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.