A Horse in the Bathroom

by Derek J. Taylor

  'In the mid eighties.'

  'Ah, well, I should have thought the number of times the West Indies, the Indians, the Pakistanis and the Sri Lankans have wiped the floor with England in the intervening years might have changed things a bit. I reckon any white English villager these days would have nothing but respect for a black face on a cricket pitch.'

  'And in the pavilion? Over tea and watercress sandwiches?'

  'Given the fearsomely competitive way that Stow's First XI play their cricket, there's always a bit of banter off the pitch, whether the other lot's from Adlestrop up the road or a touring team from Mumbai. And another thing, villages are sometimes suspicious of outsiders, you know. It's a tradition.'

  'I'm afraid sociologists have seen through that excuse as well. It's a cover-up, they say, for something more sinister, like a more subtle form of racism. And believe me, Derek, I'm just telling you what some researchers argue. They're not my views.'

  'No. Understood, Chris. I have to say it's all getting a bit too subtle for my simplistic brain. If I can't actually see racism in the countryside, I find it hard to believe in it.'

  'I sympathise.'

  I think for a moment and scratch my ear. 'But then, never having been on the receiving end of any discrimination myself, and having spent a lifetime inside a face as pallid as vanilla ice cream, maybe I'm not the best judge.'

  'True,' says Chris. 'And of course, Stow-on-the-Wold isn't the same as some other villages. The answer to your original question – "Are villages racist?" – might be different if you lived in an east Kent village, say, where asylum-seekers regularly arrive on their way to London.'

  I thank him, we agree to meet up for lunch, and I'm left with the job of drafting a counter-attack to Ralph. I fancy I do it with both wit and academic precision:

  Subject: Re: re: Invite to Stow

  From Derek Taylor [derekjtayl@internet.co.uk] Date: 14/11 19.23

  To: Ralph Aardman [ralphaardman@internet.com] Cc:

  Deasr Rakph,

  Hang on, the opinion of one biased Midsomer Murders producer is hardly a fact-based sociological thesis!!!

  Have fun in Berlusconiland, and see you when you get back.

  Best as ever

  Derek

  With the concrete base that'll end up beneath the floor of The Old Stables now sealed against deadly gases, the next ten days see the shell of the building shoot up. And on a cold Wednesday morning, at 7.45, a flat-bed lorry arrives with our hearts of oak and curved braces strapped on the back. Nigel has brought his assistant, Bertrand. He's got a beard too, a ginger one. And a red bobble hat. Recalling my anti-stereotyping resolution, I do not sin in thought or word.

  Nigel, picking up his coffee mug as a smiling Bertrand brings over a short oak joist slung over his shoulder, turns to me and says quietly, 'He looks just like Santa Claus Junior.'

  But the peaceful assembly of oak frames, the gentle tap of pegs in holes, is soon shattered. Nik's man, Scott has started to drill one of the steel columns that Jeremy insisted on placing next to the higgledy piggledy stone of the back wall. The towering column looks like it's wandered into the wrong building, like Sylvester Stallone on the set of Shakespeare in Love.

  But the 5-metre high oak columns are going to be bolted to these steel pillars. Jeremy's taking no chances with any of this picturesque stone and wood. Champion of historical character I may be, but I'm not averse to a bit of twenty-first century steel and concrete when we're talking about whether the place will fall over. We won't see any of it, hidden behind the oak posts and boxed in by plaster board.

  At the end of the second day, the frame has been pegged together and is standing four-square along the front of the building. And if you screw up your eyes, you can start to see what the house might look like finished. I wander out into the road to take in the whole scene and find Bertrand squaring up to Joanna next door.

  'If you don't move it now, I shall call the police,' she says in a tone of voice that must, in her days as hospital matron, have let young heart surgeons know their place in life. It's the oaksmith's pickup parked in front of her driveway that's the problem. Bertrand turns to look over towards me with an expression that appeals for help, and I see Joanna send me a theatrical wink detectable at 50 metres.

  'I should move it pronto if I were you,' I advise him. 'You don't want to mess with Mrs Neave.' As he hops up into the cab, she smiles at me and winks again.

  Back on-site, Nigel's perched on a pile of yellow Cotswold stone, his fingers busy with a roll-up ciggy.

  'So,' I say, thinking to be congratulatory, 'It all looks as solid as… well, oak.'

  'Yep,' he nods. 'Remember though, it's going to shrink, as the sap dries out. You work it out like this. You take the number of inches across the post, add one, and that's how many years it'll take to settle. So for the big ones here, that's nine years.'

  But I'm remembering what Nik said. 'So isn't there a worry that drafts will come in through the cracks?'

  'Not for me there isn't,' he grins, 'I won't be here'.

  Is it just me? Or do our craftsmen like winding up all their customers? 'Don't worry,' he says. 'The shakes won't go all the way through.'

  We're moving at a clip now, and a team of carpenters arrives to put in the softwood rafters that will hold the roof in place. The chief chippy pauses to admire our oak now waiting for the several tons of glass to be fitted.

  'Pity you don't have a view of the hills,' he says.

