Yes I know it’s an odd place for something like that. Let me explain how that came to be.

Originally we had intended to buy the old house in the centre of the village, the one with the slate roof and flint stone walls on the corner of the village square overlooking the village duck pond, but we were gazumped. Quite unbecoming for a staid little English village I thought. Anyway, we were not prepared to play that game, and that is how we landed up here in the gate house of the old manor.

It has a story you know, the manor. Apparently, the first owner an Archibald Friedricksen was murdered. No, I don’t believe he was the first owner either, but that’s the story. They say his ghost can be seen wandering the grounds on moonless nights. Again I find it hard to believe you can see very much at all on a moonless night, but that’s what they say.

Anyway, we don’t live in the manor and in fact it’s has been deserted these last five years. No-one is willing to take on the repairs.

But you know, despite all these stories, which I still do not believe, there definitely was something odd here. This section of our back garden was a place where no animals, not a frog, nor a bird nor a worm would go. A place where plants don’t grow.

It’s not that it lacks water or sunlight or nutrients or anything. We tilled it and added fertilizer but still there was nothing, not even weeds.

When I discussed it with my neighbour, Jack, he said “Well, you are new to these parts but I am sure you have all the standard stories like the one about the Friedriksen ghost, but” he said lowering his voice, “there is also a story that no-one talks about. One where the whole village was involved. I’ll tell you about it, because you really ought to know, but if anyone asks, it was not me that told you. Now, about ten years ago, in fact almost ten years to the day, Dan, the local publican, down there at the “Mean and Skinflint” (A welcoming name for a pub I always thought) came to a sticky end, and I mean that literally.

“It was a hot summer day and the road here leading down into the village had just been resurfaced with tarmac. Anyway, a car came careening down the hill and left the road on the bend there, and poor old Dan to avoid the car jumped out into the road.

“The car should by rights never have been there at all, because the tar on the road was still hot and wet.

“Dan was stuck and burning. Everyone came running out but no-one knew what to do.

“He died out there in the road – just over there – as we all watched, wringing our hands avoiding putting ourselves in the same position as Dan. It was awful.”

I agreed that it was a tragic story, and that I could understand the shared guilt, but I asked him “what does this have to do with my silent bald garden?”

“No idea” my neighbour replied. But the answer had come too quickly. I knew he was hiding something and I couldn’t help feeling there was a connection between the accident and my bald patch.

That evening, I went down to the pub, now run by Dan’s son, and renamed “The Rich and Magnanimous” to get to know the locals a bit better. That first evening did not go very well. I was the outsider, but I found one friendly soul. Old Pete they called him. Friendly but not very helpful. However, being kind and friendly to Pete seemed to earn me brownie points and within a couple of weeks, I was on talking terms with most of them.

I talked about Danny’s father Dan. The place went deathly quiet, but I pressed on. Innocuous questions; no reference to the tragedy. How long had he run the pub? What sort of man was he?

I got polite answers until someone, old Pete it was actually, cracked and blurted out “We don’t talk about Dan. OK!”

It was my opening. I asked why not. In fact I asked question after question that wrapped right around the whole story of Dan’s demise without actually mentioning it. By the time we had finished discussing Dan and everything but the tarmac incident, the picture was almost perfectly defined by the shape of the gaping hole at its centre.

I had my starting point. From what I understood, they had been so embarrassed by their inaction that once the tarmac was safe, they had peeled Dan’s body off the road, and buried it instead of reporting it.

I could guess the burial site. Tar and the fumes it gives off are really not conducive to life, more to the preservation of death. I had images of Dan’s tortured soul frozen in time and doomed to an eternity of perfect preservation in that moment of indescribable horror, laying under the ground in my silent bald garden.

It is sad that he is no longer with us I thought, and said so. The entire pub nodded in unison. “It sounds like he was a good man.”, I said.

“One of the best” came from one corner. “Dependable to the last” from another. Soon the pub was a babble of accolades for Dan; a sea of unspoken grief and guilt.

Now, entirely separately, I should explain that I am a member of the veteran steam society. We voluntarily repair and display old steam powered machines. Anything from a tractor to a steam organ. It is a fascinating hobby, especially for a would-be engineer like myself.

And, it is the confluence of my interests in steam and the sad story of Dan’s demise that explains the appearance of the mysterious memorial to Dan, the steam roller now parked in my bald silent garden.

After all I had to use the bald patch for something, I needed somewhere to park the steam roller and the village needed a focus for their secret grief. That’s how come there is a now steam roller proudly bearing the name “Mean and Skinflint” in my garden, where anyone else would have a lush front garden lawn.