'Well… I thought, "Sure, it'll be different, but it'll still be recognisable." I suppose I wasn't listening to you properly.'
Maggie is silent.
'Are you trying to upset me,' I demand, 'by not saying, "You never listen to me"?'
'Call it pity.'
My brain's racing on now. 'The really upsetting thing is that young people are being driven out of Hogsthorpe.'
'Because there are no jobs for them.'
'Yes, and it makes you wonder if this is happening to lots of other villages in the rest of the country. And not only young people leaving, but oldies flooding in. What sort of place is that to live in?'
'One with good viewing figures for Lark Rise to Candleford?'
'I think you might be stereotyping and getting ageist – I must make a note to throw that accusation at Ralph, by the way. Isn't the real question: are villages coping with all the changes over the past few years? If you think about it, these changes are driven by cities: technology, globalisation, people working in tall, gleaming offices, telling villagers what to do, or just forgetting about them. Villages are left on the sidelines, feeling the world is passing them by.'
'And, they can't just be places where agriculture happens any more.'
'That's right. The days are long gone of a farm needing twenty milkmaids and thirty ditch-diggers – or "dike-diggers" as we say in Hogsthorpe.'
'So villages are having to find themselves a new role.'
'Exactly. And some of them are clearly struggling. Like Hogsthorpe. It's as though the place got made redundant and has drifted into a job it hates, and so has been left with a twisted personality.'
'So what's all this got to do with Ralph's point about your warped golden-age psychology?'
'I think I might be getting a bit bored with Ralph and his question.'
The satnav woman seems to agree: 'After. 800 yards. Take the exit.'
I chuck in a last thought. 'Hogsthorpe has given us one way to measure whether a village is working or not.'
'What's that?'
'The football team test.'
CHAPTER 8
NUCLEAR WINTER IN
CHIPPING NORTON
It turns out that our bid for The Old Stables had been a poor second. Maggie makes a point of bumping into Sunny one day in Stow-on-the-Wold's Market Square. Sunny reveals that the winning bid was £15,000 better than ours. It came from a builder, who's simply going to knock down what was going to be The Old Stables and put up the cottage that came with the existing planning consent. Maggie tells Sunny how disappointed we were. And Sunny says how she would have preferred us to get it, but she needs every penny she can get for her new life in Goa. No excuses needed. It's a business deal. So that's that.
Or isn't, as it turns out.
Two months later, on a wet morning in the Yorkshire Dales, I'm walking with another old school friend of mine. Or rather, I'm walking behind him – Geoff's a lot fitter than me. And we're just coming down off the moors in the direction of some steak and mushroom pie in front of a pub fire, when my phone rings.
'I've been trying to get hold of you all morning,' says Maggie. I start to explain about signal strength in remote hilly areas when she interrupts, 'Never mind that. Sunny's plot of land is back on the market. She phoned a couple of hours ago. Apparently the builder who was going to buy came back to her and said he could only pay her half now, and could she wait for the other half till he'd built the house? She's hopping mad and fed up with the whole thing. She says if we put in a fair offer now, it's ours. That's "now" as in this minute at twenty to one on a Thursday morning.'
'Crumbs,' I exclaim. 'What's a "fair offer"?'
'She says it would have to be more than the 125K we put in before, but it doesn't have to be the 140K the builder was going to put up. So I suggested we split the difference. And she said, "Yes," provided we make it formal with the estate agent straight away.'
'So do we go for it?'
'I'm on my way,' says Maggie, and before I can explain again that phone reception's not perfect here and ask if she'd heard what I'd said, she hangs up.
'I'll put draft number fourteen in the post to you tomorrow,' promises Mr Joshua Hurley. He's our solicitor.
We've been at it for a month, trying to get all the sales contract documents agreed. The problem is there are going to have to be some shared bits of property. We'll have to lay down a parking area and a driveway to be used both by us and by Sunny or – more important – by whoever buys her house when she moves to India next year. And what if she sells to a collector of vintage ambulances, or to a mail-order supplier of drum kits? The ways in which our tranquillity could be shattered are countless.
The consequent backwards-and-forwards-ing between solicitors is getting us nowhere, other than to the bank for a second mortgage to pay their fees. The other thing is, Christmas is only a few days away and then Sunny's going away for two weeks. I'm getting the feeling that it's her solicitor that's the problem. I can't imagine that it's Sunny who keeps slipping in all these fiddling little words that would tie us up in legal knots in the event of a dispute about testing aircraft engines on the front lawn.
So Maggie suggests that we have a go at breaking the deadlock face to face over a cup of tea at Sunny's place. Reason must surely prevail before a gentle fire warming the most massive stone chimney piece in Gloucestershire (this being one of several features that earn Sunny's cottage a Grade II listing). And that's what we do. As foretold, Sunny is the soul of common sense. She wants it all settled too, and is happy to agree that no noisy commercial business can be run from either house. It all takes about three minutes, and the meeting glides on to talk of whether they sell mince pies in Goa, or whether Sunny will have to get the ingredients shipped in specially when she's settled there. We then kiss each other's cheeks and agree to instruct our respective lawyers to draw up the documents for signing the following day.
