Tired of London, tired of life?

The weeks that followed that first viewing of Beacon Cottage were a flurry of longing and begging for loans, anxiety over whether we would be able to sell our flat before the cottage was snapped up by someone else, and absolute bewilderment over such issues as well water provision, versus installation of mains, shared tracks for access, and septic tanks. Fortunately, Chris loved the cottage as much as I did and was just as prepared to make it happen. Prior to viewing, he had drawn a picture of his ideal house: a winding track, a small cottage nestled in an isolated position, encircled by trees, smoke puffing prettily from the chimney. We had joked that such a place would be impossible to find at a distance from which you could still commute to London, and within our budget. So when he saw it, it was with a mixture of deja vu and delight, and I had very little trouble convincing him we needed to become country bumpkins forthwith -in fact, he'd been trying to persuade me of that very thing for years.

London had gone badly wrong in terms of career, for me at any rate. That's a story that can't really be told here, and maybe can never be told, which is a shame, as it's a good one Mrs Carper! But suffice to say my dreams had turned to ashes, my heart was broken and my reputation annihilated. I couldn't go back to any of the old jobs I had before- well, never mind. Perhaps a little can leak out, here and there.

I was stifled in the flat and neighbours were always ringing on the door. Twice, even three times a day Ding-Dong! and pouf! half an hour would be gone as I chatted with Brian about the bushes at the front, or his basil plants, or his latest jam experiment. I must have heard the plot of Il Postino 50 thousand times. It was a nightmare! On top of Brian there was Brian's friend Maartie, next door but one and gay as Christmas. He'd been a pain ever since the day he'd told me how "stirring" and "moving" he'd found the sight of my husband on his blue Vespa 50 cc. Getting nowhere with him, he transferred platonic affections to myself and would leap over the two flimsy fences that divided us to come and tell me what was wrong with my outfit or what colour the living room should be. He was fond of dragging two filthy sheepskin rugs with him, one a dirty fuschia, one chocolate. He would fling them down on the hideous laminate floor in the flat and declare it "moody" or "provocative", insisting that I should instal similar articles and decorate correspondingly as soon as possible. I loved and hated him all at once.

Also, I'd moved from heady, do-anything devil-may-care mid-twenties to snuggle on the sofa mid-thirties, and London had lost its point. I didn't want to stand on the tube with sweat trickling down my back, breathing others' sweat and battling through turnstiles with shopping I could ill afford. I didn't want to see those choked, grey roads, the dull North Circular roar, the supermarkets bursting with prams used as weapons by mums on the verge of murder, and queues of grey working troops who all looked ten years older than they really were. I was tired of seeing the scene become ever younger, ever prettier, the T.L.Ws ( trendy London wankers) who talked airy nothings and took cocaine as lightly as a summer stroll - I've never liked watching a party from the sidelines. There was nothing grand or great in my life and it was time to move on. I wanted a baby. It hadn't happened for me. Like a fish, I hoped to grow bigger in deeper waters. I wasn't tired of life - I just wanted a bigger slice of it.

The House

We opened the squeakiest and rustiest of ancient gates and wound down a crumbling red brick Victorian path flanked with low box hedges and huge holly trees. Once within Beacon Cottage garden there was little of the twenty first or even twentieth century to spoil the illusion that by climbing up that track and penetrating through that thick circle of holly you had somehow, magically been transported away from the hurly burly of modern life into a more peaceful bygone age - far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife - along the cool sequester'd vale of life...

The doors were open. We knocked; there was no response. This gave a small opportunity to see the crenellated stonework on top of the porch, a tiny barbican, and I immediately thought of Wemmick and his castle and his drawbridge in Great Expectations. I wasn't the first to want a kingdom of my own.

We called softly and the door to the living room opened and I could see that although it was only 11.30 in the morning Mr P was indulging in a tot of something strong and suspicious, and smoking too - in my home! Outrageous. He welcomed us in , and my mother and I sat very gingerly on the sofa facing the bay and not knowing where to put our eyes, for all was such a visual feast and so exactly like falling into a fairy tale we were quite dazed.

Coffee was kindly brought, and before we had even had time to take note of the handsome Georgian fossil stone fireplace where a bright fire blazed merrily Mr P was energetically fetching his fossil collection and explaining the hill was loaded with Anglo Saxon curiosities!

