Once Upon A Time in the West . . . Country (4 page)

As we walked through the village, which was pleasant but not so picturesque and quaint that it would be a target for Londoners who wanted second homes for weekend use – another bonus – we discussed excitedly the prospects of this house becoming our new home. The house that we’d not even seen inside yet. Fran’s only concern was that she had wanted a bigger garden so we could begin growing our own food. Not that either of us had any experience of this, so how much land would be required was simply guesswork.

‘Hang on, this might be the answer,’ I said as we drew parallel with the Parish Council notice board.

A sign had caught my eye:

ALLOTMENT AVAILABLE NEXT TO VILLAGE HALL

£15 A YEAR

‘We could get an allotment.’ I said. ‘Let’s ring the number and see if it’s still available.’

A phone call later and we had done the most extraordinary thing. The lady I had spoken to on the phone had explained that the poster had only just gone up and that she expected there to be a lot of interest in the allotment and that if we wanted it then we should move quickly. I made an executive decision and told her that we’d take it, even though we hadn’t even looked inside the house that had spawned our interest in it. Could this be a sign that we were
meant
to get this house?
4

‘Well, if we don’t get the house, at least we’ll have an allotment,’ I announced proudly.

‘Yes, and we’ll be able to drive three and a half hours to do some weeding.’

‘It would be a long way back if we forgot the shovel and fork, certainly.’

***

Following our quick refreshment in the friendly local pub, where every head had turned to look at us as we’d walked in through the door, we found ourselves back outside the house. It felt like we were eager students who had enrolled on an extra-curricular course – in house buying. The lady answered the door, introduced herself as Brenda, and conducted a thorough tour. The house turned out to be idiosyncratic in layout, the victim no doubt of a string of makeshift ‘improvements’ that had happened over the years. The bedrooms upstairs were in a line – meaning that you had to walk through one to get to another. Like many a rugby player, the house was wide and shallow. Headroom was an issue, and I had to be alert to avoid beams on the ground floor.

But we loved it. We loved it because of what you could see out of the window. That seemed to be enough. Everything else we assumed could be sorted out in the future. Even when we shared a cup of tea with Brenda and attempted to ask all the questions that needed asking, all the time we kept turning and looking at the view. That view.

By the time we’d completed the drive back to London, we’d decided on every alteration we could make to the house, and we went to sleep dreaming of waking up there. In the morning I rang the estate agent, leaving it till 10.30 a.m. so I didn’t look too keen, and made an offer that was duly accepted.

Good. We now had something to go with the allotment.

2

Accepting Your Fête

I won’t pretend that selling the London house hadn’t left me with some wobbly moments. Occasionally it felt like we were casting ourselves adrift and sailing off into the unknown. Fran had been born and raised in London and had never lived anywhere else, and it had been the city that had sustained me in my career and social life for the last thirty years. Now we were both turning our backs on it. Sure, it was only a train journey away, but we were putting a firework up the posterior of our lives and it was no use pretending otherwise.

Unlike Fran, I’d moved houses several times before. I knew that when you pull your car up outside the empty shell that will be your new residence, keys in your hands for the first time, there’s a nervous feeling that you’ll open the door, walk in, and not like it anymore.

‘You OK?’ I said to Fran, as I put the key in the lock.

She nodded. Perhaps the silence concealed the nerves.

We’d seen the house a couple of times more when we’d been near Devon on other business, and we’d popped in to share a cup of tea with Brenda and ask all the questions that we should have asked before we bought it. Like what kind of heating system does it have, or does it have mains drainage or a septic tank? We learned that Brenda was separated from her husband and she now needed a smaller house, but Fran and I took it as a very good sign that she wanted to stay in the same village and had bought a house further down the road. We would be neighbours, and for the next few months we could torment Brenda with questions about how things worked, and where various switches were located.

I took a deep breath as I turned the key in the front door lock. I threw open the door and we walked in. We looked around us and both smiled. Even without furniture, pictures, mirrors, books, magazines, and kitchen paraphernalia – it felt like home.

I let out a huge sigh of relief.

***

The months leading up to the move had been tough, but I wouldn’t have described them as stressful, even though they do say that moving house is one of the most stressful things in life. My question is this. Who are the
they
that say this? Is it the same
they
that say that our bodies are 70 per cent water? Because if it’s that lot, then I’m not sure that I trust them. I just had a bit of a check and, even after a glass of water, I seem to be far too solid to be nearly three-quarters water. I’m pretty certain that my knees aren’t water at all.

Could this ‘fact’ come from the same
they
who tell us that we only use 10 per cent of our brain’s capacity? Well, frankly, how can we trust a statistic that comes from anyone who is openly admitting that they didn’t use 90 per cent of their brain in producing it? I want my statistics to come from those who are using a minimum of 62 per cent of their brains. And not from people who have those spongy damp brains that are 70 per cent water either.

Our move had been tiring, but it hadn’t taxed our nerves too greatly. Packing had been a royal pain in the arse, of course, but it produced some good moments too. Objects, clothes and photographs were discovered that brought fond memories flooding back. Objects, clothes and photographs were also thrown out, and this delivered a cathartic healing, as well as presenting the local charity shop with a number of challenges.

