Now it's nearly ours, we've pocketed our rose-tinted specs. It's small. There's no avoiding it. But the way things are going for us right now, we know there's an answer, with a bit of imagination. All we need is a small south-facing extension at one end. And we could raise the roof level a little so there's space for a small mezzanine gallery along the back wall.
We recalculate the finances, and find that M minus C (where M is the money available, and C is the cost, according to Nik's formula, of demolishing, converting, roof-raising and extension-erecting) = AN (i.e. Approximately Nothing). So that's all right, though there's now no room for M to shrink or C to swell.
The next morning, I'm standing in Back Walls – that'll be our road when it's all done – on the lookout for Anthea's four-by-four. She's agreed to pop in to have a quick look at the job en route to a meeting with one of her established clients. I see a likely looking vehicle turn in off the Fosse Way, and flag it down when I see a friendly wave through the windscreen. She bumps up onto the curb and a moment later we're shaking hands. I'd vaguely expected a strapping Amazon, for no other reason than that people involved in building work should look like weightlifters. But Anthea's dress size must be what Maggie would classify as 'petite'. She looks overwhelmed by her quilted anorak and wellies. As she slams the car door I ask, 'Don't you need a clipboard or something?'
'Bit soon for that,' she replies. 'I just want to get a general idea of what we might be getting up to.'
When she catches sight for the first time of the old garages crouching shamefaced in the corner of the plot, I think I detect a slight upward movement of her eyebrows. So, once I've explained what we want to do, and she's walked around, poked about inside, and done a bit of rough pacing out of lengths and widths, I take advantage of a long pause in the conversation to ask, 'So do you think it'll work? Or do you think we're daft?' then await her pronouncement.
'I've seen worse,' she says, shakes my hand again, adds, 'Talk soon,' and she's gone.
That evening, with Maggie in full swing moulding pastry for our chicken cobbler, I'm lurking on the edge of the kitchen, a glass of cranberry juice in my hand, giving her a word by word account, anxious to know if she thinks Anthea's opinion is encouraging.
'Well,' Maggie replies, mixing the butter and flour for the topping, 'yours was a silly question to start with. It's like asking the deli if their ham's nice.' (A low blow, as this is a crime I've been guilty of.)
'You know,' I say, 'Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall puts four tablespoons of flour into his mix. I reckon that's no more than three and a half.'
She wafts me away with the back of her hand. 'Isn't it time for you to watch the Six O'clock News?' she suggests.
'Sure,' I reply, 'but what do you mean about the nice ham and Anthea?'
'All I'm saying,' she says, 'is that we're Anthea's potential clients, so she's hardly likely to slag off what we want to do, is she?'
I ponder this as I wander out of the kitchen. Incisive as Maggie's judgement may be, 'I've seen worse' doesn't exactly sound like the kind of endorsement you hear Lewis Hamilton give Hugo Boss shoes.
CHAPTER 4
CAVALIERS AND GASWORKS
'So what's the name of the house going to be?' my sister Anne asks. She and my brother-in-law David have stopped by and I've dragged them off to look at the burgage with outbuilding. I give her credit for assuming we'll manage to buy it and build it.
'Well,' I play for time. 'Maybe, "The Old Barn"?'
'But it's not a barn' she objects, 'and it doesn't look anything like one. It's long and thin, not tall and wide.'
She's right. It's like calling a bungalow 'Chateau Magnifique'. People either assume you've got an unsubtle sense of irony or they just snigger.
'How about "The Old Chiropractor's Consulting Room?"' she offers. I'm starting to think she's not taking it seriously after all, though the suggestion may not be quite as daft as it sounds. Just up the road, there's a row of cottages called 'The Old Vet's Surgery 1', 'The Old Vet's Surgery 2, and 3', and nobody seems to giggle. 'Or,' she adds, pointing over at a 3-foot-wide wheel with rusty iron rims and crumbly wooden spokes, half-hidden behind some junky sacks of rubble, 'What about "The Old Cart Shed?"'
Well, at least we can agree on the first two words. And once she and my brother-in-law have left, I head off to do some research, pausing only in Fleece Alley to return the full-throated 'Lovely afternoon,' issued by the vicar, a man of muscular stature and a bountiful beard, who's walking his dog, Black Beauty (this is my name for the animal, reflecting its colour and near equine proportions, though its face is, I admit, more butch than belle). My destination is the glowering gothic St. Edward's Hall in the middle of Stow's Market Square. This is where local records might help me find a name that combines historical precision with… with what? Well, I'll know when I see it.
My first discovery seems to back the cart shed theory. In 1862, the railway came to Stow-on-the-Wold. Or rather, not quite. It couldn't get up the hill. So they plonked a single platform with sidings in a field one mile to the south. This station was a godsend to the folk of Stow. Not as a means of rushing them off to Oxford or Worcester. Stowites have always known that such places will disappoint, without the need to visit them. No. The railway brought regular supplies of coal from Wolverhampton and this was not just to burn in Stow's hundreds of inglenook fireplaces.
