First thing is to get that planning permission approved. So I leave a message on Anthea's mobile to get in touch with Bella and chase up our application.
The official reply comes two days later in a phone call to Anthea who relates it to me in an early morning email: 'Hi Derek, B just phoned. No extension. No roof-raising. Sorry – Anth.'
'But this planner had already told you an extension would be OK,' says Maggie when I break it to her as she's pulling on her brown suede boots.
'Well… not exactly,' I hedge.
'How do you mean? I thought she approved it in principle when you met her on-site before we bought the land.'
'Well… not exactly. She marched off before I could ask her specifically about any extension.'
'But, I thought we only bought the place because we could extend it, didn't we?'
'Well… yes.'
'It's too small as it is.'
'I know, I know.'
'So, we're lumbered with a stack of old garages that are no use for anything except keeping half a dozen cars in. That is if you're yearning to get asbestos poisoning.'
'We could always knock it down and put up the new cottage. As in the existing permission.'
'Derek!'
'Well… Perhaps we could sell it.'
Maggie groans. 'I'm late opening the shop.' And as she leaves, I hear her not slamming the front door.
I phone Anthea to see if she's got any other hints from the conversation with Bella, on what's gone wrong. I get voicemail. At the very least this planning official owes us a meeting. We ought to have a crack at getting her to change her mind. I phone again. Still voicemail.
Have you ever noticed how people you know in everyday life are much more complicated than even the richest characters in books? Take me, for example. I could never exist in a novel. The readers just wouldn't believe in me. Inside me are a pair of traits that seem to belong to two different people.
One, I'm dogged. Won't take 'No' for an answer. It ain't over till it's over. Never say die. While there's a cliché there's hope.
Two, I get anxious. In a crisis I can't bear the wait. It's not that I'm impatient. Uncertainty makes me so stressed I start to hallucinate and fall on the floor with my legs in the air.
So while waiting for Anthea to call back, I become, on the one hand, strong and determined, and on the other, demented and physically sick. All at the same time. I keep pressing the redial button on the phone in between the resulting fits.
After sixteen and a half hours, the phone rings. Actually, it's about twenty minutes, it just seems that long. It's Anthea. Bella has refused to give any reasons for turning down our extension plans. But she will meet us face-to-face, to discuss what we can and can't do.
'I think you should be there,' says Anthea. 'It would be useful to have you there to help make the arguments.'
Maggie's verdict, when I call her with the update, is a variation of this. 'I think we should both go,' she says.
Now I'm fine. Action, I've always found, is the best cure for anxiety, so I spend the next three days searching the Internet for pictures of old buildings which have glass and oak down the front and extensions at right-angles to the line of the building and roofs at least 8 metres high – and that are in the Cotswold district so she can't say, 'Ah well, that's in Leicestershire,' or wherever. 'We do things differently here.' There aren't many. But I do find a couple.
The day comes, and we all turn up at the council offices in Cirencester. As we're shown into one of the meeting rooms, I'm calm. And smiling. Maggie has been coaching me to stay pleasant and even-tempered throughout, no matter how provocative, rude or contradictory this bloody stupid bloody planning officer is.
'What I can't get my head round,' I say as we wait for her to deign to appear, 'is what their underlying philosophy is.'
Anthea splutters, and coughs a 'Sorry,' as she mops up the tea from her plastic cup with her hankie.
'Er, Derek, no,' Maggie warns. 'This is about getting an extension. Not about a sociological dissertation. So focus.'
I nod, and in walks Bella.
I hardly recognise her from that meeting months ago now. She's in a grey formal suit rather than the dressed down, site-visit jeans of last time. She looks even stonier-faced. I try to think of her nose as more Noddy than Becky Sharp.
Anthea gives a business-like introduction, summarising the issues, then whips the ball over to me. Bella sits glassy-eyed through my presentation on our vision of an extension and mezzanine floor, and on how it would be consistent with other similar heritage buildings in Gloucestershire, photographic images of which I display mounted on FIRMBOARD purchased from Stow Post Office. I talk about how, in wishing to convert this structure into our home, conservation is our guiding principle. I catch her glancing at her watch, and realise this last argument may not be the most productive one given our tiff at the site meeting.
'I don't think,' she replies, having apparently taken no account of what I've been saying, 'that you need all this space,' her nose pointing in turn at all four corners of Anthea's drawing as though it were the detailed plan for a new cathedral. I want to say, 'What are you talking about? All this space! And another thing, don't you tell me how much space we need,' but Maggie's aiming widened eyes in my direction.
Bella continues, 'For instance, you don't need two bathrooms, and the living room's enormous for a cottage this size.'
I can't bear this any more. But Maggie gets in before me.
'I can see exactly what you mean,' she patters. 'I suppose at the end of the day, it's a matter of personal taste. For us, I'm afraid it just wouldn't work without more room. So, I think what we should probably do is look for somewhere else, and sell this plot to the builder who wants to use the existing planning consent to demolish the structure and put up a new house. I'm sure the Stow Civic Society won't like it. But… I'm afraid I can't see what else we can do.'
