Explore "The Jade God" by Alan Sullivan on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
THE VILLAGE of Bamberley lay about two miles from Beech Lodge, a homelike nest of buildings gathered in a wrinkle of the Sussex hills. It was well removed from any main road, and its thatched roofs and crooked cobbled streets had fortunately escaped the demoralizing finger of progress. It was, in fact, just as it had always been in the memory of its oldest inhabitant. A village green, with the pens of the cattle market just across the road, a rambling public house, whose swinging sign creaked cheerily when the wind was high, a few diminutive shops, the contents of which were huddled in the meadows, perhaps a hundred cottages, a dozen more pretentious buildings dominated by the village institute-and then the encircling hills, velvet and brown and wide, patched with irregular coverts and dotted as far as the eye could reach with farm-house and barn.
Bamberley happened to be the most important of four adjoining villages; so here were the police headquarters of that utterly rural district. It was a neat brick building with the local jail immediately behind, standing where the cross-roads provided the main interest in life.