'It's not just that it's quiet and beautiful,' he explains. 'The people here are different.' This sounds like rich research material, so I give him an encouraging look. 'For example, when we moved to the village twenty years ago,' he continues, 'my wife was ill, and I was visiting her in hospital every day. When I came back here in the evening, there was a covered plate of food on the doorstep and a note that said, "For your dinner tonight."'
'Wow, I can't see that happening in Hampstead or Solihull,' I say. 'Sounds like a rural paradise here in Condicote.' Then I realise there could have been a tinge of disappointment in my voice. The thought flashes across my mind that I might be looking for what's wrong with village life rather than what's right.
'No, I wouldn't say Condicote's some sort of heaven on earth,' he replies. 'To tell you the truth, it's changing.' I raise my eyebrows in surprise.
'One or two bigger houses in the village are being bought by wealthy young couples. They don't take much part in village life.'
'What do these people do for a living?'
'Commute. Some work in the city.'
'What, you mean Cheltenham?'
'No I mean the City. As in City of London. It's making the village top-heavy.'
'How do you mean?'
'Years ago, Condicote was just agriculture, of course. Apart from the squire at the manor house, it was a place for poor people working on the land.'
'Sure, sure,' I say. 'That was the story everywhere in the country.'
'Well, although a few outsiders like me and my wife came in, there were still plenty of the old families here. But it's expensive living in a village. You have to go to Stow to shop. Petrol's ten pence a litre more expensive in the countryside, and public transport in Condicote means a bus out once a week on a Tuesday – if it arrives – and one back on a Saturday – if you ask it to stop here. The village has become an unfriendly place for old people without cars.'
'So what do they do?'
'A lot of them have had to move out. Their cottages are sold and done up and fetch a good price. Too much for an ordinary family to afford. There's one just over there,' – Richard points down the lane to the left of the church – 'that was sold for seventy thousand just a few years ago. It was on the market last year for four hundred thousand.'
'Hmm, so I guess there's no social housing – affordable homes – in the village.'
'Some of the old cottages are owned by the family at the manor house who deliberately keep the rents low, just to try and hold the balance of the village together.'
'You mean good old-fashioned Victorian philanthropy. The squire subsidising the rents of the less well off in the village.'
'That's one way of putting it. It's a wonderful thing.'
But I'm curious about something. I've got Herbert Evans' Highways and Byways tucked away in my pocket, and I show him what it says about Condicote, that in 1905 it had 'a bleak poverty-stricken air.'
'Sounds about right,' he comments. 'Some of the old people here when we first arrived used to remember it like that.' Then he adds, 'But I don't want to give you the wrong impression about the place today. Changes are starting to happen in Condicote. But right now, for us this is the place. We wouldn't want to live anywhere else but Condicote.'
Richard's beaming again. I shake his hand, thank him, and begin my tramp back, up the same road the Roman legionaries trod before me. Only 1,800 years ago.
I'd quite forgotten about those fifteen pages of bank forms to be filled in. I'll do them tonight. A bore. But hardly the collapse of civilisation.
CHAPTER 28
A STILT-WALKER'S
GUIDE TO HOPSCOTCH
When I was a kid, my parents used to take us to see the petrifying wells at Matlock in Derbyshire. For the price of the entry ticket, you went into a dark, dank cavern. There on shelves, spattered by water dripping from the rocky ceiling, you could see everything from car tyres to false teeth, all turned to stone. Magic. Or, as I learned in the third form, the action of very hard water, which left a mineral deposit on everything it touched.
On a murky afternoon in early March, our house-to-be in Stow looks like a Derbyshire petrifying cavern. Except that the main subject of the magic is a man. He's wading up and down in wall-to-wall sludge. His wellies are petrified. His long pole is petrified. So are his hands. Bits of his clothing peep through a stony covering. Gobbets of the stuff are sticking to his cheeks.
I stand on the outside of the oak-frame barrier to his world, and peer in. I introduce myself.
'Yis, men,' he says. 'This is a bested of a jowb, this wan.' In clipped South African tones he spits out the resented words. 'The mix wes tew liquid. Ah nearly fell into the staff. Jist saved maself in tam. It would hev bin a nahsty dayth. To drewn en cone-crete.' His face remains stony.
He has come to lay our concrete screed. It's what's called a 'floating floor.' It's been poured in from a lorry-mounted tank before I arrived, then it has to be thoroughly raked to get rid of any air pockets – which is what's happening right now. Then you leave it to set. That's the only way to get a flat surface, which is what we need for our Tuscan limestone flagstones to sit on.
'So is that going to be a problem for us? It being too liquid?'
He keeps on pacing as it slops around his boots, raking it this way and that. He says nothing for a while, offended perhaps that I'm more concerned with the quality of the floor than with his narrow escape.
'Should be OwKai, men. It's getting thicker all the tahm.'
But my real worry is more immediate.
