title: The Girl on the Bench by the Bridge in the Park
author: Taylor, Brian W.
description: Life, love, flashers and fornication, bondage, burglary, local politics and policing, transsexuals, and a golden cockerel buried in one of the flower beds by a writer trying to promote his latest book, were all part of normal life in the suburban park where Carol Trennick worked during the nineteen eighties. Carol had thought she was content with her life, and the dinnertimes she spent sitting on the bench near the bridge in the park where she worked, reading and re-reading Jane Austin novels and imagining herself as the heroine of the stories, being wooed by tall handsome men. That was until photographer Tom, who was neither tall nor handsome, took a photo of her from the bridge where he was standing, and gave her existence new meaning when he brought it to show her, and asked her to spend her dinner hours from then on with him. Happy to have found a man of her own at last, she went with him without hesitation. But later began to worry. Weren’t some of the things he wanted her to do whilst making love during those dinner hours a little too adventurous? Were couples supposed to carry on like that? In the open! Not in the privacy of their homes! And why did Tom often seem to disappear when the police were in the park trying to catch the rapist reported to be preying on women there that summer? The things that happened to Carol after she met Tom certainly were exciting, in more ways than one, but she didn’t remember any of them ever having happened to any of the heroines of the stories she’d read so avidly on that park bench before he’d come along. And as she had no experience of any previous relationships of her own to judge the one she now had with Tom by, she had no way of knowing if what she had with him really was love at last, or something her family and friends would definitely not approve of if they were to find out about it. When events surrounding a tree planting ceremony held in the park one summer’s day in 1983, to commemorate a local councillor’s twenty five years of service, ended in murder, it brought things to a head for Carol and Tom in a way neither of them could have foreseen. The Girl on the Bench by the Bridge in the Park – a blackly humorous and poignant story of life in a public park in the days when there still were such work places, before Mrs Thatcher did away with them.