceable and even classless English of radio and television performers; the language they used had the same ubiquity. Only occasionally (the Opies would have been gratified} did a childish code word surface that was entirely local in origin: a word for truce, the dialect of scatology, an insult. The Paling children, within a matter of weeks and barely conscious that they were doing so, had learned to temper their accents, slip into a more anonymous pronunciation, and call things by the right names. At home, they reverted to their usual style, so that for many months their parents were unaware of this chameleon dexterity, until one day Clare, waiting outside the school playground, heard with amazement her son shouting in an alien tongue. She had the tact not to comment, but thought about the matter. It struck her as curious that the ability—willingness, perhaps—to accept the requirements of a place should come so much more readily to children. One could look at it in two lights, of course: it could seem a sheep-like conformity, or alternatively a refreshing knack of discarding old habits. Either way, it was as though the spirit of place, nowadays, exerted its power only over the young.
    The spirit of place was in any case hard to detect in Laddenham. There was no shop or other building, in the High Street, whose counterpart could not have been found elsewhere: Boots, Dewhurst, Tesco; a nineteenth-centuryironmonger's facade, a fifties brutalist bank, an Edwardian pub. The road signs, recently renewed and standardized, pointed you to outlying hamlets in lettering that suggested cities the size of Birmingham. The Midland Bank had a clock recording the time of day on the eastern and western coasts of the United States. Only the church and a few of the older houses were a reminder that this place lay on the limestone spine of England, and was built from its own bones. The new housing estates, rushed up to meet the boom of fifteen years ago, were in brick or a garish reconstituted stone of inflexible texture. They encircled the old village center, the High Street, the church and the Green, their street names quaintly rural and suggesting quite another ambiance: The Grove, Willow Way, Rivermead, Swan Lane.
    Nearly everyone worked in Spelbury, the thriving town of which Laddenham and other expanded villages were satellites. Spelbury made the internal organs of radios and televisions, a few selected car components, women's tights and stockings, and processed frozen foods. It was a place that had been designated for prosperity immediately after the war, a London overspill town, and had flourished accordingly: industry had come, people had come, houses had been built, and