A Horse in the Bathroom

by Derek J. Taylor

  When I opt for tea rather than the sherry, Joanna asks, 'You're not in need of a stiff shot then after your morning with the builders?'

  'I don't drink,' I explain.

  'That's very virtuous,' she says.

  'Not really. I finished my lifetime's quota of alcohol fifteen years ago.'

  'That's being a journalist for you,' says Maggie.

  'A journalist, eh,' says John. 'Who did you write for?'

  'I was ITN's first Middle East correspondent,' I explain.

  'Ahha,' says Joanna. 'I lived in Jerusalem till I was eighteen years old. My father was head of the Palestine police.'

  'Wow, you must have had quite a childhood,' I say.

  'I did,' she replies. 'I was with my father inside the King David Hotel when it was bombed by Jewish guerrillas.'

  'Goodness!' I say. 'Ninety-odd killed, if I remember right.'

  Joanna nods. 'My father was hurt. He was blinded for three months. I was fine but we were both very lucky,' and she sips her sherry.

  'It was a good few years later that I lived out there of course,' I say.

  'It's still the same old quarrel today, though,' she observes, and we compare notes on what's changed and what's not.

  Joanna, it turns out has had a colourful life. Somerville College Oxford, then later she became a hospital matron, in an age when – as is often fondly recalled today – hospital matrons ruled with an iron rod. Next she married John, who with his business partner set up a farm to protect rare breeds of cattle and sheep. So she became a farmer's wife. Though she and John are now retired, the business is still going strong as Cotswold Farm Park, made famous by the BBC's Adam Henson of Countryfile.

  'John was amazing with the animals,' says Joanna. 'I remember once a particularly aggressive bull got loose. Everybody was terrified. But John just went straight up to it, and said, "Come on, you silly old thing," and it followed him like a lamb back into its field.'

  'It was a big, soft creature, really,' says John.

  Half an hour later we're back out in the road, the richer by a book on the Palestine campaign in World War One, half a dozen homemade scones, and two new friends.

  'Now you see,' I say, 'these are the kind of neighbours you get in a place like Stow.'

  'They're excellent people,' says Maggie, then adds, 'You're not suggesting though are you, that you only get good neighbours in a village?'

  'No, though I have lived in flats in London where the people in the same building might as well have been the inhabitants of Number 23 Tiananmen Square, Beijing for all I ever saw of them.'

  'So you reckon villages are friendlier than cities, by and large?'

  'I guess so. And I tell you what, I can't say I ever had a neighbour in London who could charm the socks off a ton and a half of ferocious animal. You never know when that could be useful.'

  I spend my next days chasing quotes for cement, bedroom window frames and drainage pipes. Nik gives me a list. To get the tax break, we have to buy them all direct ourselves. Every spare minute Maggie and I have together, we devote to viewing roof tiles and flagstones, and to evaluating the benefits of competing styles of bathroom basin soap trays and of kitchen unit door handles.

  Some problems of course are predictable. Take utilities for instance. Sunny has decided to go to India for six months with her sister to start to plan her new life there. So we're going to need our own power supply earlier than expected. We'll have to get npower to put in an electricity meter. Just a meter. The supply's there already, waiting to drive everything from the concrete mixer to the ten o'clock brew-up kettle.

  The first number I phone for meter installation isn't the right one. No surprise there of course. But when I dial the fourth one and again reach the wrong department, I decide to keep a log. The seventh customer services operative tells me (when, exasperated, I ask, 'How hard can this be?!') that the number he's giving me is absolutely, without any doubt, the guaranteed correct one. Nevertheless, I'm still repeating the same conversation – my voice now soprano – with the eighth and ninth departments. At number ten, I'm starting to guess the woman at the other end can hear my pathetic sobs, because she says she herself will phone the next number, and call me back. Remarkably she does so, and reports that this number, too, of course, was wrong, but she does now have the correct one, which God himself has vouchsafed her. He must have done because it works. They will send me a form to fill in.