Back home, among the Christmas cards, I find an envelope from my sister Anne containing two copies of a photograph. It's of our grandparents' little house in Hogsthorpe, with Granddad standing in front alongside Chummy, a dog he had before the war. I've reported to her by phone on our Hogsthorpe expedition and mentioned Jerry's dispute with the farmer over the boundary line. She's written a note with the pictures, 'Clearly shows wide gap between side of house and hedge.' Very satisfying, and I write a letter to Jerry enclosing one of the photos.
At the gym that morning, my attention wanders away from 'Holiday in Harlem', 'I Got It Bad (and That Ain't Good)' and other of Ella's masterpieces. The plight of Hogsthorpe is on my mind. It seems to have just slid into a regimented oldie-land. Did anybody decide that's what it was going to be? Did somebody say one day, 'We'll never manage to keep the kids here in the potato fields, so let's go for the grey vote'? I guess not, though I suppose, sometime in the 1970s, a few developers bagged some cheap land, wheedled the district council to agree, and started to throw up two-bed bungalows, twenty to the acre.
So back home after my shower, I google 'Hogsthorpe' and it coughs up something called 'A Parish Plan for Hogsthorpe'. I know about these. My old school friend, Chris, the one who's doing a late-career doctorate, told me there have been hundreds of them written over the past few years, all trying to breathe new life into their own village.
'They're researched and written by villagers themselves,' said Chris. 'They set out problems, hopes and demands for help and action. The trouble with them is they're biased. They're written by well-educated middle-class retirees who have a particular view of the rural world.'
'What kind of bias is that?' I asked him.
'You won't find any of them that, for instance, deal with rural poverty. The Parish Plans see villages as middle-class havens.'
'And what happens to them when they're finished? Do the villagers get any money to implement the plans?'
'Not as such. The plans are used to try to persuade the local authority to divert existing funds to do what the Parish Plan recommend
s.'
'Hmm,' I said, 'So it's more talk than do.'
'There are some Parish Plans that have managed to achieve things. I'm sure,' said Chris.
The Hogsthorpe Parish Plan is a sad affair. It's not even 'talk', never mind 'do.' It consists of sixteen bullet points, half a dozen words each one, filling one narrow column of a single sheet of A4 paper. It starts with a puzzling:
• 'Improvement to the village bus visibility at corner near service.'
Before moving on to an earth-shattering:
• 'Additional gritting on Thames Street and road to Chapel St Leonards.'
Then managing to dig up five words for the fate of the next generation:
• 'More facilities for young people.'
Finally hitting us with the longest entry in the whole plan:
• 'Identify potential growth in Hogsthorpe (75 per cent of those answering the question said that the village had growth enough).'
Seventy-five per cent sounds a bit suspicious to me, as though it was the result of a straw poll of four regulars in the snug bar of the pub. Still let's say it wasn't, that would at least mean that the overwhelming majority of bungalow-loving retirees in Hogsthorpe are themselves fed up with looking at endless lines of identical bungalows. So there's hope, though hope for what, I don't know.
'It's her bloody solicitor who's behind this, isn't it?' I scream across Mr Joshua Hurley's office.
'She's just doing her job,' he replies.
I want to say, 'So being an idiot is in the Law Society's job description, is it?' but just stop myself in time. It would only spark a tedious lecture on the maintenance of professional standards in rural legal practices.
What's happened is that before I arrived at his office in Moreton-in-Marsh 3 miles away, he'd already had a call from Sunny's solicitor to say that following a discussion that morning with her client, her position remains that there can be no restriction on the commercial activities of her client or her successors in title.
'So is she saying this is a bloody deal-breaker?' I shout.
He sighs and looks to the ceiling, placing the tips of his fingers together. 'If you would like to calm yourself, Mr Taylor, I will telephone her now to ascertain the importance of this matter to her client.'
I sit down again. He leaves the room. He's not risking my hearing even one side of the conversation.
Ten minutes later, he re-enters. 'Her position is unchanged with regard to the conduct of a business at the premises, and she cannot foresee any circumstances in which she would be able to modify this posture.'
'Right, that's it,' I bellow. 'You can call her back and tell her we withdraw!' And I mutter the word 'Ridiculous!' to the door frame on my way out.
It's Christmas Eve.
Not a busy one, as it happens, for us. Because all our relatives are away, visiting other relatives. Normally, Maggie and I don't mind a Christmas on our own. We eat well, go for a long walk, and pity all those people who're stressed by bitter rows with their in-laws. But as Christmas Day worms on its dreary way this year, there's not much smug superiority about in Maggie's house.