Just as the station opened, The Stow-on-the-Wold Gas and Coke Company was putting the finishing flourishes to the town's gasworks. And this, I note, was only a couple of hundred yards from our nameless home-to-be. The fuel for this marvel of industrial development had to get from the sidings at Stow station up Stow Hill to the gas furnace. All of a sudden, coal merchants and hauliers sprang up everywhere, and the smart money went into cart horses and drays. Though not certain, it looks possible that our old building housed both. Fifteen-love to Anne.
So if we're going to be sticklers for historical accuracy, I guess our prospective home might be called 'The Old Coal Carter's Yard', or even 'The Old Gas Works Supply Sub-Depot'. Now, I do know people – men mostly – who're only happy when breathing in fumes from a steam-driven canal-boat lift, or grazing their knees on a pedal-powered cobbler's lathe, and for whom such names would be bliss. And I suppose, given that both my granddads and their fathers before them were coal-miners, I ought to be relishing these echoes of my own history. I guess too, some sort of industrial name would at least stand out from all the rural idyll addresses in Stow, which, by the way, has no fewer than four 'Rose Cottages'. On the other hand, would we be lynched for bringing down house prices? I decide to compromise, and put the 'Coal Carter's Yard' and the 'Gas Works Sub-Depot' on the 'Possibles' list.
My second thread of research goes back several centuries earlier. The nearest point to us on Sheep Street is where The Crown Inn used to stand. It was built sometime in the 1400s, but came into its own 200 years later. During the 1600s, Cavaliers and Roundheads were constantly marching into Stow, declaring it for King or for Parliament, then promptly losing it to the other side.
In fact, it was in Stow in 1646 that a decisive nail was hammered into the monarch's coffin. After being defeated just north of the town, the Royalist infantry were chased into Stow's Market Square. The thousand or so who surrendered were banged up inside the church for several days without food or other relief. Nasty, but healthier than the fate of the two hundred who resisted. They were slaughtered till the blood ran down Digbeth Street and formed a sinister pool at the bottom outside Maggie's dress shop. Legend has it that ducks swam in the gore.
Records do not show whether the owners of The Crown Inn kept a sign hidden ready behind the bar saying 'The Cromwell Arms' which they could quickly hang up outside whenever the Parliamentarians came to town. The landlord must have done something similar because business at the inn was so brisk during Civil War times that the owners needed to expand. They acquired all the surrounding dwellings and their associated land. And – here's the exciting bit I stumble on – this
specifically included our burgage and Sunny's cottage. This latter was turned into lodgings for coachmen and ostlers downstairs, with hay stored above on the first floor. (Would not any management consultancy division worth its salt recommend re organising these functions the other way round? Improved productivity without having to heave fodder up and down a ladder; fitter employees with sleep no longer disturbed by showers of nose-tickling hay.)
However, what I read next makes my heart pound and I can't help muttering a stifled, 'Shi…!' The chap opposite, who's been studying a single page of his leather-bound volume for the past forty minutes, raises his dark Dennis Healy eyebrows and glares. I make a face like Wallace apologising to Gromit, and re-read the entry before me. On 29 May 1690, an advert in the London Gazette stated that The Crown Inn at Stow-on-the-Wold had 'stabling for above a hundred horses'! Now, even on the assumption that the landlord was stretching it a bit before the Advertising Standards Authority got its act together, the early evening scene behind The Crown must have been a circus of steaming, snorting animals being unharnessed, rubbed down and led off to feed and doze for the night. Our building would have been able to take about twenty of them, I reckon. The question is: does it date back that far?
I scamper out of the records library, across the Square, round Church Street and over Sheep Street to look for evidence. The most obvious sign is that our building's the right shape for stables. A bit tall maybe, but then we know from the account of Sunny's cottage that they used to keep fodder up above. Then there's the stonework on the big back wall. The pieces are all shapes, laid hotchpotch, clearly not cut by machine. Not proof of course that it was built 350 years ago.
Short of finding a Roundhead's helmet crushed in the foundations, I can't think what else would clinch it. I wander about inside and out, shifting the odd pile of firewood, pulling aside the occasional climbing rose, and am about to resign myself to an inconclusive result when I realise I've never seen the other side of the big wall. It forms the boundary of the burgage, and so looks onto the neighbour's land. I manage to part-roll, part-drag a mouldy barrel to the garden wall at the end of the building, and heave myself onto it. I immediately see something I'd not known before. The land over there is about 3 feet higher than on this side. I can also see the broken remains of a classical balustrade on the ground.
'So what?' you might ask.
Well, I've just acquired a useful bit of new knowledge from the town records. Some of the three and four hundred year-old houses on Sheep Street are a couple of feet lower than the road, which itself has risen as it's been repaired and rebuilt over the years. So the general rule is that 'lower' means 'older'. A quick check back inside our building shows that its big back wall has no join halfway up, which would have indicated that it was a garden wall that had been extended upwards at a later date. The wall looks like it was built all of a piece, and, I reckon, much earlier than the classical balustrading now scattered in ruins on the far side.