  I lie down for the rest of the day.

  CHAPTER 16

  FOURTH APOCALYPSE

  HORSEMAN IN

  REDUNDANCY SHOCK!

  Any idea, now Nik and his lads are in full swing, that it's just a question of head down and get on with it till the job's done, is as naive as pitching your tent on the side of a volcano and hoping the smoke will be clear by tomorrow. Things start to go wrong straight off. Badly wrong.

  First, there's the 6-foot-high garden wall, which should have come down in a couple of hours. It's the one Glibpert the conservation officer thought was an historic monument. It's got to be demolished so the lorries can get in to cart off what Nik estimates is eighteen to twenty loads of junk which will be left once the burgage has been levelled to a bomb site. Getting the wall down is Jason's job.

  If I say Jason is a skinhead, you'll think he starts riots at football matches and marches with the BNP. And you'd be wrong. Jason's got a chubby baby face and an innocent smile, so his hairlessness puts you more in mind of a bald newborn than a rampaging thug. He's emerging as the constant in the shifting fortunes of the Old Stables. The other 'lads' come and go as required. Jason's there at 8.30 every morning, and whatever's needed that day, he knows how to do it – and to do it with tireless good humour. That is until he meets Glibpert's historic wall.

  The trouble is that its breeze blocks are stuffed with solid concrete. Pickaxes snap against it. So Nik rents a pneumatic drill, which Jason battles to hold in a horizontal position, his whole body juddering in perfect sync with the hammering chisel end. The result is a pathetic little line of scratches. For the first time, I see a scowl trace its way across Jason's normally contented visage.

  'This is rather a difficult task,' he says to me between bouts of attempted drilling (His actual words cannot be reported in a respectable book, but you could probably write that bit yourself). He can keep it up only for a minute or two at a time – which is no bad thing from one point of view, because people who live several doors away are complaining about the racket, with undeniable justice.

  Each day when I call in at the site, I find Jason either banging away with the drill like one of those Libyan rebels you see on the news manning an anti-aircraft gun, or taking a pause to massage his wrists and check how many teeth he's got left. Finally, after almost a week, I arrive to be greeted by his old smile.

  He says, 'It was difficult, but the task is now complete,' (time for your authorial skills again), and he plants his boot on the ankle-level rampart which is all that's left of the cursed wall. It's just about low enough for a lorry to bounce over.

  The first one turns up three o'clock Friday afternoon. The driver stays in his cab shouting at his girlfriend on his mobile ('No, I've told you… I've told you before… What do you mean the dog's got to go?') while Jason scoops up assorted loads of rubble with the mini-dozer and clatters them into the back of the lorry. When he's finished, he walks round to the front to give an 'All done' thumbs up to the driver, who clunk bangs off, still shouting into the phone now trapped against his cheek, without ever having acknowledged our existence.

  So we're all set for this routine to be repeated a dozen and a half times.

  It is not to be.

  Nik calls early on Monday morning to report that a nearby road is shut for repairs. The council says it could be closed for weeks. Jason gets on with a bit of pushing and smashing, carefully avoiding any damage to the asbestos roof which will need special treatment if any of us are ever to see our grandchildren. But of course the results of his labours have now got now
here to go. So when I arrive at 4 p.m. Monday, the broken masonry, rotting timbers and assorted rusty debris have piled up and filled every square inch of burgage around the mini-dozer, which is wheezing like a sickly parent beset by hungry children.

  The next morning, on-site at 8.15 I'm taking in the scene of now silent devastation, when Nik arrives, and announces he's having to call off all further work till the site can be cleared. My heart sinks.

  'It's just bad luck,' he says. 'Sorry.'