I sit looking out of the back window at a fine drizzle from a menacing sky, thinking this must be the most miserable festive season I've ever had. And I can tell you, I've had some depressing ones back in my days as a television journalist.
In the TV news business, you often have to work at Christmas. The hospitality suite would be thrown open in a misplaced and often disastrous attempt to compensate the staff for having to come into the office rather than be with their cherished family members. Somebody who spent too long at the drinks cupboard and not enough in the newsroom usually got fired. One year, it was a studio director for making a computer-generated mouse sit on the newscaster's shoulder during a report on the Archbishop of Canterbury's Yuletide sermon. Or else there was an ugly row. Like the time a production assistant, after lunch, was held up by her ankles from a sixth-floor balcony.
Someone would say, 'Do you remember that Christmas when a young freelance reporter had too many vodkas and forgot to breathe while reading his commentary live on air?'
Nobody actually did remember it. But they all heard the story last year so thought they were there, and so someone would go on, 'God, yes. He was supposed to read, "Prince Charles is an enthusiastic hunt supporter," but he gulped for air just before the end of "enthusiastic," and the "c" got attached to the next word. It wouldn't have been so bad but the poor bugger was so shocked by how it came out that he stopped in his tracks without saying the rest of the sentence.'
It was something like this most Christmases. Then the arrival in the newsroom by mid afternoon of a senior manager, ready to carry out the suspension of this year's guilty member of staff preparatory to dismissal, would usually kill off any residual amusement. And a cynical gloom would settle back in.
In Stow-on-the-Wold this Christmas, Maggie and I survive by a strategy of conflict avoidance, i.e. we keep silent (for want of anything to say) other than emitting routine enquiries about the state of the turkey gravy or the meaning of life, replies being limited to three words of no more than two syllables.
On Boxing Day, Maggie – inspired no doubt by the televised sight of Sir Alex Ferguson screaming words of good cheer at a shame-faced linesman – decides that action is needed.
'Look,' she says, 'we've got to pull ourselves together. We must be able to do better for our money. After all, Sunny's old garages are hardly the architectural cat's pyjamas.'
Still staring out of the window, I muse on Maggie's refined style of phrase. I might myself have said it was well short of A. A. Gill's criterion of the honey-dipped things dogs like to lick.
'Derek, are you listening? Are we pulling ourselves together?'
So we drag ourselves over to Shipston-on-Stour to look again at the empty plot of building land we'd rejected. It's one of those winter days that never gets properly light. Everything's shut of course, so all we can do is peer over the 5-foot-high fence. It's not changed. It's still a small triangular piece of garden remnant with weeds on it.
'You see those trees,' says Maggie on tip-toes pointing to the other side of the plot. 'That's the south side. On a summer's day, it'll be as dark as the mouth of hell.'
I nod. 'And it's got no history.'
So we get back in the car, and head across country to where, according to an estate agent's ad we've seen on the Internet, there's a barn being sold ready for conversion.
The roads are empty. The shops are darkened. The sky is black. The place could be used as the set for a calamity survival movie.
Chipping Norton's in nuclear winter.
And it's not a barn at all. It's an overlarge shed that fronts directly onto a main road, opposite the delivery yard of Mid-Counties Co-op supermarket.
There's nowhere open for a cup of tea so we drive back home.
After we've sat for an hour – me staring, uncomprehending, at a two-day-old newspaper – Maggie slaps shut her book, throws it on the floor, and says, 'Do we want Sunny's funny old building?'
'Yes.' I hear the word spoken by an alien creature in my throat.
'How serious is the threat that somebody who wants to set up a used car business would buy Sunny's house?'
I scrunch up my nose, 'Probably not very.' The creature has taken over my brain.
'Have we got ourselves into an I'm-not-going-to-back-down stand-off with this solicitor for no good reason?'
Breathing in and pulling my hand down over my face like someone fitting a rubber mask, I say, 'I see the way you're going.'
Maggie grins.
And we agree that we'll go and see Sunny first thing the next morning, and say we withdraw our insistence on a no-commercial-businesses clause.
We exchange contracts and complete on the same day, 5 January.
Now it really is ours.
I reckon a good guide as to whether this is the correct decision or not, is how we feel once there's no going back. We're elated. Not daunted. So i
t must be the right course. That was my logic at the time. Looking back though, I can see it could have been more of a fairground shooting gallery syndrome: after six attempts, hitting a tin duck is what makes you chuffed, not winning the plastic penguin.
CHAPTER 9
THE CRASH OF A DOOR
NOT BEING SLAMMED
So, now there's no more flouncing about, fantasising about what we might do with Sunny's burgage and old building. We've signed the transfer document, paid over a substantial amount of money, and now Maggie and I own the bottom of a garden and some old garages on Back Walls, a minute's walk from Stow-on-the-Wold's Market Square.
A Horse in the Bathroom Page 7