‘Thank you,’ said the meek volunteer as I deposited another box containing a mix of shoes, jumpers, framed photos and prints, DVDs, CDs, and outdated audio gear. I didn’t deserve a ‘thank you’. I wasn’t donating, I was offloading, and by rights I ought to have been giving them a tenner to take it from me.

The good thing about unpacking is that it’s quicker and easier than packing, and far more rewarding. Packing slowly strips a house of its soul, whereas unpacking breathes life into your home with each painting you hang, and each lamp you set in place. Within a matter of hours you can begin to feel that the job is almost done, forgetting that you don’t know how anything in the house works and that you probably won’t know how to run a hot bath for another three weeks.

On that first night we went to bed elated having created an environment that already felt like home. Like thousands before us, we had done it. We had moved from the city to the country. Now we just needed to find out if we would be accepted by everyone else who called this corner of Devon home.

‘We’ll introduce ourselves to the neighbours in the morning,’ I said, as we lay on a bed that I’d just spent a disappointingly long time assembling.

‘Yes. I hope they’re nice,’ said Fran.

‘Me, too.’

It took me a while to get to sleep that night. Maybe it was the quiet. No distant hum of traffic. No occasional distant siren. Just the odd sound produced by unidentified wildlife. A wailing fox? A bird of prey? A badger? Fran’s last thought had unsettled me. One of the attractions of our new home had been that we had neighbours within shouting distance. But what if we ended up shouting at each other? What if we were flanked by the neighbours from hell? What if, after all our time and trouble, we were to find our hopes of living in a peaceful community dashed on day one? Nothing in the estate agent’s particulars had said that both sets of neighbours weren’t unpleasant, small-minded bigots who complained at the drop of a hat and threw litter over the fence. They knew their jobs these estate agents, and that was exactly the kind of thing they might deliberately omit. Sneaky. No wonder nobody liked them much.

‘Are you OK?’ said Fran. ‘You’re very fidgety.’

‘I’m fine. Just finding it tricky to fall asleep. I’m excited.’

‘Me, too.’

‘Sleep well.’

‘You, too.’

***

As we stood at the door, I looked at Fran and smiled, trying not to reveal my concerns, before taking a deep breath and ringing the bell.

Ding Dong.

Good. A nice old-fashioned bell ring. Not the kind that psychopaths with dangerous dogs would have. Surely?

The door opened and before us stood a tall, strong-looking man in his sixties, and we introduced ourselves as the new neighbours.

‘Oh, hello,’ he said in a gentle voice. ‘Come on in.’

Soon we were taking tea in Ken and Lin’s small conservatory and enjoying the wonderful view from a marginally different angle. The conversation, if a little stilted at first, soon began to flow. Ken’s gentle Devonian brogue was a product of this very village, where he had been born and raised. He was a retired builder, who had actually built the house in which we were now sitting. He’d worked on it at weekends when most would have been resting from the tiring paid work of Monday to Friday. His equally gentle, but considerably smaller, wife Lin was also a local but she had suffered the major upheaval of moving here from a few miles away. They had one son who lived with his partner in a neighbouring village, and who came every Sunday for lunch. Apparently he liked to go out with Ken on ‘tractor runs’. I didn’t ask what a tractor run was, because I didn’t want to appear like a clueless ‘townie’ who knew nothing of country ways. Better that they discover the truth in the coming months rather than reveal all at the outset.

As we sipped our tea and ate rather too many of the tempting chocolate biscuits neatly spread out on the floral plate before us, it soon became clear that we had one set of lovely neighbours.

‘Don’t forget,’ said Ken, as a parting shot while we waved goodbye from the end of their path twenty minutes later, ‘if you need any help with anything at all – just call.’

‘I will,’ I replied.

I meant it. Poor Ken didn’t know what was to come.

We repeated the same ritual with our neighbours the other side, making this day a veritable festival of tea and chocolate biscuits. Tony and Edna were very similar to Ken and Lin in many respects, just older. Tony, now in his eighties was also born and raised in the village, and his wife Edna had also suffered the disruption of uprooting herself from a nearby village, travelling literally thousands of yards to begin a new life here. Tony spoke proudly about his veg patch, and we left clutching courgettes and marrows wondering what the difference was between the two.
1

‘Well, we have two sets of lovely neighbours,’ I said to Fran, as we got home, taking good care not to put the kettle on and accidentally have some more tea and chocolate biscuits.

‘Yes. I wonder what the rest of the village is like,’ said Fran.

‘We should find that out at the village fête. It’s coming soon enough.’

We’d seen the posters and the bunting as we’d followed the removal van into the village. Bunting. Nothing seemed to represent the move from urban to rural more succinctly. I imagined that there were black and white pictures from fifty or sixty years ago that would not have looked much different to the current decorations around the village. It made me wonder for a moment whether our move here was actually a progressive move? Were we gentle pioneers exploring a simpler, more honest way of living, or were we simply trying to go back in time?

***

I settled on a lime and coconut cake. I’m not sure what drew me to it, probably just the way the recipe and the instructions were laid out in the book. It looked easy. The usual set of criteria for choosing which cake to make didn’t really apply in this case, since I wasn’t going to eat it.