'I know. Well, we'll see what happens.'
Back at Mill Cottage, the littler van's arrived and its first load's being fitted in. This amounts to the sofa and four boxes. My job is to stand about inside the cottage, like those teenage kids you see employed to direct traffic in fields used as temporary car parks on village fete day, waving their arms about meaninglessly, which I do whenever the movers back through the front door with a bedside table or a standard lamp. The task's only three-quarters done by the time Maggie gets back from the shop late afternoon. Removal costs are up by 40 per cent.
The following week sees a repeat, in reverse process, of the misery we went through at the old house. But at least it is a reverse process. We've got a sofa to sit on opposite a TV (which announces 'And now for the news where you are' then shows reports of a shopping centre stabbing and a bin men's strike in central Birmingham). We speed things up when we take a decision to nominate about half of the removal boxes 'Not wanted on voyage.' (That's the last ocean-going reference, I promise.) This is stuff we can do without till we get to The Old Stables, stuff that can be stacked up in the third bedroom of Mill Cottage. And by halfway through our second week, our feet are firmly on dry land. (Sorry.)
Blockley's only minor downside stems from the otherwise endearing fact that our watermill – or rather the landlords' – is one of no fewer than twelve such mills, which started to turn around the time of Domesday Book. Over the centuries, these have powered everything from silk-glove factories to a bone grinding business. Each one, of course, needed somewhere for the miller and his clan to live, and we discover over the next few days that the village now has twelve Mill Cottages, more or less. It makes for an entertaining breakfast time, seeing how many letters intended for other Mill Cottage dwellers we've received today, and speculating on how many of our own bills and good luck cards have gone AWOL. Even this mix-up has its benefits, because around ten o'clock a selection of us mill-cottagers often meet up at the village post office to swap mail. Maggie and I start to meet some affable neighbours that way.
Our landlords' converted mill sits just over the other side of our garden stream. He turns out to be a man of fearsome strength and energy. I bump into him just as I'm loading the car with the last lot of empty removal boxes to take to our allotted garage hidden away at the far end of the Mill House grounds. I tell him how much we admire their home.
'I did it all myself,' he says. 'I laid every single stone of Mill House, fitted every window, put on every square inch of roof, landscaped all these grounds, did every last bit of decoration in your cottage as well. It was all a total wreck when we bought it. We didn't use builders. I did the lot myself.'
'Crikey,' I say, not feeling I can mention our little enterprise in Stow. 'How long did it take you?'
'On and off, eighteen years. And by the way, I hope you don't mind a bit of noise. Just for this weekend. Our daughter's getting married on Saturday. Three p.m. in Chipping Camden church. The reception's going to be here. In marquees. Two hundred guests.'
'No bother. Congratulations…' But he's already off.
Saturday turns out to be a warm day. It's the last weekend in August. So I sit outside in my shorts and watch across the stream the white-jacketed waiters, catering vans, a jazz band and a platoon of wedding furniture humpers arriving to get set up throughout the morning. All under the energetic eye of our landlord. It quietens down at about 1.30 p.m., but then suddenly an hour later, he's back out there. There seems to be a problem with the eating arrangements. Next thing, I see him emerge round the edge of Mill House, half-running but bent forward from the waist at right-angles, an eight-seater table upturned on his back. He clunks it down, shouts at a waiter to fetch a cloth for it, then runs back and repeats the exercise three times. The peaked-cap chauffeur who's been shining the door handle of his vintage Rolls, a white ribbon across its bonnet, pauses to watch.
I reckon there are about twelve minutes for the father of the bride to shower, change and escort his daughter to her big moment.
At six minutes to three, she emerges, tall, white and serene, and heads for the Roller. He catches her up – still fiddling with his collar button, the tails of his morning coat flying – just before she gets there.