Bella doesn't flinch. 'OK,' she says, 'you can have a four-metre right-angled extension. But it'll have to be "No" to raising the roof level.' And she picks up her papers and walks out.
'I thought this was supposed to be a negotiation,' I complain to the other two once the door has snapped shut, 'and since when has it been any business of the planners whether – like any civilised human beings in the Western world – we want two bathrooms?'
'I think she was trying to be helpful,' suggests Anthea.
'Helpful!' I squawk, at which point a woman with a tray comes in and, under the guise of tidying up our debris, herds us out into the fresh air of the car park.
With the words, 'Exercise cools the brain' Maggie sends me off to do two circuits round the lines of municipal employees' vehicles and those of the supplicant citizenry. And by the time I return to where she and Anthea are smiling to each other, my audible muttering has subsided into silent lip movement.
'We were just saying,' chirps up Maggie, 'it could be a lot worse. Sure, it's a shame about the mezzanine, but the more important bit is the extension. And we've got that. Without it, there'd have been no chance of being able to squeeze in.'
'Yeah you're right,' I concede. 'It would have been nice to get the gold medal. But this is an honourable silver.'
'Just let me know how you want to proceed,' says Anthea, chucking her files into the back of her four by-four, and she gives us a jolly wave as she reverses out.
On our journey home, there's hardly a flicker of bickering between us, as we take stock.
'On the plus side,' says Maggie, 'I've still got my ten metres of sunshine and you've got your yards of exposed oak and stone.'
'Right,' I say. 'We've not had to compromise on those. And the plan for a thirty-five-foot living room has always been a deal-breaker as well. Because that's where we'll spend most of our waking time.'
'And the thing is, there's a bit of sleight of hand to be had there. A main room that big will give the impression that the whole house is on the same scale.'
'You're absolutely right,' I enth
use, holding back to allow an old lady in a hat to steer her Vauxhall Corsa through the narrow gap in the road ahead. 'And what's more, your many-splendoured wall of glass will make it seem even bigger. If we put floodlights in the courtyard outside, even at night it'll look like there are two big adjoining rooms.'
'I know, I know,' says Maggie. 'And the other thing is, so long as we keep our bedroom and its bathroom a decent size, we could chop back on the guest suite.'
'Sure. Who wants visitors to stay more than a couple of days anyway?' And I direct a benign smile at a young chap on a dirt-track motorbike as we drive through the plume of blue smoke he's left behind. We both sigh sighs of contentment and relief.
Over the next few days, however, the ointment turns out to have one little irritating fly in it. A door has to go somewhere on the glass and oak wall. I want a split stable-door into the kitchen. Maggie's keen on double glass doors with oak frames in the middle of the main room, opening on to the terrace.
We racquet the arguments back and forth for ten days, each of us roughing out sketches and plans to show why one works and the other doesn't, till we've run out of paper. Up early on the Sunday morning, I pick up from the floor one of Maggie's old drawings and mark in, for the sixty-eighth time, where the ideal door should be. Leading into the kitchen. Maggie walks in, and gulps back her yawn as she catches me at it, defacing her sketch. Her head makes a vigorous sideways twitch of despair and she shouts, 'That's it!'
'What?' I ask in sulky defiance, imagining she's about to add, 'I've had enough,' or 'You're completely impossible.'
'That's it,' she repeats with slower emphasis.
'That's what?'
'That's it!' She grabs the guilty drawing, and waggles it in front of my nose. 'We need both lots of doors!'
I detach the plan from her fingers, and study it.
That is, indeed, it.
'The logic's obvious if we'd thought about it,' she says, flopping onto the armchair. 'Neither of us was actually against the other's idea. But we were both battling for our own. I don't mind a kitchen door. In fact I can see benefits. Just so long as I can have my French windows in the middle.'
'And ditto for me,' I add.
It's a team decision we never regret. For ever after, those two sets of doors become symbols of the unity of our marriage. That's what we tell the more sentimental of our friends, anyway.
So, Anthea turns all our toil into professional drawings and re-submits the planning application.
CHAPTER 10
HITLER LOVE CHILD IN
OXFORDSHIRE VILLAGE
The next big job is to agree a contract with our main builder. Nik is probably our man. But we reckon we've got to be professional about this and should ask to talk to clients he's done similar work for, before we sign him up for definite. After all, one mistake in this department and it could be thousands of pounds down the drain, months or even years of heartache, and enough stress to crack up a wagonload of Buddhists. We arrange to meet him at eleven o'clock on Saturday morning in the Oxfordshire village of Swinbrook, where one of his satisfied customers will be waiting.
We're half an hour early so we go for a wander in the early March sunshine.
Swinbrook is not any old village. It's where the six Mitford sisters lived as children long before they became variously: novelist, wife of fascist leader, communist, Hitler groupie, duchess, and the last one – as described in The Times of the day – 'unobtrusive poultry connoisseur'. With five sisters like Nancy, Diana, Jessica, Unity and Deborah, it's not hard to see why Pamela took refuge in a hen coop.
