After three hours of mind-numbing duty, wrapping saucepans and dessert spoons in squares of white paper, we decide to reward ourselves with fish cakes, salad and sauté potatoes. Blockley's new community shop, cafe and post office has just officially opened.
'Hi guys, welcome,' says Chris from behind the counter. 'That's four pounds ninety, Mrs Stevens.' Then turning to us again, 'Grab somewhere to sit and have a look at the menu.'
The place is buzzing. There's only one table free. Doris, who used to work in the old shop across the road, greets us, takes our order, brings us drinks, and ten minutes later we're complementing her on the excellence of the food.
By the time we've finished my lemon meringue pie (Maggie doesn't eat puddings – well, not unless they're mine) the tables are starting to empty, and Chris, in maroon 'Blockley Village Shop and Café' apron, pulls up a chair and asks, 'Good?' indicating with a nod the clean plate and two spoons.
'Excellent meal,' we both say.
'How's it going?' asks Maggie.
'You've seen for yourself,' he replies. 'The cafe's overrun. And the shop too. People are telling us they do their main buy here rather go to the Moreton supermarket. And you remember we needed to raise £20,000 from local subscriptions. Well, we've got nearly £45,000.'
'That's brilliant!' I say. 'And are you sticking to your plan of no volunteers? Paid staff only?'
'You bet we are. We're employing sixteen local people. Part-timers on six-hour shifts. It's ideal for mums with kids at school.'
'And my guess is,' I say, 'that it's more than just a place to eat good food and buy your groceries.'
'You're dead on,' he answers. 'It's already becoming the hub of the village. There was a house broken into last week, and the police know we've got the emails of 400 households in the village – people who're on our mailing list – so the cops asked to send out a message to everyone telling them to take extra care locking up. Then the doctors' surgery have been in touch, asking if prescriptions could be left here when locals can't get into Moreton easily, when we get snow for example.'
We congratulate him, then explain this is our last day in the village before we move out. He hops up and shakes our hands, saying, 'Well, you don't have to live here to eat here.'
'Don't you worry,' says Maggie. 'You'll see us again.'
For ten days, in a casita with a south-facing view of mountains near Valencia, we manage not to call Nik. Then, on the eve of our return he rings us. All's fine. The water-damaged plasterwork has been repaired, the kitchen's finished with all its appliances plumbed and wired in, and the bathrooms are shiny white in all the places they should be. The furniture removers are delivering our stuff as he speaks.
We don't get much sleep that night with the thought that, this time tomorrow, we'll be in bed under the oak beams of The Old Stables for the first time.
CHAPTER 33
FIRST NIGHT
NERVES – AGAIN
I wake with a jolt.
The bedroom door has opened and Maggie is sticky-taping her way out and into the living room of the The Old Stables. 'Uggh,' she says. 'What's wrong with this floor? And what on earth are you doing? It's five to six. How long have you been here?'
Too many questions. I'm still sitting on the packing case where I'd slumped after swilling the test patch of floor behind the TV, and as I straighten up, my back stabs where it's been draped sideways over something. A waist-high removals box, by the feel of it.
'Must've fallen asleep,' I mumble, coming back into the world. ''Sthebloodyflooragain,' I sigh. 'There's some sort of sticky mess coming up through it.' Maggie's bare feet back me up with delicate 'sick, sick, sick' noises each time they rise from the limestone slabs. 'It's never-ending,' I say. 'It's like a medieval curse, this floor.'
'How long have you been here?'
'I dunno. Since about three.'
'Oh,' she sympathises, walking over to put an arm on my shoulder. 'Come back to bed.'
I drop my gaze. 'Do that again.'
She strokes my head. 'Come back to bed and you can have a nice cuddle.'
'No. I mean, Yes. Just do that again. Walk away a couple of steps.'
She takes her hand from around my neck and moves backwards.
Nothing.
A lovely nothing.
Her feet leave the floor in unresisting silence.
'That's the bit I've just been swilling with hot water!' I cry. 'I did it three hours ago. The heat's been on all that time. And it's still OK!' I jump up, then stamp about on the test patch like a demented grape treader.
It's redemption. The floor has finally become a responsible member of society.