I settle back in the sunshine to observe the moorhens forming street gangs to intimidate the squirrels who venture down to our stream. The sun is making wavy patterns on the tree-topped ridge across the cornfields, and a treacherous little idea insinuates itself into my brain. It says to me, 'What are you doing putting yourself through all this stress of converting an old stables? Mill Cottage has got everything that you want, and everything that Maggie wants. Why don't you see if you could buy this place instead? You could sell the burgage with planning permission at a profit, and I bet the couple who own Mill Cottage would sell it to you if you made a good offer. Just think what worry and effort you'd be saving yourself. Think how lovely it would be…'
When Maggie arrives from the shop, I poke this serpent of a thought back under its stone, and she joins me with a glass of chilled white wine in her hand. She turns her chair so she too can see the proceedings across the stream without twisting her neck.
There's something surreal about watching someone else's wedding from the front row of the stalls. We're close enough to see prim aunties in sugar-bowl hats, the lads from the bridegroom's office horsing about, the flower girls falling over and getting mud on their dresses, the best man looking more and more ragged as the evening progresses, and our landlord being mein host all over the place. But what with the syncopated rhythm of the Dixieland band, we can't hear what the performers are saying, so Maggie and I write our own script as the play unfolds before us. That night, once the strains of 'My Old Kentucky Home' have subsided, we sleep content.
CHAPTER 15
A SEVENTEENTH-
CENTURY CAR PARK
So, now we've got the planning consent, we've got the money (thanks to the sale of Maggie's house), and we've got Nik. So D-Day approaches.
Disentangle Day. Declutter Day. Dump-all-the-rubbish-from-the-site Day
We tell people, 'We're converting an old stables.' And that's technically true. The Tax Office defines it as a conversion. And so does Bella's planning department. So judge for yourself. We'll be knocking down the roof and the whole of the front. We'll be taking down one of the end walls and rebuilding it 4 metres out (though Nik says a lot of the stones won't be reusable, so 'rebuilding' might be fanciful). The whole floor will have to be hacked up and replaced by steel-reinforced concrete. So that'll leave just two walls of the old stables standing: the high one that runs along the boundary for the length of the building, and the thick, end wall next to the road. Oh, and these might need to be underpinned, or otherwise tampered with, or – and this is what keeps even Maggie awake at four in the morning – it's just possible they might be so unsafe that they too would have to be pulled down and rebuilt. Where that would leave planning consent, VAT status, diplomatic relations with Mr E. Grise, my craving for tradition, not to mention the state of our finances, are questions we only allude to when we want to terrify ourselves.
Anthea knows a good structural engineer who'll pronounce on the state of our walls (and thus of our future mental health), and she's fixed a site meeting with him for the following Wednesday. That will be Judgement Day.
But first, on Monday, it's D-Day. The paper stage is over. I'm already there, exchanging 'Wonderful Mornings' with the vicar and his dog, when Nik's four-by-four arrives outside the burgage at 8.27 a.m. Three of his lads tip out, and he sets them to work clearing the site of all the trees, bushes, rusty barrows, heaps of shattered tiles and the rest of the detritus that I've never really noticed before. Remember, the burgage is a long, narrow piece of land. And though the house will be long and narrow too, other stuff's got to be squashed in next to it, like a courtyard, but also a driveway leading to parking spaces we share with Sunny (or whoever buys her cottage). So all plant and tree life has to come out.
> I'm amazed how fast the area starts to open up. If I were going to get rid of that gnarled damson tree for instance, I'd first have to draw up a plan of action, then trim off the branches, and cut them into small pieces. Next I'd saw the still vertical trunk into manageable slices where it stood, sweeping up the shavings as I went. Then I'd dig out the roots. Finally, I'd cart it all away piece by piece. It would take me two full weekends, at least. And that's assuming, unreasonably, that I hadn't pulled a muscle in my shoulder on the first morning. What Nik's lads do is throw a rope round the redundant tree, give a good heave, and chuck it, roots and all, into the skip, taking approximately two and a half minutes.
