Guns in the Gallery

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The human mind is very selective in its retention of information. Carole Seddon had walked along the parade at Fethering more times than she cared to remember, but she’d never before been really aware of the Cornelian Gallery. Of course, she knew it was there, but she had never thought it might have any relevance to her own life. As she passed the frontage on a daily basis, usually with her Labrador, Gulliver, on the way to his walk on Fethering Beach, she had paid scant attention to the gallery’s window displays.

This, like many things in Carole’s life, was a product of her austere middle-class upbringing. Her parents’ lives had been dedicated to keeping below the level of any parapets that they might encounter. By their scale of values, one of the worst social offences was ‘drawing attention to oneself’ – or, even worse, ‘showing off’. Though they’d never articulated the view, there was a tacit assumption in their household that most artistic expression was a form of showing off. And to their cash-strapped, penny-pinching, post-war minds, the idea of spending money on art belonged in the disapproving category of ‘frittering’. During her upbringing, Carole had lost count of the sentences she had heard from her mother which began: ‘Fancy frittering your money away on . . .’

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