'You will be careful won't you with that rake.' And I deliver my speech on the cataclysmic effects of spiking one of the heating pipes. Surgeons, it's said, bury their mistakes. This guy could do the same.
'No worries,' he says. 'These little besteds of pipes er es taff as a rhino's voors keen.'
I am about to point out to him the error in his imagery since procreation depends on sensitivity rather than invulnerability, when I'm joined by a small bearded chap in a cashmere sweater and orange-coloured cords.
'I'm sorry to interrupt,' he says, 'but I couldn't help noticing the name of your new house as I was passing.'
'Oh, terrific. Thank you,' I say, welcoming the interest of a fellow historian. I'd only stuck the temporary 'Old Stables' sign to Nik's mesh-gate the day before.
'It's going to be nightmare,' he says.
'Sorry?'
'For my friend. It'll be an absolute nightmare. His house in Stow is called The Old Stables already. I think you'll have to change it.'
'Sorry?'
'The mail will get mixed up all the time.'
'Will it?' I'm forgetting the Blockley Mill Cottages palaver, but then there are twelve of those, more or less. 'Well, I suppose it might. But we've got one of the most brilliant postmen in the whole of Gloucestershire, Michael. Not only does he not mess up the deliveries, he sorts it out when people have made a mistake writing the address. That's one of the joys of living in a little place like Stow.'
'I'm fully aware of the pleasures of living in Stow,' he answers with quiet persistence. 'I've been here many years.'
'I'm saying it's not like we're in the middle of London, where nobody gives a monkey's.'
'It's the sime in Pritoria,' intervenes the screed-layer, slurping by on his next circuit of the cavern. 'Ah used to git litters for pipple in the nixt strit.' This could be support for either side of the argument.
'Well, it would be so much easier for everyone if you were to call your house something else,' insists the visitor.
'I'm sorry,' I reply. 'That's what it is, an old stables. I've done all the research. And anyway, it's registered now with Royal Mail.'
The visitor tuts and leaves.
'Yew ivva bn to Sith Ifrica?' the screed-layer enquires in passing.
'Only once.' I reply. 'I used to be a TV reporter.' I'm addressing the last comment at his back as it disappears into the far bedroom.
Three minutes later he strides past me again and
picks up the conversation, 'Wonderful country, marvellous wald laaf, lions, elephants…' before disappearing into the room at the opposite end. And this is how it proceeds for the next hour. Brief extract from a lecture on the Kruger National Park or the views from Table Mountain are delivered as he wades into sight to be followed by gaps of silence when he passes out of eye and ear range, during which I think up what I'm going to say to him on his next circuit but don't usually manage to do so because the screed-layer starts up his monologue just before he appears in one of the end doorways. I can't make an excuse and leave because I can never seem to get into the conversation. And anyway, thoughts of the Matlock petrifying cavern of my childhood fix me there entranced.
'That's it,' says the screed-layer suddenly, stepping out of the grey slush to stand beside me on the other side of the oak frame. 'The jawb's done. It'll go awff in a couple of days. But make sure now-body steps on it till then.'
I thank him.
'That's OwKai. It was a pleasure to mit a men who's visited ma lovely homeland,' he says, 'and who appreciates it so much.' He offers me his cement-studded hand, then trudges off, leaving a line of stony grey footprints on the black soil.
Three days later, Nik pronounces the screed set solid enough to walk on, and the building then starts to acquire things more associated with a house than with an upmarket garage. Eight door-sized pieces of extra-thick glass have now been fitted into the oak frame. The electricians turn up and run so much cable under the roof beams that you could imagine we won't need any other insulation. The plumber fits a boiler onto the end of those little pipes that have now disappeared for ever under 13 tons of concrete screed. We even have two giant boxes standing in the living room, one marked 'This way up. Refrigerator' and the other, 'Oven unit. Unpack before using.' But the task I'm really anxious to get done is the laying of the precious limestone slabs.
The supplier – the man who told us the story about his customer boiling stone in blackberry jam – keeps changing the price, then insisting we pay the whole lot upfront before we've taken delivery. He has a strange way of dealing with customers – or with me anyway. He doesn't ask for a cheque, or enquire when would be a suitable date for delivery. He orders me to pay now, and instructs me to prepare for its delivery on a date that's OK for him.
'It's probably you,' suggests Maggie. 'I expect you're getting worn down by the whole project. You're getting oversensitive.'
'No, I'm not!' I protest. 'He doesn't have to grovel. The occasional "please" would do. I just think it's a funny way for someone in business to behave. And we're paying him thousands of pounds for these earth shatteringly miraculous – sorry – very special tiles. It makes you wonder if he's not a charlatan.'
'OK,' says Maggie, 'so why don't you do a bit of background research on him?'
Good idea. His website gives a number for a regional office. I decide to call it to see if it's real or not.
Me: 'May I speak to Archibald Loosetrap?'
Other end: 'Who is this?'
