by Amanda Owen
No matter what lay ahead, this was a defining moment. We had committed to buying ourselves a house that would become our family home one day, a place that we could love and where we could finally put down some permanent roots.
2
A Family Home
There was no ceremonial handover of ownership, it was more of a gradual process as Susan and Graham slowly moved their belongings out of The Firs. I felt for Susan. I recalled packing up and leaving my little cottage at Crosby Ravensworth. Even though I was happy to be moving to Ravenseat to be with Clive, my husband-to-be, the whole upping sticks and closing the door for the last time still hurt. How difficult it can be to dispose of items collected over the years. I had books that I had never read, a belt that didn’t fit anymore (truthfully, it was a little on the tight side when I bought it as a teenager at Pink Cadillac, the most fashionable shop in Huddersfield), spanners that had belonged to my father, and mouldering notebooks and diaries. My house clearance had been a mere fraction of what Susan and Graham had to deal with, but I knew that it was the reminiscing that took the time and that emotions would be running high. I had other things on my mind too, namely the newest member of the family, baby Clemmie. She had arrived early and – reminiscent of times past – had been born on the hearth rug in front of the open fire at Ravenseat.
Clive and I would wait until after tea and then drive down to The Firs to see how much progress had been made with the moving out. It wasn’t that we were wanting to move our things in, more that we needed to see the blank canvas and decide what was the most logical starting point for the renovation. When that day finally came, we realized there wasn’t a logical starting point. To see the place stripped, devoid of its clutter, furniture and warmth, made me shudder. Clive and I wandered from room to room in silence while the stark emptiness lay bare the realities of the task ahead of us. It was extremely daunting: what had initially seemed like a relatively simple spruce-up had snowballed into a monumental undertaking. And we couldn’t let the house sit empty for too long. I needed to recoup some of the money that I had invested in order to pay back the bank. The house needed to earn its keep.
‘Oh, what have I gotten myself into,’ I said to Clive. ‘How am I ever gonna get this fit for people to stay in?’
‘It’s not that bad,’ said Clive. ‘Imagine what you’d ’ave ’ad to do if we’d bought the chapel at Keld or t’Smithy Holme.’
‘We wouldn’t ’ave been skint an’ we could ’ave gotten an architect – it’d ’ave been a blank canvas,’ I said.
However, when the sun was setting over Ash Gill and the house, ivy clad and sturdy, was basked in a gentle mellow glow, I was filled with hope and joy. This was a place that, like Ravenseat, had everything: centuries of history, stories of people who had lived and worked here, and above all a peaceful sense of intimacy. There were, unfortunately, the sodden, grey days when the dwelling appeared sullen and seemed to afford little comfort when you were inside its dank walls. The cold seemed to permeate the very core of the place.
The furnishings were replaced with sparse oddments that we brought from Ravenseat: a few kitchen chairs, an electric heater for whichever room we were working in and a couple of clipping stools that we’d found in a barn. These doubled as either saw benches or tables. Clive and I set about making the downstairs sitting room into somewhere that we could retreat to at lunchtime. Susan had left a dolls’ house, a game of bagatelle and a few jigsaws, and these kept Sidney and Annas amused in one corner. Little Clem was happy in her travel cot or car seat.
The one saving grace in this room was that it had a sizeable French potbellied stove, and if there was one thing that we were not short of it was fuel to keep her lit. Chewed architrave and skirting boards, rotten door frames and floorboards, the house kept us in firewood if nothing else.
Clive and I weren’t half bad at demolition, excelling in the slash-and-burn technique, but as the jobs stacked up it became abundantly clear that we were going to need expert help. As farmers, we liked to think that there wasn’t much that we couldn’t turn our hand to but, although we did possess many basic skills, we were woefully underqualified when it came to electrics, joinery and plumbing.
On finer days, at the weekends and during the school holidays, the children would all come down to The Firs. When the weather was pleasant, they would head off to explore the surrounding barns and fields. It was only five acres but still it was a new playground for them and they ran riot.
‘Should we be worried?’ Clive would say when we hadn’t seen hide nor hair of them for an hour or so.