  I'm defensive. 'Oh, we like the convenience of being close to the shops.'

  'Yes,' he continues, patting the fat column by the gap that'll end up as Maggie's French windows. 'Wonderful thing, oak. A living being. We've just been working on a house with massive oak posts that'll take eighty years to dry out. They've got shakes in them already.' He laughs. 'The whole house creaks and moves in a storm like an old ship.'

  Yes, but not ours, surely.

  The thing about a roof is, if something goes wrong, you can fix it without much sweat. When you find a couple of broken tiles in the back garden after a stormy night, one call to the local handyman, and two hours and forty quid later, like the chief executive of an oil consortium once the leak's fixed, you've got your life back.

  Floors are different. You might say, 'Yes, but there's not much can happen to a floor.'

  Wrong.

  Well, wrong in our case, anyway. Because we've agreed to go with Maggie's idea of underfloor heating. We've plumped for a company in Northern Ireland I'd found at the trade show in Birmingham. The people there seem helpful and so are their prices. This last point is a vital one, because we've got to look for savings wherever we can. The downside of using an Ulster company is we have to make all the arrangements by phone. I'd feel better if I could see the whites of the managing director's eyes now and again. It all seems a gamble too far. The hot water piping, hundreds of yards of it, will be stretched out on the concrete base of the building like giblets on a butcher's block. It'll then be entombed in thirteen tons of concrete screed, and on top of that will be laid our cleverly made, and quite expensive, limestone slabs.

  'What if there were an earth tremor?' I muse to Maggie.

  'Well, I reckon if there was an earthquake in Stow,' she answers, 'replacement heating pipes might be low on the schedule of our insurance claim.'

  'No, I'm not saying a quake. I'm talking about a tremor, as when you wake up in the middle of the night with the mirror falling off the wall and the alarm clock dancing up and down, then when you get up, you find next door's chimney pot has landed in your fish pond.'

  'Has that ever happened to you?' asks Maggie.

  'No. Not as such.'

  'What do you mean "not as such"?'

  'Well, as a reporter I once covered an earthquake near Naples, and I felt the aftershocks.'

  'Sure, but what about here in the UK?'

  'No. But there was a tremor in Wolverhampton last year. One crack in the floor, and – Bingo! – your underfloor heating's pumping hot wa
ter round your ankles.'

  'You don't think you're getting paranoid, do you?' says Maggie.

  'All right then, what if one of the pipes gets a hole in it? It's always happening above ground. That's what plumbers do all day long, fix leaky pipes. So why wouldn't it happen down there?' Maggie frowns, and I press home the point. 'Or, what about if the pipes fur up? You'd have to use a pneumatic drill to smash up the limestone and the concrete to get at them.' And another, even greater terror grips me. 'And how would you know where the leak was?' My voice is getting shrill. 'You'd have to dig the whole lot up till you found it. And…' I'm panicking now. 'And… and then, you couldn't smash up the concrete without damaging all the pipes as well!'

  Maggie's quiet. This pushes my derangement towards levels barely recognised by medical science. I'd been hoping my outburst would prompt some rational reassurance from her.

  Next morning I ask Nik. He's bound to have useful experience.

  'Well,' he says, 'Underfloor heating is standard in a lot of Scandinavian countries. People in Britain are confused about it. Normal central heating pipes, between the radiators, usually go under the floor, so if they go wrong, you still have to rip up tiles and concrete.'

  This is not quite the answer I'm looking for.

  I phone Portadown in Northern Ireland, to tell the manager of our underfloor heating company that we're having second thoughts, and I explain our worries.

  'We've been in this business for fourteen years,' he explains, 'and we've not yet had a single problem. I can give you testimonials.'

  This is more like it. We do fancy the idea of no radiators in the house, and heating bills are supposed to be lower.

  We're still dithering when two weeks later, our son Dan and his fiancée Jo come to visit us in Blockley, and they get taken on the obligatory tour of the building site. There's a lot going on. Plumbers are linking up drains and installing water supplies, electricians are starting to pull cables, Simon's laying blocks for the kitchen wall. As usual though, for me, it's like visiting someone else's house. It's not ours yet. It belongs to the builders. And I keep thinking if they spoke their minds, they'd tell me I was in the way.

  But this time, Mark the plumber calls out, 'Ahh, just the chap we need. We've got a problem. We can't put the toilet there.' He points to the right. 'Because the pipework won't fit. It could go there.' He points to the left. 'And the basin there.' He points to the right again. 'So we need you to decide.'

  He needs me! I get on the phone to Maggie, and the deal's done. I announce the decision to Mark. Swap them over. Basin on the right.

  The rest of the tour has an upbeat tone to it, as I explain to Dan and Jo how we have had to overcome setbacks at every twist in the project. What man doesn't crave to be a hero in the eyes of his son?

  CHAPTER 24

  OK, ETHEL, BACK OFF!

  I wake early to an eerie white light filling the bedroom. It's odd because the front of the radio says '7.09AM NOV 29'. Yesterday about this time, the thin bedroom curtains had the rippled greyness of the River Mersey. Today they're shining silver. The clock must be wrong and we've overslept. After fumbling my watch onto the floor, I make it over to the window.