At about 9.30 a.m., Sunny appears in her dressing gown, and shows the guys where the electricity supply is. Nik leaves them to it. I stick around for a couple of hours feeling self-important and at the same time redundant, then leave to attend to the other fag-ends of my life.
When Maggie and I go to review progress in the evening, it is with a sense of joyful freedom in our hearts, possibly akin to that felt by the countryman immortalised by Vaughan Williams, heading for 'where, for me, the apple tree / Do lean down low in Linden Lea.' (Hum immortal tune.)
'No more theoretical battles with bureaucrats,' I say to Maggie as we park the car in Back Walls. 'Action. That's the thing!'
'Yes,' she says. 'We ought to just stop and mark this day. We've actually, at last, started to build our new home.'
'Well, knock down the old one, anyway,' I quip, and we giggle like kids let out early on a spring afternoon.
Our euphoria lasts about as long as Vaughan Williams' three-verse song.
The burgage is transformed. Now that much of the Cotswold jungle has been hacked out, the plot of land looks wider than we'd thought.
'We'll be able to have a nice-sized courtyard to look out on,' says Maggie, doing metre-long strides from the glass and oak facade (battered garage doors) across the terrace, bedecked with potted bay trees and primulas (chopped white roots, mud and shattered tiles), then looks up.
'Bloody hell!' she cries. Maggie is occasionally given to utter this expletive, but only when she suffers a life-threatening shock, so I rush out of the old building, where I've been trying to discover if there are any original beams in the roof, stumbling over a rusty upturned wheelbarrow handle, and land on one knee behind her.
'What is it? What's wrong?' I ask the back of her thighs.
'I never realised before, when all this was trees and hedges,' she says, 'but now anybody walking along the alley…' (Fleece Alley, an old sheep-run, goes along the side of our property allowing the residents of Back Walls to cut through to Sheep Street and the Market Square) '… will be able to see straight into our living room!' I struggle to my feet, and before I can judge for myself, she adds, 'And what about the neighbours in that house!' She points to a three-storey cottage a few yards along on the other side of the alley. 'If they decide to peer over as they get out of bed, they'll be able to see everything, from what I'm eating for breakfast to the colour of your nightshirt! It wouldn't matter if we were having tiny, lace curtained windows. But the house is going to be like one of those aquariums you see in dentists' waiting rooms!'
I try to find some reassurance for Maggie by walking back and forth along the alley several times, crouching progressively lower, with my head bent sideways peering towards her. A young woman picks up her small child when she sees me, and holds it in a protective hug as she hurries past. Back in the burgage, I tell Maggie, 'I reckon there's no problem. Except for people going past who're taller than five feet six.'
'So approximately fifty per cent of the adult population.'
We try various positional experiments to test the full extent of the difficulty, and, concluding that we are comprehensively doomed, withdraw in anxious silence.
That evening we discuss whether a 1.8-metre-high wall would give enough cover. Or bamboo shrubs. Or tall, sun-seeking eucalyptus trees. At 3 a.m. these options are still fighting each other in my fevered brain. So the next evening, after Maggie's finished at the shop and Nik's lads have left for the day, we go back to see if any one of these solutions would do the trick. But it's clear that now the decluttering job is complete, we're even more exposed.
Three o'clock that night, it's the same routine inside my head. So by the next morning – which is J-Day – I'm tense and tired.
It turns out J is not only for Judgement, but also for Jeremy, the structural engineer who'll be the one delivering verdict and sentence on the issue that's even more critical than protection from passing voyeurs: are the two main walls unsafe and going to have to be rebuilt?
Jeremy arrives on-site to find three of us in two camps. Nik and Anthea are in a jolly mood in one corner. Yeah, well, it's not the whole of their lives at stake. I'm in hunched silence in the other. I wouldn't say Maggie and I are falling out of love with the place. It's just that our desire for it no longer burns like Wordsworth's 'sacred flame'. Our feelings for The Old Stables have come down to earth. The honeymoon boarding passes have turned up crinkled in the bottom of the washing machine.
