I was in a community centre the other day chatting with residents about some of the images they had brought for the local website they are developing. As soon as this one came up they all said: 'talking over the palings'.
The picture seems to have encapsulated a historically intense neighbourliness, and the phrase was its widely-accepted shorthand.
One of the residents said: the man in the background, that's Mr Bernard, he was from London, such a nice man.
The picture dates from about 1950. I was born a few years later and grew up in the sixties, and I remember a lot of fences like this and, later, chain link fences. In many cases these would have replaced iron fences and gates, where the iron had been taken and used for armaments during the war.