Three hours later, there's a knock at the door. I say to Maggie, 'There's a knock at the door.' The words have a warm and magical feel to them. 'There's a knock at the door' is what people say who have real houses. Like us.
It's Nik. He's carrying a huge bouquet of flowers. Maggie runs over and throws her arms round his neck. I pump his arm and clap him on the back. Not only has he brought flowers, he's got a glass vase as well to put them in.
'You are a genius, Nik,' I say. 'And not just for all this.' The sweep of my arm almost knocks the mop off the sideboard.
'Sorry we didn't get chance to finish the floor,' he says. 'Simon and me had just done mopping it over with some cleaning stuff from the Co-op, when the removals blokes came. So we didn't get chance to swill it off with clean water.'
'That,' say Maggie and I almost in unison, 'is no problem.'
We spend the rest of the day hunting through the packing cases for saucepans and towels, and creating a little oasis of sofa, coffee table and TV. Our home is ours at last.
Well, for one day it is. Because Day Two sees the invasion.
By 0745 hours, Michael the decorator is whistling a merry jingle outside our bedroom door as he primes the skirting.
The carpenter's apprentice is measuring up for a wardrobe. I prepare to give him a headmasterly 'I'm watching-you-Fosdyke-Minor' kind of a look, when he beats me to it with a jaunty, 'Y'orlright, Derek?' before putting his coffee mug on the ebony and mother-of-pearl chessboard that I brought back from Iran.
Simon, who's laying stone terracing in the courtyard, marches into the house and on into the guest bathroom. He leaves the door open, and Maggie and I look at each other while we listen to his manly tinkling followed by a flush, before he marches out again. We can't complain. Simon is one of the decorated heroes of the campaign. While he's still working here, it's his building site. We're squatters.
So these characters, plus the occasional electrician or plumber dropping by to fix a snag, are our housemates for the next three weeks. And that's not counting Bill, who spends all his coffee and meal breaks sitting just outside the door to avoid being mobbed by his fans. 'I 'ad some Austrian girls this morning,' he tells me as he munches his cheddar and pickle sandwich. 'There was eight of 'em. On a walking 'oliday.' He winks. 'They've all give me their phone numbers, and asked me to go and stay with 'em. Did I tell you about them flats near Princess Anne's place?'
I'm starting to get edgy. 'Look,' says Maggie. 'There are two choices. Either we have all the guys in at once and get the work done in two or three weeks, or we have them in one at a time, and it'll drag on for months and months.'
'OK, OK. I know. It's better to jump through a hoop of fire than walk over a mile of hot coals. It's just that this hoop seems to go on for a mile itself.'
'So find something productive to do.'
And, as it happens, I do have a nice little job up my sleeve that I've been looking forward to. Do you remember the old cart wheels my sister Anne spotted rusting half-hidden in a corner of the burgage about eighty years ago? (Eighteen months actually, but it seems like eighty years.) Well, I had the idea of turning them into a sculpture for the courtyard. It turned out there were three of these wheels (You could write a poem on what happened to the fourth. Pinched by an Edwardian spiv? Melted down to make the turret of a tank on the Western Front?) alon
g with the iron end-pieces for the axles. The wooden wheels inside the iron rims, complete with all their spokes, collapsed into heaps of fine dust as soon as I went to pick them up. Still the rims will last for ever.
I assemble bits of cardboard and glue on the dining table, and come up with a sculptural design. It's a cross between a globe and a telescope (I can see it already: 'The pull of the stars and the drag of the earth create an unbearable tension in Taylor's work.' – Brian Sewell, London Evening Standard). Somehow the half-inch thick coat of prickly rust will need to come off, then the hoops will have to be welded together and painted.
So I scour the Internet for someone to execute the installation. I want a craftsman with experience of working with artists, not just any old wrought-iron gate-maker. The man Damien Hirst uses would do. But a quick google shows Hirst's got his own hundred-strong workshop. I find a company in Ayrshire. But 300 miles seem a bit far to go for the impromptu artistic consultations that'll be necessary. Then, when I've almost given up, I stumble on a welder's website that says, 'If you have a plan, a problem, or just an idea, large or small, one or one thousand, we are here to help you.' And what's more, this one's only half a mile from our old temporary home at Mill Cottage, Blockley.
I phone the guy: 'Is that Mick Keepence?'
