‘Are there woods? Where are the woods?’ said Claire. ‘Ah, yes, the woods. I think we’ll just start by having a quick look in the cellar, though,’ said the vendor. The fish weren’t included in the sale. He just wanted us to see them. He took the fish with him, or they took him. He really didn’t want to sell the place, the farmer. Poor man had been a beef specialist: punched on the nose by BSE, then kicked in the face by foot and mouth. He’d spent the last ten years watching everything he’d spent his life building, slip through his fingers as his profits dwindled and his assets corroded. It had been the worst time in history to be a farmer. The place was a ruin, but he’d loved it and poured his life into it. He was crying as he handed over the key, that was in my pocket now.
I cut the dying engine as I pulled off the road and was suddenly aware I was arriving at a point of silence. Silence and stillness. The gentle sounds, the pulses and tunes that had been there all along revealed themselves to my conscious mind. Rabbits scattered as I coasted slowly and gently down the drive in the filthy, dying car, with the front caved in and the rear driver’s side window missing from an earlier incident.
It was rural, properly rural. People had asked me where it was we were going and there was no easy way to describe it. There were no towns nearby – the Industrial Revolution skipped the Cotswolds. It was an area that had never been built up. I didn’t really know where the Cotswolds began or ended, although Oxford was possibly involved and Cheltenham. It was pure English countryside and that means old money and dynastic families wherever you go, but it also had more than its fair share of billionaire tradesmen, and lately, television personalities, film directors and media moguls.
I remember the feeling I had when I first walked into my first rented flat in Covent Garden. A thrilling sense that this must be mine and no particular inclination to leave when I’d finished looking around.
We’d looked at all kinds of houses from manors and mansions to cottages and space age barn conversions – we’d got used to looking for ways to escape before we’d even been shown the best spare. When you get the feeling of not wanting to leave, you’ve found a home. And it doesn’t happen very much. Like meeting people you could fall in love with, or seeing chances to change your life. They’re bound to come along but never very often, and when they do come you’ve got to spot them and go after them with everything you’ve got, even if it makes you feel and look ridiculous – which is also pretty much guaranteed.
I liked that old farmer. He had a particular quality of serenity, as cool and powerful as the morning sun, and we were all instantly at ease in this cobble of buildings all clustered around an ancient well, fields stretching in all directions through pasture and woodland, bordered to the east by the road and the west by a river. It was the first house we’d seen that was obviously a reluctant sale. We’d walked around the place with him. He never said anything was wonderful or great or useful, like all of the other people had, but it all was. We’d sat in bright gold sunshine in the ramshackle kitchen having a cup of tea. It was just nice, merely nice but I knew I was having the feeling. The feeling of wanting to stay somewhere. And as I rolled up the drive I was having the feeling again. I wanted to stay. It was enough to make my heart beat faster in the silence. I didn’t even care about the car. I was where I wanted to be. I didn’t know my way around the place. I knew I wanted it the moment I arrived. I’d been back three times and still only scratched the surface. There were a lot of rooms, a lot of buildings, most of which I still hadn’t even set foot in.
It was a mad jumble of endless compartments and spaces. If you included every building there must have been way more than a hundred rooms. Not one of them was very grand, and only the kitchen, the bathroom and one of the bedrooms in the farmhouse itself had recently been in use. There were so many outbuildings, a bewildering amount, it was more like a village than a house, really. Many stone and slate stables falling into disrepair. Endless empty structures snaking around overgrown courtyards. Everything from a cathedral-sized stone barn that looked as permanent as a mountain, to something that had been made out of telegraph poles and bits of railway line, and was about to collapse at any moment. There was a vast, rusting modern agricultural hangar big enough to park the space shuttle. There were towering corrugated sheds. The farmer had sold his cattle some weeks before and the whole place had ground to a halt: slightly eerie. There were sheep out in the fields in the middle distance – the fields were rented out temporarily to a neighbouring sheep farmer – but the buildings were in decline and obviously had been for some time. I still meet people from time to time who say, ‘Oh yes, you live on the heath, don’t you? Well, we looked at it, you know.’ Too big. Too complicated. Unmanageable. Impractical. And shake their heads.
It surprised me, actually, quite how nasty it all was, now I was faced with it alone: asbestos, concrete clamps and slurry pits, no garden to speak of. There was the remains of a walled garden, but it was completely derelict now, just a red brick wall remained. Toppling half-demolished sheds obscured every outlook. There was a concrete slab as big as a football pitch just outside the back door, and the back door didn’t lock. There was no lock on it. If you approached the house from the right direction, you could just let yourself in. It was a long way from Covent Garden. I didn’t know places like this still existed.
As well as buildings there were heaps. The place was characterised, really, by its heaps. Heaps are a feature of farms, just as much as hedges and cows are. Where there is a farm there are always heaps. There were piles of logs, piles of sacks, piles of manure – the farmer had emptied out the old slurry pit and made an enormous cowpat. That was one of the biggest heaps. I wasn’t sure what it was but my natural inclination was to climb it. It was a magnificent five-storey whopper. I began to scramble up the side, but two steps in, I was up to my knees. A crust had formed, but underneath it was still very sloppy and warm. It was like a pie. A pie made from the accumulated mess of twenty years of intensive cow farming.
Inside the sheds were piles of bricks, pallets of Cotswold stone, many different species of roof tiles, doors, boards, and timbers divided into oak, elm and pine. Farmers have always managed to recycle just about everything. Apart from old tyres. No one has thought of a use for old tyres, but farmers still tend to hang on to them, perhaps because they know that time will come. There was another, newer pile, which seemed to be horse related. This was fresh, and quite obviously still in business as a pile, still steaming. The farmer and his wife kept horses and had housed them at the farm until the last possible minute. Maybe they’d ridden off on them that very morning. There was a big mountain of rubble next to the horse manure and that was clearly my best pile. There was enough rubble there to make me feel confident. It was reassuring just to have so much of something all in a nice pile. Even rubbish. It wasn’t very pretty to look at, that one, but I climbed to the top and everything else looked pretty from there.
You get heaps when there’s building work going on, and there always is on farms. Farm is another word for a building site. The first building gangs were actually farmers. Farm workers built barns in the winter months when there was not much farming going on. Actually, stuff pretty much just grows by itself anyway. Farming really means taking care of everything else. That’s the tricky bit. There is always something leaking, falling over or blowing away on a farm, and building, rebuilding, patching and fixing are a continuous cycle.
There was a great view of everything from the top of my heap of rubble. I had a good look at the house. It stood right in the middle of the piles of muck, debris and ugly modern concrete slabs. Although it needed new windows you could tell it had started out, and remained, beautiful to the core. The Cotswold type of house is a beautiful thing. Built to last, built with stone and roofed with stone. Stone roofs held in place by great timbers from woods nearby and from old ships that had once sailed the oceans, now come to rest. The stone roof slates were a mosaic of a million greys, practically alive with moss, and gold and silver lichen, a part of the landscape. It had been built with care, and from where I was standing the roof looked like a work of art and emphasised the sense of shelter a home provides. There it was.
The house didn’t look in too bad shape. It was a typical rambling farmhouse with rooms and corridors everywhere, apparently at