by Amanda Owen
‘Nice thing, that,’ he said, nodding towards the table, as we took a breather before carrying in yet another heavy panel.
I bit my tongue; I wasn’t going to tell him that it was about to be chopped into kindling and fed to the fire.
‘Mmm, I’m thinking of painting the legs – shabby chic. Reuben’s gonna sand it down for me.’
He went over to the table, pressed his weight down onto it, rocked it and then slid open the drawer underneath.
‘It’s solid enough,’ he said. ‘It’ll clean up nicely.’
We agreed that in exchange for £150 and the table, I would get the chandelier. That sounded good to me, so we shook hands on it.
Clive was not so enamoured with the chandelier and pointed out that there were not so many rooms in which it could hang, as the beamed ceilings were quite low. What I hadn’t yet mentioned to him was that I was thinking of getting rid of the dated plasterboard ceiling in the front porch, and that would be the perfect place for it.
I liked the porch, which was roughly built with an oak door to the left-hand side. It had once been whitewashed both inside and out, though now its outer walls were swathed in a thick covering of ivy. Perched upon the apex of its gabled roof was a stone finial, weathered over time to the point that its original shape and form was now indistinguishable. A simple little window looked eastwards over the footpath from Keld, forewarning the house’s occupants of any impending visitors. Unevenly set steps, then stepping stones, guided visitors from the footpath to the porch door. In the wall beside the door, obscured from view by weeds that had pushed through the cracks in the flagstones, was a semi-circular niche that housed an iron boot scraper. Built into the wall, such things would have encouraged would-be guests to remove mud from their clog soles before crossing the threshold. I thanked my lucky stars that wellies were now the footwear of choice around the farm, as I should not have liked to have been standing guard at the door barking at the children to scrape their clogs before coming inside.
‘The Firs, a cosy house, older and less altered than most in the dale, and with a whitewashed porch like a dairy; on its window sill a white cat usually dozes.’ This was Marie Hartley’s description of the house and porch, written nearly eighty years ago, and this picture of homeliness that she paints was what I wanted to achieve. In its present form, the porch was structurally sound on the outside but seriously affected with damp on the inside. It had been used as a tackroom; saddle racks were attached to the walls, as were hooks upon which bridles and head collars could be hung. The porch could still be used for storing tack and boots, but it needed to be opened up and made airy, maybe even have some form of heating incorporated to keep the damp at bay. Mouldy walls were one thing, but mouldering English leather saddlery was a no-no.
When I shared my vision with Clive, he wasn’t so suited.
‘So yer think tha’ we should start knocking ceilings down now, do yer?’ he snapped. ‘We’ll nivver ’ave this place finished if you keep findin’ more work to be done.’
‘Look, this is what greets people when they come ’ere,’ I said, pointing upwards, trying to draw his attention to the water-stained plasterboard ceiling. In an attempt to emphasize my point, I picked up a broom that was leaning against the porch wall and poked at the plasterboard directly above with the handle end. The board disintegrated around the broom handle and years’ worth of dust and debris that had accumulated above showered down upon us.
‘You’ve done it now,’ Clive said, resignedly.
I hadn’t intended to do anything quite so immediate, but the fact that there was now a gaping hole in what was left of the ceiling did force the issue.
Clive went outside to rid his hair of all the loose debris whilst I set to work with my new improvised tool, puncturing the ceiling at irregular intervals and watching as the crumbling panels caved in and crashed to the ground. By the time Clive had dusted himself down, the porch was a picture of devastation. Splintered lats, lumps of plaster, mouse droppings and all manner of rubble lay in heaps on the floor.
‘Well, I hope yer like yer new-look porch now,’ said Clive.
‘I’s thinkin’ that my chandelier would look well in ’ere,’ I said, looking up to the now-exposed roof timbers.
