THE DOOR Tony Harmsworth
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Details can be found at the end of THE DOOR.
1 The Wall
Note for non-British readers – Tony writes using UK English spelling, punctuation and grammar.
Addy and I were in a rut. Our evening promenade had become predictable, yet I wasn’t short of options.
Home was central in the village of Goodwick, so plenty of choices were available including the woodland, the beach and riverside, the park and disused railway line, or this route. It had become the regular outing, my favourite, with many trees, walls, lamp posts, and gateways to keep Addy’s interest.
We set out along the lane and hedgerows of the bridleway towards Alfern, then back through arable country to the housing estate, before the final left turn homewards alongside the convent wall.
It was a good option during the winter. I liked the variety and it was sheltered from the cold easterly breeze which often spoiled the beach walk. The woodland option could be muddy if wet and the old railway embankment was lovely, but really exposed except on still days.
Global warming had seen fit to bless us with a cold end to summer, so I was dressed warmly today, with a tweed jacket and pullover plus stout walking shoes. We passed the last farm entrance and four old terraced houses dating back to the early nineteenth century, if not earlier. The last of the houses butted onto the stone wall to some ancient convent and from there it was only a quarter of a mile to home.
The wall stretched more than a hundred yards at ten or twelve feet high. Addy loved the wall, continually pulling over to sniff the bottom where it joined the path. I suspect she recognised that we were nearing home and wanted to postpone the end of her walk. Addy, in case you wondered, is a Jack Russell terrier with distinct black and brown patches over her snow-white base colouring. The blur which was her short tail sported a black tip which matched a patch over her right eye. She was an insatiable bundle of energy.
Long ago, the wall would have been clad with smooth mortar, but time had not been kind and, in places, it was now rather scabby, revealing the sandstone blocks from which it had been constructed. Ivy had also got its tendrils into the surface and was assisting the weather in its inevitable pursuit of the wall’s destruction. I guessed it must have stood there for a hundred and fifty years, maybe longer.
The ivy provided a picturesque, mottled, natural look. In the summer, butterflies used it to sun themselves – red admirals, tortoiseshells, and peacocks spread their wings adding splashes of colour. Not today though. Summer was dying early. Too late in the year for most butterflies, but the ivy contrasted nicely with the decaying mortar.
Set into the wall, the arch of the doorway showed the undisputed skill of an ancient stone mason and the door, neglected for decades, suffered from peeling green paint which exposed grey timber beneath. It would soon rot if it remained so unloved. It was badly in need of rubbing down, a new coat of paint, and some tender loving care.
We’d continued about twenty feet past the door when I stopped dead in my tracks. Addy reached the furthest extent of her lead and jerked to a halt. The Jack Russell was surprised at my sudden stop and looked around with one of those expressions which questioned the stupidity of her master.
‘What door?’ I asked myself. There was no door in this wall!
I tugged on the lead and we returned to the section where I’d seen the stone arch and ancient door.
As expected, there was no door. Eh? The lack of a door could not be more evident. Addy sat obediently while I stared at the scabby wall and its patchy ivy jacket.
What had I seen? Was it further back?
I walked another twenty or thirty feet, but there was no ivy growing on that section and the door had certainly been set into a section sporting the evergreen plant.
‘What the F!’ I said under my breath.
Crazy! Had I imagined it? I thought back. There never had been a door in this wall. I would have remembered it. I turned again towards home, walking more slowly. We both studied the wall, me looking for evidence of the door and Addy sniffing its base. We reached the ivy. I stopped and examined the wall more closely.
The ivy didn’t cover it here completely, more a network of tendrils and leaves allowing the underlying sandstone to show through. Along the bottom of the wall there was grass trying to gain a foothold in cracks where the wall joined the path. There was certainly no door. No door at all. Not even a sign that there had ever been a door there.
‘Come on, girl,’ I said, shrugging my shoulders, and we both continued homewards, but I now kept one eye on the wall.
How could I have had such a vision? There had never been a door in this wall. I would have seen it, yet the image of its peeling paintwork and ivy clad opening was so vivid. On its left side, there had been a black, round door handle and I seemed to recall a circular lock escutcheon. There were even marks in the paint where some long-since-gone sign was once attached at head height. I could visualise the rusty traces and holes I’d seen. What a strange aberration! The mind can truly play tricks. In fact, the door was clearly set into a stone arch. Ridiculous. I couldn’t continue. I had to return for another look.
To Addy’s great puzzlement, we returned to the ivy clad section. There was no door. The absence of a door could not be more obvious. There was no break in the stone wall. There was no arch to frame the door. There was no doorstep. There never had been a door. Nothing. How weird.
For a third time, we continued on our way, reaching the end of the wall where it turned left at ninety degrees with a narrow grass path beside it. I stopped. To the right of the path were the rear gardens of a dozen relatively new properties. Perhaps tomorrow Addy and I would take a stroll along it and see if we could circle the property.