In 1919, the Mitford family moved from Batsford, five minutes down the road from our new home in Stow, to Asthall Manor in Swinbrook. And so the agricultural peace of the place was then constantly disturbed by the comings and goings of celebrities who would have featured in the upper-class edition of Hello! magazine had such a publication existed in the 1920s, ranging from the Churchills to the painter Walter Sickert. Life in Swinbrook is described in Jessica's autobiography, Hons and Rebels. This includes an account of sister Diana having her appendix out on a table in a spare bedroom, which tells you a lot about the efficiency of the Oxfordshire Ambulance Service pre the introduction of response time targets, as well as about the grandeur of Asthall Manor. How many of us today can boast a spare bedroom big enough to take – in addition to a double bed – a 6-foot-long table and enough elbow room for the performance of major invasive surgery without the medical staff bumping into boxes of old videotapes and an ironing board that should have been chucked out long ago? The Mitfords loved Swinbrook village so much that when they moved away in 1926, it was only as far as nearby Swinbrook House. And that's where they stayed till the girls left one by one and the parents died.
Maggie and I set off, eager-faced in pursuit of Mitford memories, with me holding half an eye alert for any sign that the village is in need of regeneration now that the Mitfords are no longer providing employment for fifty servants, twenty stable lads, several political advisors with extremist views, and a couple of chicken-sexers.
First off, we head for the church. 'It's where Unity's buried,' I explain as we climb the stone steps to get up into the graveyard.
'Is she the one who became Duchess of Devonshire or the one who was a communist and lived in America?' asks Maggie.
'Neither. She was the one who spent five years with Hitler in Berlin then shot herself in the head on the eve of the war.'
'They didn't half live on the edge, those sisters.'
'I know, but they wanted to come back here to this Oxfordshire village when they died,' I say, as we stop in front of three small tombstones. 'Well, these three anyway.' The stone on the right is the cleanest and newest. 'Diana,' I pronounce. 'She married Oswald Mosley, the British fascist. And there's Nancy,' I point to the left, 'who wrote Love in a Cold Climate.'
Unity's gravestone, in the middle, is covered with white splodges of lichen. Maggie crouches before it and reads, 'Unity Valkyrie – VALKYRIE! – Mitford. Bloody hell, who'd christen their kid "Valkyrie"?'
'Yes, a sure-fire way to guarantee your child being beaten up behind the bike-sheds on a daily basis. Except of course the Mitford girls didn't do anything so common as go to school. Do you think people live up to their names?'
'You mean like girls called Hillary being sporty?'
'And there aren't many all-in wrestlers called Algernon.'
'So you're saying Unity Valkyrie was marked out as a Germanic fascist from the cradle?'
'Yes, or I suppose if she'd had a good voice, she might have ended up singing Brunhilde at Covent Garden.'
'She probably wasn't beefy enough,' says Maggie.
'There's a cracking mystery about her,' I say. 'She muffed the suicide attempt and survived. Hitler then personally paid for her to be shipped home, but apparently she was treated in a maternity ward. Now why would she be in a maternity ward?'
'You don't mean…'
'Right. There's been a suggestion that she was carrying Hitler's child!'
'I thought he was impotent.'
'Ah. Who knows?' I have another look at the tombstone, and pointing to a half-obliterated epitaph below the name, read '"Say not the struggle naught availeth."'
'And what exactly did Unity Valkyrie's particular struggle avail then?' asks Maggie.
'Well, it's kept us amused for five minutes.'
And with that we have a quick squint inside the church. The main attraction is a three-tier bunk-bed to the side of the altar, where three bearded men are watching us, each reclining on one elbow, heads propped up on their right hands, as you might do on a picnic while you listen to someone tell a funny story. However, the rest of their bodies are as stiff as planks, as though rigor mortis has set in, which in fact it has, about 400 years ago, because their effigies are made of white marble. We read on a little card that they represent three generations of the Fettiplace family, who for several hundred years were lords of Swinbrook before the Mitfords muscled in.
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sp; Back outside, we do a tour of the village. It doesn't take long. There appear to be no more than twenty houses in the whole place, and the remarkable thing is that they're nearly all big. The very largest ones, whose spreading complexity can only be glimpsed in the distance through trees, sport gates of wrought iron between 10-foot-high stone salt-cellars, and show no house names. So we can't figure out which ones are the former Mitford mansions. We see not a soul walking in the village to interview on the subject. The not-quite-so-grand residences do have names, like 'Swinbrook Cottage.' But 'cottage' in Swinbrook doesn't have the same diminutive meaning it does elsewhere in England, because Swinbrook Cottage seems from the number of upstairs windows to have at least seven bedrooms.
The centre of the village is a thing of exquisite beauty. A trickling rivulet tinkles between weeping willows, their delicate, swaying branches just showing the first bright green leaves while a million daffodils wave in the grass beneath. I suppose in a place of such opulent perfection as Swinbrook, you need to have some little thing to remind you just how opulent and perfect you really are, and Swinbrook even has this. Two council houses, complete with grubby cement-sprayed walls, identical green doors, satellite dishes plus garden gnomes, jar on the edge of the village.
A Horse in the Bathroom Page 8
