Far out to the East of London, where the River Thames widens into an estuary as it flows out to sea, lies the village of Little Wakering. Like many small English villages, it is simultaneously ever so humble and wildly beautiful. Tiny, well-maintained cottages and buildings made of stone, set in a rolling blanket of green.

The villagers all know each other by name, of course. They'll yell a hello as they clamber in and out of their cars or stroll down to The Purse & Duckling for a pint in the evening. Little Wakering is perhaps even a little unremarkable. You might get the feeling that if you've seen one rural village, you've seen them all.

But there are differences. If you know where to look. A closer inspection of the villager's front doors will confirm that every single one of them is freshly painted. At all times, all the doors in Wakering are freshly painted. The logistics to that alone boggle the mind. But it doesn't end with a lick of paint. Hinges are uniformly well-oiled, shelves put up straight and true; lawns mowed, windows sparkling in the sun and smelling vaguely of white vinegar.

Throughout Little Wakering, beautiful flower displays hang in baskets bursting with flowers. And this is true all year round. Even in the depths of winter colours bloom against grey skies. One might suspect some sort of hot house is involved? Certainly there must be a guiding hand to facilitate such beauty.

And of course, there is a hand. And an arm. And a face full of laughter lines and grey whiskers. Because the truth of the matter is that all of this craft and care is the work of one man. Every hedge trimmed and bowl turned. Every jam jar filled and marrow grown. From the newly seated welcome sign at the top of the main street, to the artful sculpture made from old milking machine parts outside the pub. Adam Greengrass is responsible for the lot.

Mr Greengrass lives on the edge of the village, a little further out than most of its other inhabitants. His property used to be a network of cottages and outbuildings serving a long forgotten estate. The place is startlingly well-maintained (startling only to those haven't yet seen his work in the village of course).

Over the years Mr Greengrass has patiently restored every facet of his property, improving on the original designs and slowly working the outbuildings together to form a sort of idyllic rural compound. The neat lines of a vast allotment take up the entire Eastern end of the property - seasonal offerings of carrots and cabbages, trellises of heritage tomatoes of every conceivable shape and colour. A riot of smells, hues and textures.

The adjoining greenhouses are practically humming with seed trays and young plants. It all becomes a little dizzying. Turn up at any time of day and you invariably see Mr Greengrass working on something in his modest grounds. Here he is re-tiling the roof on an ancient tractor shed, there he is doing some crazy paving or watering the rhododendrons beside the kitchen door.

There's a long running joke in the village that Adam Greengrass must have some closely-guarded superhuman ability, or at least be extremely comfortable being in two places at once. It seems almost inconceivable that he can maintain such a large property while still doing all the odd jobs around the village. And yet whenever he's needed, invariably within the hour, there he is at your front door - putting down his tool box and wiping his brow with a spotted hanky - kitted out with paint brushes or welding equipment; carrying a ladder over his shoulder or a sheet of corrugated iron under his arm. He'll fix the split leading in your roof that is letting in water or set you up with a new chicken coop and a month's feed for good measure.

Mr Greengrass doesn't talk much but smiles often. He takes different amounts of sugar in his tea depending on the day. He wears overalls in all the colours of the rainbow, sometimes changing throughout the day (it seems Mr Greengrass can’t abide paint stains or mud splatter). He is sometimes a little vague on the exact pronunciation of your name or when you last saw each other but he can take apart and name every piece of a dual fuel generator and diagnose its mechanical failings in a moment. Another joke in the village is that Mr Greengrass is better with plants than people - more comfortable in fields than living rooms.

Every villager has a Greengrass story.

Like the time the Clarke's youngest went missing.

All of 9 years old, and after a pre-teen meltdown the details of which no one can ever remember anymore, she slipped out in the middle of the night and off into the dark velvet of the countryside surrounding Wakering. Out where no electric light shone, under a canopy of cloud that hid even the moon from view.

Judith Clarke was beside herself, of course. It wasn't the fear of wild animals particularly - the English countryside is hardly a seething mass of alpha predators (although you wouldn't like to get some of the badgers too riled up). It was the acres and acres of open country - the barbed wire fences and pockets of marshland, the bifurcating streams that flowed out past Potton Island towards the North Sea, uneven ground and animal sets that could easily twist an ankle (badgers again). Little Kathy was too young to be out in all of that, stumbling around in the dark, when she should have been tucked up in bed under a pile of quilted blankets.

But before the authorities could get organised, even as the villagers began to establish a rudimentary grid system to guide the search, Adam Greengrass ambled up the path to the Clarke house. He had a torch in one hand and Kathy Clarke nestled in the crook of his other arm. She was clinging to him for dear life - her jeans were torn and muddy and her hair was plastered to her scalp with moisture. No one quite knew how he had reacted so quickly, nor how he had managed to cover such a vast area in so little time. No one really cared either. All that mattered was that the youngest Clarke was now drying off in front of the fire with a cup of hot cocoa.

Later, when she had calmed down, Kathy was able to recall stomping off into the woods before becoming so lost she sought refuge in the lee of a fallen oak tree. She couldn't remember how long she'd spent there in the pitch black, back to the trunk, shivering uncontrollably in her thin t-shirt and startling at every unfamiliar noise. She only remembered the sudden torch beams and the sound of Mr Greengrass' voice, so loud it overlapped itself, bouncing off nearby tree trunks, as he called her name.

But that's how it goes in Little Wakering. Adam Greengrass is there to help with whatever life throws at you. Whether it's a broken tile or a lost child, an extra bunch of carrots or an emergency tracheotomy. It's the perfect symbiosis. The village relies on Mr Greengrass, and in his own way, Mr Greengrass relies on the village to keep giving him a reason to put on his overalls.

Time passed.

—

No one ever found all the copies of him.