  I can't help thinking it's an omen. Two setbacks. First the stubborn wall. Now the blocked road. There's bound to be a third. The big one. I regard myself as a rational person. I don't just mean that I'm not given to outbursts of lunacy (though at least one of my previous wives accused me of that, unjustly of course). What I'm trying to say is I think I'm fairly logical in my beliefs. But I have to confess I've got a thing about the number three. Mike – you remember, he's the chap who's known me the best part of a lifetime – reckons it's my brain in desperation trying to regain control by making a pattern out of life's chaos.

  'In my experience, bad news comes in packets of three,' I say to Nik, shaking my head. 'So what's going to come round the corner next and smack us in the face?'

  'Look, Derek,' he replies. 'I've been in this game for twenty-five years. And in my experience, troubles on a building site don't come in threes. They more like come in big economy-sized packets. They come in hundreds.' He pats me on the shoulder, and climbs into his pick-up. 'Get used to it. And don't worry.'

  As I watch the dust rise in his tracks down Back Walls, I know why when we tell people we're building a grand design, or in our case a modest set of drawings, they marvel. That's because it's an unusual thing to do. And brave. And foolhardy. And completely unnecessary in a world where umpteen million customers of Barratts and Wimpey can't be wrong.

  The vicar has paused this morning on the corner of Fleece Alley, and I can't help thinking – uncharitably perhaps – that Black Beauty may have been up to no good on the bottom of our wall. Nevertheless, once we've exchanged assessments of the miraculous beauty of the first falling leaves, I wander along the alley and down Sheep Street, drifting towards my own personal consolation zone. Retail therapy. Specialised retail therapy. I speed up as I get close to one of the four bookshops in Stow. This one's housed in a square flint-faced building that looks like a stranger from Sussex among Stow's blocks of oolitic limestone. It had started life as the office of the old brewery. Yes, as well as making our own gas, we also used to brew our own beer. Or rather Messrs Beman, Charles and Fletcher did once they'd built the Victoria Brewery here in 1837, Mr Fletcher apparently seeing no conflict of interest with his other job as 'Overseer to the Poor.' (Which way was the traffic? Alcoholism driving drinkers to the workhouse? Or the redeemed poor expanding the market for the beer?)

  One of the things that strikes me about Stow is that it's always had lots of different cards up its sleeve. It was never just an agricultural settlement. And in the early nineteenth century, lots of villages all over the country, like Stow, had their own brewery. Jobs, relaxation, a source of local pride and the temptations of the devil all in one glass. What's happened since is that the big brewing companies have driven these little local ones into oblivion. Yes, I know there are still independent brewers around, given a new burst of life by CAMRA and the real ale movement. But they're the exception to the brewing giants' rule. The Victoria Brewery shut for good in 1914.

  You could say it was a symbol of the English village's story, or at least part of it. When the world consisted of a million little places where things were made, villages could just as well be those little places as towns and cities. But once efficiency demanded centralisation (i.e. in cities) in order to achieve economies of scale, then village industry collapsed. But don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to turn the clock back. Life's moved on. And villages that win – in a world that'll sideline them given half a chance – are the ones that have found little new businesses to replace the little old redundant ones. Stow's Brewery Yard is a triumphant example. It's now a circle of small-scale commerce from posh hairdresser on the left to Persian carpet vendor on the right. And of course an antiquarian bookseller in the old brewery office.

  The inside of The Book Box gives the impression that people come a poor second to books, the latter occupying 90 per cent of the cubic footage of the place, with humans restricted to small passageways one sideways person wide. The shop stocks lots of old guidebooks to the Cotswolds, so it doesn't take me long to find what I'm after: something to tell me what the villages hereabouts were like a hundred years or so ago. Rejecting A New History of Gloucestershire by Samuel Rudder, 1779 (too old and too expensive at £699) and A Cotswold Book by H. W. Timperley (too vague and too recent at 1931), I settle for Highways and Byways in Oxford and the Cotswolds by Herbert A. Evans, 1905 and The Changing English Village 1066–1914 by Ms M. K. Ashby, which is a history of the nearby village of Bledington. I pass over two £20 notes to the shop's proprietor, who is busy explaining the English Civil War to two confused American tourists, and make for the Square and its several tea shops.