What started out as a rather insignificant little space gradually morphed into something quite grand. The reclaimed oak panels were used to cover the walls. They were not a perfect fit, though, but with the addition of yet more oak panels, this time out of Ian at Hawes’s shed of distressed antiquities, we were able to piece together the panels to very pleasing effect. A retired joiner by the name of Ken was called upon to do the refit of the porch. It broke my heart to see a saw being taken to the antique panels but there could have been no better person to do the job. A likeable and jovial chap, he could be entrusted with any task I set him. Years of working with heavy machinery had left him very deaf; I’d often converse with him whilst we were studying the timber and say where to make the cuts, only to find that he hadn’t heard a word of it. This, coupled with the fact that he loved singing at the top of his voice, meant our communication was very limited, which is probably why we got on so well.
‘Measure twice, cut yance’ was his favourite saying, and for this precision I was eternally grateful, as the end result was a joy to behold. The panelling looked as though it had always been there, as it was dark, heavily decorated and had a rich patina that can only come with age.
‘It’s like goin’ into a confessional,’ said Clive when, finally, all the panelling was in place.
‘Christ, don’t start confessing,’ I said. ‘We’ll be ’ere all day.’
The religious theme continued with the purchase of a pew. Being less of a stickler for the precise measurements that Ken was so good at, I just measured out the space in the porch in welly lengths. The auction house at Leyburn had a general household sale once a fortnight, and here you could find all manner of curiosities. The problem was that I would set off with firm resolve, to buy something useful and practical, but then get sidetracked.
‘Oh, you’ll nivver guess what I found at the auction house,’ I said to Clive on my return.
‘I’ll bet that it weren’t what you set out to get,’ he retorted.
‘A gnu, a stuffed blue gnu. Came out of a castle in Bavaria, apparently.’
‘So, you set off this morning with the intention of buying a pew, but instead bought a blue gnu!’
‘Pews are ten a penny,’ I said. ‘Gnus aren’t.’
It was a shoulder mount, a splendid specimen dating from the 1930s, and when bidding stalled, I jumped in with the winning bid without really considering just how big the front end of a gnu was. From where I was standing, at the back of the crowd of buyers, in one of the spacious, opulent rooms of the auction house, it had looked rather smaller than it really was. I had no idea where I would display my impulse buy and so, for the time being, the blue gnu (that the children christened Hugh) was draped in a sheet and put in the corner of one of the bedrooms. Hugh did, as time went on, progress from lying on the floor to being laid out, face upwards, shrouded in a dust sheet on one of the beds.
‘Christ, it’s like a scene from The Godfather,’ Ken had commented when he caught sight of the recumbent gnu.
I did get a pew at the next sale and, miraculously, it fitted in the porch exactly. All that remained was for the chandelier to be put in place. It was being rewired by an electrician who specialized in antique lighting. Unfortunately, some kind of domestic dispute had resulted in the man’s wife confiscating the keys to his workshop and, for a little while, my chandelier was trapped in the middle of some bitter feud. I hardly dared ring to enquire of its progress for fear of stirring up trouble but, eventually, calm and order must have been restored for my chandelier was couriered back, rewired and ready to hang.
Dick and Clive were still running copper heating pipes between rooms, while the children made themselves useful wherever possible. I armed the girls with paintbrushes and
set them off to whitewash the dairy. Reuben and Miles set to work on two iron bedsteads that had been left behind by Susan. After dismantling them, they waited for the first fine day and set to work with a roll of masking tape to wrap around the brass parts, and tins of black spray paint to cover the rest of the frames. What a transformation: with new mattresses the beds looked the part, and stylish too.
It was a real test to keep the children amused whilst the monumental task of renovation was being undertaken. Sometimes, on the busiest days when it seemed that we lurched from one disaster to another, I would find myself wishing that I had never set eyes on The Firs. Then, one day, when all of the pipes and radiators were in place and all of the plaster had been hacked off, we saw that we had turned a corner and were on the gradual road to completion. Other specialists were now drafted in to do the jobs that we could not.
Our good friend Django did the electrical work. We had known Django for many years, he was something of a local personality, an enigmatic figure who was born in Hungary, moved to England, and had a nomadic existence. He had a close affinity with the land and held strong to more straightforward, traditional values in life. He and Clive would debate all that was wrong with the modern world in great depth and had a lot in common.