I looked at my watch. Six fifty-five. Hazel would be almost home or back already. I was the house-husband and had food in the slow cooker. I couldn’t complete the circuit now.
I gave a wee tug on the lead and we set off at a faster pace, turned left along the front of the new properties, and took the next right into The Sisters, the road which led to our house. I wondered if its name was something to do with the convent. I realised my knowledge of this street and the mysterious walled property was extremely sparse, despite us having lived here for almost a decade. The new Abbess Road houses all had both front and rear gardens and there was a wide grass verge between the path and the road. Ancient beech and horse chestnut trees stood every fifty feet in the verge. In another week, their colourful autumn coats would be at their best. Abbess Road, The Sisters – it all had to be related to the convent.
In The Sisters, the houses were quite ancient. All large cottages built around the beginning of the nineteenth century. They fronted directly onto the road with a matching set on the opposite side. Most were painted white with casement windows, but some had been given a colour wash. Ours was a pale yellow. Number one was terracotta; across from us, twelve was lime green. What would the original builders have thought of such frivolity? When built, they would all have had a vanilla-coloured lime wash.
Addy and I stopped at our orange front door, the seventh house on the left. Number fifteen – there was no thirteen in this street. Hazel's Lexus stood outside. She was already home. I fiddled around for my keys and gained entry.
‘Hi, darling. It’s me.’
‘In the living room,’ she called.
I let Addy off the lead, and she scooted along the polished wood floor and tried to turn sharp left into the lounge. I sniggered as her back legs slid, cartoon-like, beyond her, owing to the speed of her racing turn. She always did that if Hazel was ho
me, letting out an excited ‘found you’ bark, her tail doing nineteen to the dozen.
I hung the lead on a hook on the old-fashioned settle and coat stand in the hall, slipped my tweed jacket onto a hanger and put my shoes on the rack. Now in some comfy tartan slippers my mother had bought me for Christmas, I joined my wife in the lounge.
She was leaning forward petting Addy. I bent and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Have a good day?’
‘Yes. Interesting divorce case this afternoon which made up for a boring morning’s property conveyancing.’
‘Ha-ha. Someone playing away?’
‘Yes, a serial lecher! It’s going to cost him.’
I nodded. ‘I’ve a chicken in the slow cooker. Be ready soon. Like some wine?’
‘Please. I looked at dinner. Smells lovely,’ she said.
I put a couple of logs into the fire, then Addy followed me through the hallway towards the rear of the house, passing the dining room and on into the kitchen.
A large size, it was the full width of the property, so some seventeen feet wide and perhaps fourteen feet long. It was the one room we had modernised. At the far side a door led out into a surprisingly long narrow garden. When these cottages had been built everyone grew their own vegetables and probably kept poultry too.
I lifted the lid of the slow cooker and checked the chicken. Almost ready. I turned it onto the low setting ready to serve, then took through the cutlery and two glasses of a cool, crisp Sancerre.
I returned to finish preparing the dinner and we sat down to eat chicken, parsnips, carrots, sweet potatoes and sugar snap peas from our lap trays, while we watched a recorded episode of Happy Valley. Scary!
I wasn’t ready to raise the subject of my mysterious green door, because that was even more scary.
2 The Perimeter
The next day, Addy’s morning walk was energetic. I let her off the lead and there was plenty of playing with her ball in the park. I’m pretty fit and I needed to be, in order to keep up with the demands of this diminutive dog. I am one of those lucky individuals who can burn off the calories easily and have been eleven stone since I was twenty and entered the rat race.
Now thirty-eight, I’d extricated myself from the old nine-to-five and become self-employed, working for a variety of companies in different industries, mainly providing solutions to administrative or logistical problems which exist, no matter what the business. With lots of variety, it maintained my interest, and working from home gave me time to look after the chores and cooking during the week.
Hazel, named for her eye colour, is the main earner. She complains that the desk job means she is always fighting her weight, but I find her ample curves delightful.
On Saturday morning, Hazel came with us and we took the route which brought us back via the convent wall. The leaves were now displaying a finer selection of autumn colours, conkers were dropping to the ground along the bridleway and, in a few weeks, it would become mucky as the leaves began to mulch down.
We started down Station Road and came alongside the convent wall. I stopped by the large patch of ivy where I thought I’d seen the door. Hazel looked at me strangely as I studied the wall. I guessed an explanation was in order.
I laughed nervously. ‘You know. Strangest thing. On Thursday, Addy and I walked past this stretch of wall and I could swear I saw a green door set into the stone. We stopped a few yards further on, I came back and there was no sign of it.’
‘Early onset dementia!’
‘Must be something like that. I can still see it in my mind’s eye, the peeling green paint had that decaying greyish wood underneath it, you know what I mean. Like the shed. It had an old iron door knob, a lock, and even marks where there had once been a name or number screwed onto it. It was set into a stone arch. It was so real. The wood at the top left of the door had begun to rot and was bending outwards from the frame.’
We both studied the wall.
‘I don’t think there has ever been a door in this section of wall,’ Hazel said. ‘The stonework would reveal it and there would, at the very least, be a sign of the entrance at the bottom of the wall.’