  Over a pot of camomile, I delve into my rucksack and pull out Highways and Byways. Its author, Herb Evans, it turns out, was an aficionado of that newly popular Edwardian pastime, bicycling. So what's he got to say about Stow? In his lead-in, he says that there's something about the names of some villages that 'makes the traveller feel that life is still worth living…' Blimey! It doesn't take much to lift old H. E. out of suicidal depression. He goes on…'Stow-on-the-Wold itself, for instance, suggestive of isolation and defiance.' Hmmm, I wonder if these are tactics the Samaritans have ever tried.

  The houses, he says, have a 'quiet, comfortable appearance.' And the place as a whole is 'old-fashioned.' He then goes on about the church, the Battle of Stow, and an incident in 1772 when five soldiers of the Royal East Kent Regiment perished in the snow at the foot of Stow hill. Lest we get the wrong idea, he adds that the village is a 'bright cheerful place enough on a fine spring morning,' which is when he biked there, and is 'unpretentious'. So in 1905 there's not much to offend even A. A. Gill.

  I look out through the cafe window at the Market Square and wonder how I might describe its atmosphere today. Quiet? Bright and cheerful? The scene through the window of my chosen tea rooms is not so much a bustle, more a shuffle of the stick-wielding elderly, and a dawdle of buggy-pushing families. They've just got off a bus with 'Jones Tours of Swansea' written on the side. ('Be sure to be back here at 11.30, 'cos we won't wait. Ha ha.')

  Comfortable? I suppose Herbert means the buildings are well-maintained, middle class maybe. Stow's certainly stayed up-at-heel, though there are two or three shops with dark and empty windows and an estate agent's sign that gets all the other shopkeepers complaining about sky-rocketing rents. The farmyard over to the left by Parson's Corner boasts rusty corrugated iron and cracked sinks for the dogs to drink from. But I don't mind that. That's what real farms look like. They're not Constable prints, if they ever were. Nor do they all have steel and white concrete warehouses where the old barns once stood.

  Old-fashioned? An obvious 'Yes', though I bet Herb couldn't have bought ostrich burgers or Pot Noodles here in 1905.

  Unpretentious? What did he mean by that? Modest, not showy, not getting ideas above its station?

  As I consider this, I realise there's no simple answer to the question of whether it's like that today. Because this is the place where I live, so I can't form snap judgements about it as a tourist might from North Carolina or South Korea. For them, Stow is a tea-stop, halfway between a quick whizz round an Oxford college and a brief gawp at Shakespeare's second-best bed in Stratford-upon-Avon. But as far as we Stowites are concerned, where we live is a hundred things at once.

  Gawd, if I keep on thinking like this, I'll never come to any conclusions about village life and what makes it work. And of course, that's what I've been doing about Stow, avoiding any conclusive judgements – ever sin
ce that fish-and-chip lunch with Ralph. I've been fiddling around at the margins with the question of whether Stow works then filing it away again under 'Too Hard For Now'.

  So that's what I do again. Slot it back in the drawer.

  I flirt briefly with the idea of a lardy cake, see some overseas visitors waddle past, and instead turn back to Highways and Byways. What about villages that are less complicated than Stow? Ones that are smaller? How are they faring these days?

  One of my favourites is Bledington – hence why I'd chosen Ms Ashby's volume. It's a thickish tome, so I opt first for a glance at Herbert the biker's snap 1905 opinion of the place. It is a village, he says, with 'the deserted melancholy air of one which has seen better days.'

  This is too much for my curiosity. I chuck a fiver on the table and decide to head off right now to give it a fresh look. It's only ten minutes away. 'Deserted.' 'Melancholy.' 'Seen better days.' There must be some clue in today's Bledington as to what makes the place now the reverse of these three gloom-ridden qualities.