‘Nivver worry,’ I’d say, ‘they’ll be back wi’ some tale or other.’ And they would eventually appear. Dishevelled and dirty, talking of wading through streams and climbing trees, they’d empty their pockets of the grubby mementos picked up en route. You could say that they surveyed the whole place for us, leaving no stone unturned. They knew where the gaps were in the drystone walls, where the stone land drains ran and where the demolished barn foundations were that could supply us with extra walling stone.
Reuben and Miles in particular got to know the lie of the land and became very useful groundsmen, as tidying up outside was of the utmost importance. Roll after roll of fencing wire had been used to divide up the fields into smaller paddocks but I wanted to revert to the original drystone-wall boundaries. It was important that the fields were stockproof as we did intend to take Miles’s small flock of Texdales down there to graze, but there was no need to have the place resembling Colditz with coils of wire bridging gaps and suspended over gutters. It all had to go, and so the boys were armed with fencing pliers and an empty bucket in which to put the staples. Soon we had even more firewood, namely fence posts, all surplus to requirements. I took my chainsaw down and sawed them into logs. The children gathered up a whole tractor-load of ugly wire, rolled it up as best they could and put it, and two cast-iron baths that had been used as water troughs, out for Daz, the scrap man. Reuben set about making a little wicket gate from some of the reclaimed wood, which allowed people to walk down to the riverbank, whilst Miles cleared a nettlebed that grew on an old muck midden with a scythe.
The rich, black soil from the muck midden and rubble from previous building projects were all removed and redistributed where they could do good. I hesitate to use the word ‘landscaping’ to describe this work, as it was undertaken by Reuben in his vintage mini dumper. Everything was done in fits and starts; some days we could get the farm jobs done quickly and spend the majority of the day at The Firs, on other days we would run out of time altogether and vow to get to work down there the next day.
Clive is a very good drystone waller, and he has had lots of practice over the years but more in a practical sense, repairing walls, rather than constructing an object of beauty. The lawn at the front of the house morphed into the field and was crying out for a retaining wall that would separate the two areas and neaten up the frontage of the house. It was hardly a building project where he could let his imagination run wild, but still it was one that he felt perfectly at home with, and one that he could create entirely from the stone reclaimed from the field itself. The recycling or robbing of building materials is nothing new. When I’d go along gapping with Clive, we’d occasionally find stones that had been decoratively hewn long ago for other purposes. Door jambs and mullions from long-forgotten dwellings, and stones intricately chiselled by someone with an eye for detail and precision. To handle such a stone would always fire my imagination. Who were these early stonemasons, these skilled men who worked with the most basic tools but left us with a tantalizing glimpse of what went before? A gate stoop, a large angular stone with iron hanging still intact, was incorporated into Clive’s new wall, as was a find of Miles’s: a fossilized tree root that resembled a snake skin. There were no plans regarding the wall, it just evolved as load after load of stone was unearthed and delivered via the quad bike and trailer.
‘I’s gonna build a seat in this wall,’ said Clive, and
he did. Not the most comfortable of seats but a place to perch, nevertheless. When, finally, the last topstone had been set, we all stood as a family and looked in admiration at Clive’s handiwork.
‘It looks like it’s allus bin there,’ said Raven.
That was a compliment indeed, and exactly what we hoped to achieve with the rest of the house.
We were aware that there was only a certain amount of landscaping work that could be carried out with a spade and the mini dumper. The boys had made great strides, but it was time to bring the old orange digger down. This was music to Reuben’s ears. It had been inherited from our friend Alec who had used it for renovations when he was landlord of Tan Hill, England’s highest inn and our nearest pub. Now he’d retired, and just concentrated on his other passion of sheepdog trialling, he had no need for a digger. We were the grateful recipients of this slow-moving rust-bucket, and Reuben was delighted.
‘Can I drive it there?’ he said excitedly. ‘Pleeeeeease.’
Raven rolled her eyes. ‘It’ll take you aaaaaaages,’ she said. ‘Seriously, you want to drive it all the way from t’Ravenseat to t’Firs.’
He nodded vigorously.