‘Hello, my fellow peasant farrrrrrrmer,’ Django would say with his lilting accent, rolling his ‘r’s.
Django would try to wean Clive onto Hungarian delicacies, winter salamis and sometimes goulash, all laced with paprika and made by his own fair hand out of offal and the bits of meat that most would classify as inedible. He had more success with Bull’s Blood, a famous Hungarian red wine.
He had a piebald mare, Gypsy, who was his companion, but most importantly his transport. Though now residing in the dale, he was always a free spirit and rode his horse the length and breadth of Britain. In a western saddle and bridle, panniers loaded with his belongings and with his dog, Lucky, trotting obediently beside him he’d think nothing of setting off for Leeds or some other far-flung place.
Whilst working on the house, he’d chatter away to Dick, recounting tales of his childhood in Hungary and his years of travelling around on horseback. Two more contrasting characters you’d struggle to find, and it amused me greatly to listen in on the mainly one-directional conversation. Django’s hair-raising accounts of life on the open road all told in gloriously vivid detail and strewn with colourful language left nothing to the imagination. Dick would listen, nod away in agreement and respond with a suitably shocked ‘crikey’ at the appropriate moment.
Our builder friend Stephen came to repair, replaster or repoint the walls that required it. And, after my many futile attempts at removing layer upon layer of thick paint from doors with little more than a heat gun and scraper, a chap by the name of Martin came armed with his shotblasting kit. There was a tremendous satisfaction in watching the old paint from the creaking door into the living room being stripped away and seeing the bare wood underneath revealed. Lopsided heavy iron hinges had been attached to equally lopsided battens with horse-shoe nails. A previously invisible repair had been carried out at the bottom of the door; perhaps once it had been a henhouse door for a ‘pop hole’ had been neatly filled in. Since time immemorial, people had been recycling and using whatever they could lay their hands upon, every object had a story to tell and the door was no exception.
The window seats in the living and sitting rooms were in a poor state. Cracked and brittle, they splintered as soon as they were shotblasted – it appeared that it was only the paint that was holding them together. They were unsalvageable and, once again, Ken was called in to work his magic with the leftover panels from the porch.
As time went on, a display of artefacts accumulated on the mantelpiece beneath the picture of Jack, a collection of insignificant little objects discovered during the works. Yellowing pieces of newspaper that had been stuffed into cracks behind the woodwork, a primitive form of insulation. Fragments of pottery that had found themselves amongst the rubble within the walls, and shards of thick crude glass, clearly of considerable age.
‘Yer see folks was battlin’ to keep rats out even back then,’ said Clive as he studied a lump of lime mortar that was laced with glass.
‘Same as they are now,’ I muttered.
In the depths of winter, when all was frozen and everything hungering, these old houses became a tempting prospect for the most unpleasant of invaders: rats. Even now, with the advent of rodenticides and sonic deterrents, every winter we would become embroiled in a battle of wits, man versus rodent. Having Dick, the plumber, around, we decided to make full use of his expertise and get him to do a few improvements at Ravenseat farmhouse whilst waiting for Django to do the necessary electrical wirework for the boiler installation at The Firs. The washbasin and WC upstairs in the bathroom needed replacing and, for a little while, we were reliant on using only the downstairs or outside toilet whilst Dick installed the new suite. Many a time I swore under my breath at the inconvenience of it all but would be reminded by Clive that the indoor bathroom and toilet was a relatively modern invention.
We had just been through a hard spell of wintery weather, and the farmhouse had been plagued with mice. I had mouse traps set in the dairy and behind the cupboards and, although annoying, the mice weren’t really causing any great harm. Dick had been busy upstairs in the bathroom making new holes in the wall for the waste pipe and had, after tea, gone down to the shepherd’s hut for the night. Now, nothing in the world will ever stop a determined rodent from finding its way indoors. They are opportunists and will sneak through a door left ajar in broad daylight, scale a wall or even swim through a U-bend – so a fresh uncovered hole in the wall was just asking for trouble, though we didn’t realize it until it was too late.