  Snow.

  Thick snow. At least a foot deep. And it's still falling.

  A billion words have already been written about why quite normal adults (ones who don't do drugs and can read a newspaper inside their heads without moving their lips) adore scenes like the one now visible through the French windows of Mill Cottage, despite the fact that it doubles commuting times, balloons heating bills and then turns into grey sludge. I turn off the Breakfast News after hearing the phrase 'Winter Wonderland' forty-three times in the first two minutes, then Maggie and I permit ourselves a dose of such adoration.

  'Oh, the ducks are having a hard time of it,' observes Maggie. 'The stream's frozen over.' She opens the window a slit and throws out some pieces of my best home-baked ciabatta. I don't begrudge it though, as we watch the powdered snow tossed around while a pair of mallards tussle over a large slice.

  'Look at the weeping willow,' I say. 'Its branches are encased in ice. It looks like a glass model. There must have been an ice storm over night.'

  'What's an ice storm?' asks Maggie.

  'Well. I don't know really. The total sum of my knowledge on the subject comes from the film of that name with Sigourney Weaver. The characters all get marooned when the roads and railway are iced up.'

  And so we go on, chattering away about everything snowy and icy for half an hour over our breakfast, or rather over my breakfast, while Maggie savours the Spanish-blended roast torrefacto mezcla coffee which, as usual, she has prepared with the care and precision of a Nobel Prize-winning chemist. After her second cup, she's ready.

  'Right, let's go for it,' I say.

  We pull on our wellies, brush the snow off the car and crunch it along the village road at ten miles an hour. Blockley is in a hollow. Stow is, as you know, on a hill. Thirty seconds after passing the last of the village's twelve mills, the car – with an elegance seen otherwise only in Dumbo on Ice – slides, with its rear offside wheel leading the way, back down as far as the neat front wall of that same last mill.

  Blockley is cut off from the rest of humanity; for those without tractors or experience of Antarctic treks that is.

  Back at Mill Cottage, I phone Nik. The road between Cheltenham and Stow is blocked by toppled lorries. 'And even if we could get through,' he says, 'there wouldn't be much point. You can't mix muck at minus six.' (Translation: when the thermometer shows six degrees below 0ºC, mortar does not set.)

  Even in Mill Cottage, we need two sweaters on. While Maggie checks her emails, I set about lighting a log fire to boost the efforts of the radiators. There's one thing about these old houses, you can't ignore the seasons. They seep in beneath the doors and whistle through the cracks in the eaves.

  We're getting short on basics, like milk, bread, eggs. And tapenade. So I volunteer to walk back into Blockley and stock up.

  It's a slow plod, and on two occasions between Mill Cottage and the village green, my feet fly up in front of my face in that comical fashion that would normally result in multiple fractures of the lower vertebrae. But today the laws of nature are suspended – it's the feast day when the jester can get away with anything – and the cushion of snow is so thick that, in order to recover, I have to do no more than check nobody is watching and get up.

  At the village shop-cum-PO, there's a shock Blu-tacked to the inside of the window.

  As of January Blockley Post Office and Shop

  will be closing down.

  We would like to take this opportunity of thanking

  all our customers for their support over the years.

  -The Proprietor.

  'It's an absolute disgrace.' I turn to see a red-faced, elderly chap in trench coat and Cossack hat. 'The man should be ashamed of himself. Some people have got no sense of social responsibility.'

  'It's terrible.' This is a woman on my other side. 'No sense of community, some people.'

  And the two of them head off in opposite directions.

  Inside, Doris, one of the regulars behind the counter is saying, 'Please don't shout at me. The boss isn't here right now. I'm as upset about it as you are.'

  'I'm sorry, I'm sorry. You're right,' says a fur-clad woman putting down her basket brimful of bread, parsnips and tinned salmon.

  'I live in the village too, and this is my job,' says Doris. 'It's awful for all of us.'

  'There must be something we can do,' says a middle-aged fellow, thumping his mittened hands together. But nobody answers.

  Back outside, my rucksack now stuffed with life-preserving nutrients, I see a figure stomping across from the churchyard and raising a duvet-jacketed arm in a wave.

  'Hi Derek.'

  It's Chris from the cafe.

  'Hi Chris. I've just seen the news. About the shop.'

  'Hi Margaret. Hi James. I know. It's hitting people badl
y. Hi Oliver.' This is the thing about having a conversation with Chris in the street, everyone knows him.

  'It's been the death of some villages,' I observe. 'The shop and the post office closing. And of course, your cafe's gone now as well.' As I say this, I realise it sounds like I'm accusing him of helping destroy Blockley, and add, 'Sorry, I didn't mean…'

  'It's OK, it's OK. Look I'll tell you what's going on.' He pulls me over by the arm out of the way of the crunching wheels of a Range Rover, and smiling and nodding to other passing Blockleyites, he says, 'We're going to open up a new community shop. Well, in fact, it'll be a shop, post office and cafe all in one. That's the plan.'

  'Wow, that's fantastic.'