After he agreed to drive it cross country through the fields, Clive gave him the nod. It was only a two-mile journey, but it took him all day. First the digger overheated and boiled, then one of the tracks came off.
The rest of the children, who were playing in the farmyard at Ravenseat, provided a running commentary as the orange outline crawled along at a snail’s pace. When Reuben finally reached his destination, he described all the folks he’d waved to, who’d passed by the fields in cars, apparently none of them batting an eyelid at a young boy quietly driving a digger along.
‘I tell yer what though,’ he said, ‘I think I saw mi’ geography teacher frae school an’ he fair glowered at mi.’
‘Thoos done well, Reubs,’ Clive said, patting him on the head affectionately, ‘but now it’s time that I took back the controls of yon digger.’ And with that he slowly reversed it down to the bottom of the lawn, swung around the boom and knocked over one of the two coniferous trees that grew in the corner.
‘Look what you’ve done to mi bloody tree! I can’t believe you’ve just done that,’ I shouted; I was furious, Reuben thought it was funny.
‘Ey, Mum, yer gonna ’ave to change name o’ t’house now – it’s not The Firs anymore, you’ve only got one fir tree now, so it’s The Fir!’
We had already decided that we were going to plant more trees; we wanted as much greenery as possible. There was a wooded copse where a cuckoo could be heard calling in the springtime and a few magnificent mature ash trees grew alongside the river, their roots exposed in the crumbling eroded riverbank. I was hopeful that where we had failed with tree planting at Ravenseat, owing to waterlogged heavy soil, we might succeed at The Firs, where the soil was deeper and richer. Maybe in a few hundred years a whole line of trees would grace the skyline, but for now I was going to have to content myself with finding a replacement fir. This time it was eagle-eyed Miles who spotted, out of the school-bus window, a sad-looking Christmas tree amongst the firewood and pallets of a recently constructed bonfire.
‘Are yer sure it’s got its roots on?’ I asked as we discussed it at the tea table.
‘It’s in a pot, Mam, it must ’ave.’
We didn’t regard this as stealing – it was obviously unwanted – so we scaled the mountain of chipboard, pallets and branches and came home triumphant with the tree. I don’t know that it’s possible to hold great affection for a tree, but that one certainly came close to being loved. Edith cradled it in the back of the Land Rover for the journey home; Sidney and Violet tenderly unravelled its coiled roots from the plastic pot before carefully placing it in its ready-dug hole. Even now the children often go and check on its progress, recalling how they rescued it from its fiery fate.
To be at The Firs is to experience quiet, a silence that can seldom be found in the busy lives that we lead. Ravenseat, too, is a peaceful place, but its tranquil, sleepy appearance belies the bustling activities that are part and parcel of a working hill farm. Barking dogs, the cattle in the barn or tups in the stables all contribute to the sounds that surround us. One day Edith and I were alone at The Firs working in the garden, trying to ascertain what was a weed and what wasn’t, when we heard distant voices, children’s voices. We both stopped what we were doing and listened hard.
‘Did you hear that?’ I whispered to Edith. She nodded.
‘Violet, weren’t it?’ she replied.
We both stood quiet for a while but heard nothing more. I was not entirely convinced that my children’s voices could travel all the way from home, over a distance of two miles or so, but it is true that on a still day – as this was – when there is not a breath of wind, the cries of birds on the wing can carry over a great distance. On countless occasions I’ve heard the haunting call of the curlew or the drumming of the snipe and yet seen just the tiniest speck upon the horizon.
I’ve also had call, on occasion, to reprimand Clive for his expletive-filled rants at Bill the sheepdog. Having apologized profusely to anyone within earshot (which is much further than Clive ever thinks) I would stand, hands on hips, awaiting the pair’s return to the farmyard.
‘Yer can’t yell at Bill like that,’ I’d say crossly.
‘It’s like water off a duck’s back,’ Clive would mutter. ‘Bloody dawg, getting me into trouble.’ And he’d scowl at Bill, who would nonchalantly cock his leg on the quad bike wheel, oblivious to the domestic argument.