It took a long long time to view the fossil collection, the photo albums, the rooms and the gardens. If I were to describe it all at once we would be exhausted, and so it will have to leak out in bits, every beloved bubbled pane of elderly glass, every flagstone worn smooth by a thousand footsteps, every fireplace gazed into by ghosts of the past...

In me Mr P recognised a truly kindred spirit, and we both knew at once that I would have the cottage. He had loved its history and had given it his best years, as well as his first wife. He couldln't bear to sell it to anyone who would smash and build, he said, and nor did he want the Alsatian dog breeder, nor the man who did not know an apple from a leek and who had nearly been hen-pecked into buying the cottage by his wife. And yet he was canny, enchanted by my response but giving little away, selling its good points, glossing over the bad. "Do you like pears?" he'd cry "Luvly pears from that'un!" "How about wild mushrooms?" "This 'ere spinney's full of 'em" "Wild garlic here - keeps the witches away". "How's yer tea- finest well-water, that is". On and on it went, a catalogue of delights I could never absorb. In that afternoon I learned to recognise more plants than ever I had before, the birds were introduced- the long tailed tits and pheasants, the places where the lily of the valley grew, and where I could find the heart shaped petals of an ancient rose planted a hundred years before.

The history of the house - that too, was made as dashingly romantic as it possibly could be. Mr P was not content for Beacon Cottage to be a mere farmhouse. Oh no. Too boring for him - he explained that it was either the hunting lodge of a long-dead lord, the scene of gay hunting picnics and the home of the huntsmen and gamekeeper - or - even better - the love nest of this same lord, who we will call Harlowe, a summer folly built to house a beloved mistress within easy reach of the great house 1 mile away. Perhaps even a couple of illegitimate children were squirrelled into the attic bedroom! I keep expecting to find their bones.

And so we walked through that sunlit spring day, half in imagination and half in reality, and when we said goodbye he hugged me and the scent of his tobacco and the smell of the fires of Beacon Cottage clung to my silk dress, just as the soft mud of the garden clung to my city shoes, and the cottage was in my eyes and my hair and my clothes and I was feverishly in love with all of it.

Beacon Hill

I'll change the name a little to help conceal my location.

It's night now, I'm in the drawing room, and from the windows the town glitters below me. This is when the view really sings, you can't make out the individual uglinesses of modernity - it's yellow droplets of light right to the horizon and the train snaking through it all that will, eventually bring my husband back to me.

Around the cottage the inky black of fields and trees has come to feel particularly comforting, it's a private kingdom and I'm the queen - a good feeling. If I were to step outside there'd be a million rustlings and scurryings, some disgruntled hooting of owls- but no neighbours, no cars, no shops, no road -we drive up here in our four wheel drive along the perfect horror story track.

I remember my first encounter with that track. I couldn't imagine the house could be much beyond the green farm gate, and so we parked there, and walked, and walked, with me knowing all the while that this was it, love had hit - it didn't even matter what the house was like because anywhere that necessitated a mile walk off any kind of road had to be mine! As the land grew steeper the town and sky came to a kind of wild crescendo, and though the town's nothing special, the skies in Lincolnshire are. That was one of those days when the clouds go racing across the blue in a desperate hurry to get somewhere. It's a huge expanse of sky here with every shade of blue and pink and yellow annd mauve happening at different times and seasons. The house was built for the sunset on the west and the sunrise on the east, I never miss one these days.

When we finally reached the house, it wasn't proudly sitting on the very brow of the hill as you might expect. It still kept its secret privacy, nestled a little below the brow with the densest and tallest of encircling hedgerows, only the tip of the roof peeked out curiously above the greenery. This gave it the most endearing quality, here I am, on my own on top of a hill, it seemed to say, and yet I'm hiding! I'll try and post a pic. A secret house, up a secret road, encicled magically with protective trees, and yet with the whole world stretched out before it and the winds kissing it from every corner. I loved it already.

We are not beginning at the beginning

In a novel, there's always a convenient jumping off point. In life, it's all so much more blurred and continuous isn't it? I probably should have started this blog when I left London, when my life changed, and history, and solitude, and countryside, and a million period property restoration techniques and products I'd never heard of, became my world.

But it was all too raw and new to be able to dissect it, so I wove my terror into a giant tapestry for 9 months, then stuffed it into a blanket box and forgot about it.

Now I have space and peace enough to disentangle everything that's happened at Beacon Cottage and before and share my thoughts with a warm laptop and maybe a few dear and familiar faces.