‘I know. It’s daft, but it was such a vivid impression.’
‘It’s an old convent in there, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, The Sisters is probably related to it.’
‘Are there any nuns there now?’ she asked.
‘No idea. Never seen any.’
‘Wait a minute,’ she said, looking at me strangely, ‘Where is the entrance? Have you ever seen an entrance?’
‘No, but there’s a narrow path just down here,’ I said and set off in a homewards direction.
We stopped where the wall carried out its ninety degree turn.
‘Come on then,’ Hazel said as she turned along the grass path.
‘Come on, girl,’ I said as I pulled Addy who didn’t understand why we’d forgotten the way home.
The path was too narrow for us to walk side by side. The gardens on the right terminated with fence posts and wire strands. Some owners had installed pig-fencing to prevent dogs escaping and even more enterprising homes had grown hedges which were a nuisance on our side of the boundary as they were overhanging most of the pathway. Don’t suppose the owners ever thought about that.
I traipsed after Hazel, and Addy followed me. It was an amazingly long wall. At least a hundred yards.
‘This used to be an entrance,’ said Hazel.
There were two vertical columns of stone about eight feet apart which had almost certainly been the sides of a full-height gateway.
‘It’s been bricked up,’ I said.
‘Yes. And not very well. This is concrete blockwork so relatively recent.’
‘I don’t know. Judging by the lichen and moss growing between the blocks it’s been like this for decades.’
‘Yes, genius, but the original wall could be close to two hundred years old. The blockwork is recent on that scale.’
‘Everything’s relative.’
‘Well, whoever owns this property is sitting on a gold mine,’ said Hazel, putting on her lawyer’s hat for a moment.
‘Yes. It’s a huge plot of land. A house in a walled couple of acres in this location… millions.’
We finally reached the end. We were now at another lane which terminated here. The gardens on the right continued into the distance so the lane must, at some time in the past, have run through to join Abbess Road from which The Sisters was a tributary. Now it was closed off by one of the new Abbess Road houses.
‘You game to go a bit further?’ Hazel asked.
‘Why not?’
We set off along the third side of this convent estate, up a barely noticeable incline.
The lane was narrow here, had no road markings, and on the right were a few eighteenth or nineteenth century cottages, but unlike ours in The Sisters, these were detached. One was the most beautiful thatched house. Too big to be called a cottage, it could have graced any chocolate box.
‘Gosh. Isn’t that beautiful?’ I exclaimed.
We stopped and admired it. The garden was full of late summer flowers and a clematis around the doorway was just finishing its colourful show.
We continued along the wall, again no sign of any working entranceway. We’d reached the last corner. The lane continued straight on, but a left turn followed the final stretch of wall.
‘Look at that.’ Hazel pointed across the road.
I looked and saw Convent Lane on the signboard.
‘All of this seems to be connected to this estate,’ I said.
I crossed the narrower section leading along the wall and, using Addy’s ball-throwing device, pulled aside some brambles to reveal yet another black and white street sign.
‘Convent Drive,’ I said.
‘Yes. The entrance must be along here.’ Hazel slowly walked beside the final stretch of wall towards what, in the distance, appeared to be a dead end.
We slowed as we approached this unexpected
obstruction. It was part of a building. It rose to maybe thirty feet and we could see it stretched in beyond the wall. A window was visible inside the estate, but none here. I noticed the window was boarded up and suspected the glass had been broken by kids throwing stones. The building jutted out about eight feet and butted up to a tangle of vegetation. Convent Drive came to an end. There was no way forward.
I prodded at the brambles to see if the path continued around the front of the building. The opposite side of the lane was another wall, lower than the convent wall. Beyond it we could see some nicely maintained fruit trees and it was obviously part of a garden of another house on Convent Lane.
I managed to pull back some of the spiny shoots, ‘It’s the front of the building,’ I said.
Hazel looked over my shoulder. The lane had, once upon a time, continued along the front of the building, but had become completely overgrown.
We returned to the corner.
‘You know, I’ve been down this lane before with Addy, trying to find a different route back home, but discovered it was a dead end because of the gardens of the new Abbess Road properties. I never walked far enough to see that footpath between the gardens and wall. If we head fifty more yards in that direction, we’ll come to the bridleway we came along earlier.’
‘Okay, let’s go right around. I want to see the other end of this section of wall.’
‘It butts onto another cottage I think,’ I replied, puzzled that I couldn’t remember exactly despite passing the spot several times a week.
We started up Convent Lane, turned left onto the tranquil tree-lined bridleway and emerged at the end, turning back towards home along Station Road. The name of the road was an historic aberration as Goodwick no longer boasted an actual railway station.
It was as I thought. A cottage, similar to ours, butted onto the end of the convent wall. I looked up at it. There were no windows overlooking the wall. I supposed that was only to be expected. The nuns wouldn’t want people looking into their compound.
‘The convent is derelict then,’ said Hazel.
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