During those first few months at The Firs it really was a voyage of discovery, getting a feel for the place and trying to get a plan of action together. Outside was comparatively simple really, it was where we felt at ease, we could wall, dig and plant to our hearts’ content, but interior design was an entirely different matter. It was the change in the weather that finally drove us back into the house. When all around us became churned with mud, and the rain fell incessantly, then we knew it was time to begin implementing some of the big ideas that we had been talking about since the start of the project.
The onset of bad weather brought one job to the forefront of our minds: the windows. The house had wooden sash windows, and half of them were rotten. Layer upon layer of paint had been applied to the frames but nothing could disguise the water that pooled on the sills inside, and a gale blew between the casement and the panes. The front exterior of the house was cloaked in ivy, tendrils of which had even penetrated through the crumbling mortar. The long, narrow window at the corner of the house, that sat at a right angle to the hearth, would originally have been a fire window, letting light into the inglenook, where the inhabitants would undoubtedly have huddled for warmth on dark winter nights. It is a pleasant thought to imagine the room warmed and shadows cast by a blazing-hot fire, but the reality was more likely to have been a smouldering, lacklustre fire, fed by peat and a little coal of the very poorest quality. When I touched the window frame, it moved, fragments of mortar dropping onto the floor. New fitted windows were going to cost us dearly but until we could make the place watertight and windproof, we could not progress. The old windows were ripped out without much ceremony; the glass was removed by the glaziers whilst the wooden frames and casements were left for us to burn.
The new windows were made to look like traditional wooden sash windows, but were PVC, easier to maintain and considerably lighter on the pocket than the alternative, though not what I really wanted. I was fortunate to have been able to choose: if The Firs had been a listed building then I would not have been allowed this luxury. The difference amounted to many thousands of pounds that I didn’t have.
Ravenseat is listed, The Firs is not. It makes no sense that this should be the case: maybe it just got missed, because it is so hidden away. Listings came in during the Second World War, with the aim of ascertaining which buildings would have to be rebuilt exactly as they were, should they be bombed. I imagine that th
e officials responsible for listing were probably a little more casual about their work high up in the Dales, which was highly unlikely to have been the target of any bombing raid.
‘These windows’ll keep t’weather and t’noise at bay,’ one of the lads said as he admired his handiwork.
‘I’s not troubled wi’ noise,’ I said. ‘Not ’ere.’
The new windows made a huge difference to the appearance of the outside of the house; the ivy that clung to the walls had been trimmed back and exposed the paint-flecked stone quoins and ledge. A ridge remained where the stone mullions had once divided the windows into two smaller rectangular panes. These would have been knocked out once bigger glass windows became more available and affordable. With the advent of electricity, light is something that we all take for granted but, in the past, it was of far greater value. To live in almost perpetual darkness, through the grindingly long, hard winter months, when the days were short, and the weak winter sun sat low in the sky and the surrounding moors cast a shadow over the farmhouse, must have been dispiriting. However, Ravenseat has a very big arched window built into the east wall, and the morning sun illuminates the hallway and staircase and creeps into the bedrooms, waking us in the most pleasant way. My friend Hannah Hauxwell, the Daleswoman who became famous in the 1970s for living frugally in the most primitive of conditions on her farm in Baldersdale, summed it up perfectly when she said, ‘In the summer, I live; in winter, I merely exist.’
Warmth must have been something that evaded the early inhabitants of these houses in the Dales, and centuries later The Firs was still cold. The storage heaters that were dotted around the house took the chill off, the French stove in the sitting room could warm that room itself nicely, but the wood-burner in the larger main living room seemed woefully inadequate for the size of the space. This room had not always been so spacious, as it had at one time been divided by a wooden partition that kept the passageway between the front door and porch to the dairy separate, keeping draughts at bay. The constant footfall of the clog-wearing occupants had worn a shallow groove into the stone flags, and you could follow the dipped pathway where people had rounded the corner into the dairy. Cosiness had had to be sacrificed in order to create space, but now as I sat in my coat, right up against the small wood-burner with my hands nearly touching its cast metal, and I was still cold, I knew that a solution was needed.
