If you turn right at the fork of Grenkins Avenue, which becomes Dennison Road on the left, the first thing you’ll see of Cornfield Street is a rusty metal post. This post is the earliest hint you’ll get to the street behind it being not the most ordinary of streets. Though the sign is the blue green and orange of rusted and unkempt copper, it is obvious even to the most ignorant that, though it has fallen into disrepair, its creator cared for it greatly; the letters ‘Cornfield Street’ are elaborately etched there, each character bearing quite a few extravagant spirals and curls that seem to have been added out of sheer enjoyment. All around these words, the sign branches off into a thousand little metal leaves and flowers that stretch out their tendrils and spikes to all sides, twining and creeping down their lamppost, stretching out their thin, delicate copper leaves as though they needed sunlight to survive.
If you are lucky enough to be strolling past Cornfield Street at dark, you’ll notice the ornate lantern suspended from the sign, and if you are very lucky and just a little observant, you may pause before the signpost, struck by curiosity. Under the warm yellow light of the lantern, the metal leaves will seem a deep green, rustling in a fresh breeze and there, hiding just beneath the shadows, a soft, blood red rose has bloomed from the fragile blue buds that turned their heads to the daylight some hours before. You’ll draw closer in wonder, but find, upon closer inspection that metal remains metal, even under a mysterious, flickering light that induces fanciful imaginings.
You’ll probably shake your head or sigh dejectedly before putting this strange occurrence out of your mind and continuing down the rough cobbles of Dennison Road, thinking of the breakfast you’ll be having and worrying about whether you left the stove on at home. Your mental abstraction will be such that you do not see the tiny glowing hand that was placed on the lantern’s glass from the inside, nor the little bright eyes under their white lashes blinking mischievously and never mind the many muffled giggles coming from behind the slightly scratched pane.
And so, Cornfield Street will fall back behind you, silent, slumbering, its many wonders undiscovered.
But perhaps, all through the night, you will have the strange nagging feeling that you have forgotten something. Your thoughts will resume their usual course but return, always, as though by accident or chance, to the overgrown signpost and the tingling, laden darkness beyond. And in the morning, as the cool white light breaks through the cracks around your curtains, you find that your mind has made itself up for you; you’re going back to the crossroads at the end of Grenkins Ave and you will go, this time, to the right. You will not stop walking until you have been all the way down Cornfield Street.
Whether you make this decision or not, you are in luck, for I myself have been up and down that road, I have climbed the house’s facades and been rolled up contently in a patch of sun on every single front porch (except for number 36’s, everybody is scared of that house) and I have glided over the different shingled roofs enough to last a few lifetimes so I know of every one of Cornfield Streets nooks and crannies and am acquainted with all creatures that live there.
On either side of Cornfield Street is a row of houses, tightly glued together, save for narrow gaps between a few of them and yet, it is impossible to wonder which house is the first; at the front of the left row of houses, an erect and elegant red brick silhouette is visible beyond the high, overgrown dark green bushes with the sparkling, floating yellow pollen around them. These bushes have begun to creep up the house’s face and fan their leaves over the arching blue doorframe, swallowing both red chimneys and stretching their straggly cirri up, reaching for the swung, high gabled roof. And who better to live in this majestic, ancient home, the first monument on a fascinating street than old Abe Cornfield the fifth, descendant of Abraham the first, who was the one to search far and wide for the famous Pirkin, cunning blacksmith and gnome, to charge him with the fabrication of the renowned sign for the street he was going to build. Little did the first Abe know when he surveyed his new, shiny copper sign in satisfaction, that magic attracts its like and that his street would be no exception; its inhabitants could not possibly be void of a touch of that same spark of wizardry, nor would his own wife be, but that is a tale for another time.
It so happens that Abe the fifth, like all the Abes before him, occupied the elegant red brick house and, when his wife left him, and his son moved to the big city for work, he took to sitting on his light blue front porch in an ancient rocking chair and scowling at anyone who passed by from under his thick, bushy white brows. Only the neighbours dared still approach the grumpy old man who they were quite used to, and regarded as a sort of constant in the landscape, like an ancient oak or a marble statue, but if any stranger were to observe closely, they would find that Abraham Cornfield’s eyes were of the most striking, twinkling, swirling and really, slightly abnormal turquoise speckled with gold with good-natured wrinkles and laugh lines around them, whose existence someone who was only aquainted with Abe would never suspect. The only person who really, truly noticed those eyes (apart from me) was not Abe’s wife or his son, but a woman named Rose Jenkins, who lived in the house with the stained-glass windows just across the street, because who better to live so near Abraham Cornfield than the best friend he ever had? Rose Jenkins had pink apple cheeks, large, merry eyes and loosely curling pearly white hair streaked with silver and the warm chestnut that was the colour the glossy locks used to be when still her face was wrinkle-free and the freckles on her nose were visible and not concealed under weathered skin.
Miss Jenkins would watch the old man on the blue front porch every day from the little round window of her room, thinking that that day she would finally march over, over the cobbles of Cornfield Street and tell Abraham Cornfield who she was, asking whether he remembered her. Every morning, she was so busy convincing herself, that the knitting doing itself in the air before her got all knotted up and she would have to wave her fingers and concentrate on undoing the pesky tangles.
Though for Rose, the voices that called the old man ‘Little Abe Connie’ on their first school day, had barely ceased to ring in her ears, she was well aware that sixty years had passed since then, and her dear Abe was sure to have forgotten her. She did not think she could bear the look of confusion in his eyes when she told him that she still missed him, after all that time since her parents had moved away and that she had never had a friend as good and true as Abraham Cornfield when they were but ten years old.
Abraham Cornfield, for himself, spent his days sitting on his front porch, pretending to look at the few passers-by, who were all residents of the street, while in reality stealing glances at the pretty, cream-coloured house where weeping begonias dropped down their round pink blossoms, like droplets on a thread, over the stained-glass bow window opposite, he imagined Rose Jenkins standing behind it, perhaps preparing to come over and speak with him. When Abe caught himself at this, he shook his head at such folly; really, to imagine that Rosie Jenkins remembered him after sixty years! And so, he would go back to scowling at people with renewed fervour, telling himself that he was protecting his street and heritage from any harm.
I have tried to bring them together innumerable times; I pulled at Rose’s dress and tugged at Abe’s trouser leg, pointing with my tail to the opposite house, but they both just assumed I was hungry and fetched me some cookies. As though I was unable to steal them for myself, I! The renouned biscuit-thief! The agile crumb-shadow! After that, I whisked away (quite stealthily) a picture of little Abraham with braces standing next to young, pig-tailed Rose, and brought it to Miss Jenkins, but all she did was gasp and frame it.