Me: 'Am I speaking to The Astonishing Floor Co?'
Other end: 'I'm no longer associated with that company.'
Me: 'May I ask why?'
Other end: 'No you may not. It's none of your business.'
Me: 'Is there any problem with the company?'
Other end: 'I didn't get on with Mr Loosetrap.'
Me: 'I'm a customer and about to pay to him a large amount of money. Would you advise me not to do so?'
Other end: 'No, no, not at all. Thank you. Goodbye.' Click.
So I suppose that's a good sign.
Then two minutes later I start to wonder. 'When he said "Not at all", do you think he meant, "No, don't give him your money on any account"?' I ask Maggie.
'I wouldn't have thought so,' she replies. 'If you ask someone, "Would you advise me not to do so?" and they reply, "Not at all," that means they wouldn't advise you not to do so.'
I scowl and say, 'I'm getting lost in all the negatives.'
'Well, what was his tone of voice?'
'What do you mean?'
'Did he say it sort of quickly and upbeat: "Not at all" breezily and cheerily. Or, did he say it sort of gloom-laden and shaking his head?'
'How do I know what he was doing with his head? It wasn't a webcam call.'
'You know what I mean. That kind of thumbs-down tone of voice. Anyway, what was your first reaction? That he was telling you it was OK? Or that he was warning you off?'
'The first. Definitely. I think.'
So that night Maggie and I hold a meeting to assess what alternatives there are. The kitchen table is wrist-deep in little squares of stone glued to bits of card, and brochures picturing Elizabethan mansions shot from the knee down. After a couple of hours of shuffling them around like a game of dominoes that can't get started, we call a halt to try and decide where we are.
'There's nothing else that'll go with the exposed stone wall and the oak like the Italian slabs from the dodgy bloke,' I say.
'And there's nothing else that won't scratch and stain and so have to be hacked up every time there's a spill,' Maggie adds.
So we decide to recognise it as a risk, go ahead anyway, and to sign a lifetime-binding pact which specifies that we'll still be nice to each other if it all goes wrong.
It's the turn of the plasterers next. Jonathan and Dave. I could watch them all day.
'It's a regression to your childhood,' says Maggie.
It's true. I loved the circus when I was a kid, and these two guys are one of the best acts I've seen since.
They're on stilts. Their boots are about 4 feet above the ground.
'It saves a lot of time,' says Jonathan, as he crouches, balancing, under the main oak cross-beam 8-feet high above the living room floor, 'given the height of this place.'
'We'd have to keep putting up scaffolding and ladders then taking them down again,' says Dave, addressing the words to the plasterboard over his head as he nails it in place.
Both of them are stamping backwards and forwards. That's the thing about stilts. If you stand still, you topple over like a felled tree. So you've got to keep moving. Not easy when the two of you are trying to work together to fix a 2-metre-square board up above you, so you can't look what's going on 10 feet below, around your stilt feet. And down there are all manner of wrenches and gash cable and buckets and bags of screws left on the floor by the electricians, the plumbers and the carpenters. For earth-bound walkers it's a game of hopscotch to get from one end of the living room to the other. For Jonathan and Dave, it means their stilt footwork has to be even fancier.
So they perform a surreal dance, rotating round each other, balancing the giant board over their heads with one hand, a drill or a bucket of wet plaster in the other, their bodies swaying from side to side in order to shift their centres of gravity, while their long stilted legs tramp in a peculiar sideways motion as though they've got dislocated hips. Time after time, one of them wobbles and looks like he's going to tumble as his stilt gets caught, or the two guys bump into each other. But at the last moment, they'll stab out a stilt in the direction of the drop and stay up in the air, the drilling, or nailing, or plastering uninterrupted.
By the end of the day, bits of mushy plaster have dripped from the ceiling, leaving Dave and Jonathan looking like they've come off worse in a custard-pie-throwing contest. But like all professional clowns of course, behind the funny faces and near prat-falls, are skilled, athletic performers. I never have any doubt that they're doing a good job.
CHAPTER 29
SAVING THE WHALE –
OR THE HEDGEHOG
AT ANY RATE
On a dull, unpromising morning in early March, I suddenly catch sight of two little green shoots heroically fighting their way up through the compacted rubble by the concrete mixer. I've no idea what they are. Must ask Maggie. But their appearance suddenly makes me look ahead to when this will be our courtyard garden. And I realise – the end of the whole project is… well, not exactly wit
hin sniffing distance. But it is just around half a dozen corners now. The problem is we've got to give a month's notice to the landlords at Mill Cottage in Blockley. We've already extended by two months, what with the snow and the roof and the rest of the delays. So we need some kind of estimate of when we might move in.
Move in! The words fill me with terror. I start to make a list of all the things still to be done. Things like take delivery of kitchen appliances, hang doors, paint inside of house, install both bathrooms, fit skirting boards. And we haven't even got these limestone slabs down yet. In fact they haven't been delivered. It goes on and on.
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