The other thing that's struck me in my afternoon's research is how often buildings in Stow have been used for different purposes as the town's needs came and went. The Crown Inn hasn't had a London-to Hereford coach clattering over its cobbles since 1814, when it was turned into a private house. It's now part rectory, part antiques emporium. The gasworks and the railway were both dismantled at the same time in 1954. So obviously our building could have housed horses for The Crown, then later been turned over to the coal hauliers.
Pleased with this historical sleuthing, I report back to Maggie.
'How does "The Old Stables" grab you?' I ask with a triumphant beam.
'You don't think we might be jumping ahead of ourselves, do you?' she queries.
'No. Where things come from is important. And the fact that this matters to me, I think, proves something: the reason I like Stow is because of its history.'
'Ah, it's back to Ralph again.'
'Well, he's got me thinking. That can't be bad.'
'What about less thinking and more doing. Like, when are you going to talk to the council planning office about getting permission to build?'
'I'm glad you asked that,' I reply. 'It's all in hand. I'm meeting her tomorrow.'
It's well known that getting planning permission in the middle of Stow – whether for a cute cottage or a public lavatory – is more difficult than being accepted as an MI6 operative, and can be just as arcane. As well as the ordinary planning restrictions you get in the rest of the country, buildings in Stow also have to conform to Conservation Area rules, which means architectural or historic features must be protected. We're also within the boundaries of the medieval town. If we ever manage to live in Sunny's garages, our address will be 'Back Walls', the street that marks the limit of thirteenth-century Stow, and we'll be on the townside of the street. So there may be archaeological evidence that mustn't be damaged. Then, finally, the building stands in the curtilage – 'grounds' to us mortals – of a listed building, i.e. Sunny's cottage. So any historic structures in the garden will have to be preserved. I'm ready for complicated arguments.
The planner is waiting outside the burgage gate when I arrive. She looks at her watch and introduces herself at the same time. She has one of those double-barrelled first names like Marie Antoinette or Violet Elizabeth. Hers is Bella Donna, or something equally botanical. We shall call her Bella to save on typing.
Bella is in her twenties, very tall, slim, in tight-fitting jeans. She has a small turned-up nose. I don't mean like Noddy. More like Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair.
'So,' she says, striding through the rampant crocosmia, unfolding a metre-square architect's plan and thrusting one end of it into my hands. 'You've got permission to demolish, and put up a three bedroom cottage here in the middle.' She points in the general direction of Sunny's VW.
'Ah, we don't want to do that,' I say, pausing for effect. 'We want to convert the old outbuilding.' I make an expansive gesture with my free hand along the line of brown garage doors, waiting for her effusive approval of our conservation-focussed aspirations (or whatever consultants working for local authorities call them).
She pokes her head briefly inside the nearest garage, leaving me in sole charge of the architect's drawing.
'We want it demolished,' she states, looking down her nineteenth-century nose at the twentieth-century aluminium door frames. The metre-square sheet of plans is poised in front of my face, around which the wind is threatening to wrap it like a slapstick custard pie. 'It's an eyesore,' she adds. 'The area will be improved by getting rid of it, and by putting up a cottage. In Cotswold stone, of course.'
I'm shocked. But if I'd ever been curious to know what it feels like to be a Cotswold planning officer dealing with an obstinate citizen intent on wrecking the village's heritage, now is the moment for a role reversal.
'Researches show,' I say, confident that weighty tomes of history sit like a bulwark at my back. 'Researches show that this building dates from at least the seventeenth century when it provided stabling for The Crown Inn. It then became a domestic agricultural building.' (As I say these words, I realise I don't know what they mean.) 'Later, during the Industrial Revolution, it was at the forefront of the economic transformation of Stow with the building of the gas manufactory and the arrival of the railway. My wife and I place the highest value on the preservation of Stow's history as embodied in its ancient buildings. We feel we have a duty to restore this old treasure to its former glory.' All this has been accompanied by my scuffle with the drawings which are flapping in my arms like a duck trying to regain its freedom.
'Looks like a bunch of old garages to me,' observes Bella, seizing the architect's plans and folding them with a single movement. 'OK,' she concedes. 'But you'd have to put in glass and oak all down the front.' I'm about to say, 'That's just what we want to do,' when she continues, 'And remember, this is only general guidance. You'd still have to go through the application process.'
And before I can thank her, she's disappeared through the buddleias.
I recall what Mike, who's known me for the best part of a lifetime and who's from an army family, often reminds me: time spent on reconnaissance is rarely wasted.
CHAPTER 5
STRANGE ENCOUNTERS
AT THE BURGAGE
'They've got a mouthful of gimme and a handful of much obliged,' sings Ella into both my ears at once.
The good thing about going to the gym (and Lord knows there has to be something good, apart from the doubtful promise of a longer life with a smaller belt size) is that I get time to listen to Ella Fitzgerald on my iPod. And it's not just the sweet sound of her lilting voice. It's the lyrics as well. Who wrote them, I wonder? Take this one. 'A mouthful of gimme and a handful of much obliged.' It describes every American hotel doorman you'll ever come across.
A Horse in the Bathroom Page 3