But I'm still loyal. So when I see the bits of asbestos flaking from the roof, hear the battered aluminium door frames rattle in the breeze, and smell the inside like a disused dockside warehouse, I feel the need to defend the place and our marriage to it. So I start to tell Jeremy about my researches.
'It doesn't look much today, but in the seventeenth century,' I boast, 'this place was one of the stables for The Crown Inn. According to the London Gazette of 1690, a hundred coaching horses could be kept here overnight.'
'A sort of early NCP franchise', he quips. And without waiting for any uproar of laughter to subside, he darts behind me, banging a wall here, measuring a width there, kicking a stone where he presumably thinks it matters.
Nik's dug out a couple of deep holes next to the tall back wall. Jeremy shines his torch down inside.
'That's brash,' he says, making what I assume is another witticism, and though I don't quite understand it, I ho-ho anyway. The faces of the other three remain unmoved, still staring into the hole. 'Brash,' says
Nik, looking at me as if I'm a slow child, 'brash,' he repeats, 'crushed limestone.'
'Ah, yes,' I say. 'Brash, yes, brash.' Then, 'Is that bad?'
'No, it's good,' explains Jeremy. 'It's solid, like a natural foundation. No need for underpinning. In fact you'd need a pneumatic drill to shift it.' I peer down. Now I can see it, looking like a mini cliff-face glinting in the torchlight. We've allowed £10,000 in the budget for making these walls safe and my heart starts to dance. But it's soon clear it's not all saving. There's much talk, largely unintelligible to me, of the need for columns, piers and curly tail-ties. Jeremy talks of the risk that the Big Back Wall could 'bulge and wave.' Is this technical, as in 'brash'? Or is it jocular, as in 'seventeenth-century car park'? The impression I'm getting is that while the wall might not sink like a Coke can in quicksand, it could fall over. Finally, unable to bear the strain, I ask Jeremy what he really thinks of the wall.
He walks along it, places his eye next to it, strokes it a little and says, 'It's a damn good wall!'
I don't quite kiss him.
As the meeting breaks up, Maggie arrives. It's her lunch break, and for once I'm able to give her a bit of heart-lifting news. 'With the five grand or so we've saved,' I say, 'we can upgrade the kitchen.'
'Possibly,' she replies. 'I know you fancy yourself as an amateur Raymond Blanc, but I thought you were supposed to be an amateur Eric Braithewaite as well.' (He used to be my accountant).
'Yes of course,' I reply, 'I mean so long as the budget allows.'
'Oh, by the way,' Maggie chips in, 'I think I've got the answer to the people-peering-in-the-windows problem,'
'Really,' I marvel. 'What's that?'
'It's like the doors argument we had.'
'What do you mean?'
'It's not a case of either/or. It's both. Or in this case, all three or four. Bamboos, euca
lyptus trees, a higher wall and maybe a trellis with clematis on top of the wall as well. All of them together should block the view.'
'You don't think it's going to feel like Colditz, do you?'
'Prisons aren't the only places with walls, you know. Remember when we went to the Alhambra Palace in Granada? The Spanish have these beautiful courtyard gardens. Leave it to me.'
'It's all yours,' I say, as we wander out into Back Walls. I'm delighted to have any item crossed off my worry schedule, which has a habit of lengthening if I take my eye off it for a minute.
'Good morning,' a voice calls from behind us, and we turn to see a figure in a dark blue skirt and jacket smiling from the doorway of the house just below The Old Stables. 'You must be the people who've bought the old bit of land,' she continues. 'I'm Joanna.' And almost before we've managed to return her smile, she asks, 'Would you like to come in for a glass of sherry or a cup of coffee?'
We accept, introduce ourselves, shake hands, meet her husband John, and settle ourselves in their living room.
A Horse in the Bathroom Page 12