We had all gone to bed, the household was in total darkness, everyone sleeping, when I had to answer a call of nature. I trundled down the staircase in semi-darkness and then into the bathroom. I heard a rustling noise coming from the farmhouse dairy just along the passageway but didn’t think too much of it – it would probably be Pippen on the trail of a mouse. There have been instances, on particularly cold nights, when one or both of the terriers have stayed in the house overnight, although usually the last job on an evening was to open the farmhouse door and see them scamper off into the darkness.
The door to the bathroom was wide open and a low-wattage bulb cast a dim light into the passageway. Half asleep and mid flow I looked to the left towards the dairy just in time to see a rat cornering at high speed and heading towards me. In a matter of milliseconds, the rat launched itself off the single step down into the bathroom, skimming my knees as I leapt to my feet. I didn’t see where it went after that, I screamed and hurtled out of the toilet, slamming the door behind me. This was more accidental, rather than a deliberate attempt at imprisoning the wretched creature, as I was in a state of terror. I shot up the stairs, three at a time, switching every light on that I passed whilst screaming blue murder. Reaching our bedroom in about three seconds flat, I pounced on Clive in roughly the same way the rat had on me.
‘Whasssup, whassup?’ Clive hollered, sitting bolt upright in bed.
‘It’s a . . . it’s a . . . rat! An’ it jumped on mi knee whilst I was on t’loo.’
‘Oh,’ said Clive, lying back down again. ‘Yer mun’t freeten’ mi like that, I thought summat reet bad ’ad ’appened.’
I pointed out in the strongest terms possible that in many people’s minds what had occurred was ‘reet bad’.
‘I am not going back down and into t’toilet agin until it’s gone,’ I announced.
The rest of the night I lay awake listening to the gnawing of wood. The rat was trapped in the bathroom and trying to eat a hole in the door. As night gave way to morning, it clearly became more desperate. I listened as the door now shook, the rat rattling the sneck as it tried in vain to make a getaway. We got up early and went to summon Chalky. The children were directed to the outside toilet and warned that under n
o circumstances should they venture into the downstairs bathroom.
‘Don’t tell ’em what it is,’ I hissed to Clive, although it was obvious to the older ones what was going on, especially when Chalky was propelled into the smallest room and the door hastily slammed behind her.
‘Is there a rat in there?’ asked Raven with an impassive look on her face.
‘Erm, yes,’ I whispered, ‘but don’t tell the lal’ uns.’
It took all of a minute for word to get around the kitchen table that there was indeed a rat in the downstairs bathroom. Dick came in for his breakfast.
‘There’s a wat in there,’ said little Sidney, pointing enthusiastically towards the bathroom door. Inside could be heard Chalky scuffling about, punctuated by an occasional whine and the sound of frantic digging.
‘Crikey, a rat,’ said Dick flatly, seemingly neither shocked, horrified or even surprised. It was as if for all intents and purposes it was an entirely normal thing to encounter over coffee and toast.
After a short while, Clive became impatient and decided to take matters into his own hands, arming himself with the nearest weapon to hand, a Vileda Supermop. The children ate their breakfast and Dick went upstairs to continue with the work in the bathroom, whilst from the downstairs toilet came the sounds of a room being turned upside-down. Chalky was in her element, yipping excitedly and growling, whereas Clive most definitely wasn’t in his element.
All of a sudden, there was a furiously loud flurry of activity. The children stopped eating their cornflakes and stared open-mouthed towards the bathroom door. Finally, there was a dull thump, a squeal (but not from Clive) and the door flew open. Exiting the bathroom wielding a sizeable flattened rodent impaled on a snapped mop handle was a triumphant Clive. Chalky, who followed, seemed to have grown in stature and stood squarely in the hallway, her coat tousled and her chest out. She was the champion and defender of our home and she was proud.