'I'm afraid so,' comes the response in a Music Hall voice that I expect to add, 'I say, I say, I say, how does my dog smell…' or similar.
I drag the rusty rims – they're a yard in diameter and weigh about 70 pounds each – into the boot of the car, scraping the tailgate bodywork before they clunk in. It hardly matters. You could read much of the history of our stables conversion in the current condition of the car. There's the place where Jason 'touched' it with the JCB claw. The jagged lines on the top where I carried an oak brace without a roof rack. The multi-storey car park concrete embedded in the side where I was late for the bank manager. Not to mention the inch-thick skirt of caked mud from the hundred or so journeys back and forth between The Old Stables and Mill Cottage.
So off I go to find Mick.
Once in his yard, I open the boot, and he says, 'Ahh, tyres.' He strokes them, the rusty splinters sticking to his hands. 'Those old blacksmiths knew what they were doing,' he says, and he explains how the nineteenth-century wheelwrights used to weld these massive iron bands into a circle in the heat of the forge. Then while the metal was still red hot, they'd fit the wooden spoke-frame inside. When the iron cooled, it would contract and clamp tight round the wooden wheel. Perfect. Here's a man who'll love these bits of old iron while he turns them into our sculpture.
He tells me to come back a couple of days later when he'll have shot-blasted the pieces to get rid of the rust. And when I turn up on the Wednesday, there are the component parts of my sculpture in a corner of Mick's yard, gleaming in the sunlight as if they've just come out of a blacksmith's forge. He heaves them into his workshop, then, with a quick spot-weld, he 'tacks' them into the shape of my Blue Peter cardboard model. And when I think it's not quite right, he breaks them apart and tacks them again. His son then arrives and helps him hump the result down from the work bench. Back outside, his wife and daughter join us, half a dozen beagle puppies at their heels.
'So what colour do you want it powder-coated?' asks Mick. And I have to confess I don't know what this means. The two women explain it's a kind of long-lasting paint job carried out at a high temperature. Then they hold a debate on whether it should be gun-metal grey or rose red or sunset orange. They plump for the grey. And so do I.
Thus fortified, I return to The Old Stables. It's the end of the day, and Maggie and I have the place to ourselves. Or so we think. The front gate opens and in walk a dignified elderly gentleman and what could be his daughter.
'Oh, God,' says Maggie. 'They must have escaped from Bill's afternoon lecture. He had a whole busload of Japanese tourists spellbound for about two hours.'
'Yes?' I call through the open stable door. 'What is it you want?'
'Ee-eh,' says the frail old man, smiling and nodding. 'Ee-eh.' He moves his eyes along the whole length of The Old Stables, and adds, 'Ii desu yo.'
I return his smile, wondering if we should offer them tea.
Then the young woman says, 'My grandfather wishes to say to you that he admires your house. He believes it to be a very good house.'
'Oh thank you, thank you,' I simper, leaping to my feet. 'That's very kind.'
We all bow and smile to each other, and the granddaughter adds, 'It was also most generous of you to allow your servant to explain how to build such a wall as this,' – she touches Bill's stonework with the tips of her fingers – 'and to permit him to give such interesting insight into life of peasant in England.'
They bow once more and leave, shutting the gate behind them.
CHAPTER 34
PC JOBS'
LOPSIDED HEART
'So remind me again which day he's coming.' says Maggie, her glass of Pinot Grigio balanced between forefinger and thumb.
'Next Friday,' I answer, sprinkling an extra tablespoon of flour into my mixing bowl. 'He says in his email that he'll be back from Cremona on Tuesday.'
'Remind me what he's been doing in Italy,' she asks.
'You know Ralph,' I reply, 'it was some study of Marxist social perfection in the Po Valley,' I reply, and give the pastry an extra hard pound with my knuckles.
It's noticeable that the output of expletives in the kitchen has fallen dramatically, now that things, e.g. garlic press, fish slice, that nifty bit in the food processor that grates cheese, can be relied upon to stay where they're supposed to be and not wander off. The incidence of swearing is now no more than you'd expect in the course of any creative cooking. The change has only been possible with the departure of Nik and Simon, of Mike the decorator, the carpenter's apprentice, and even Bill has said farewell to his last groupie. Autumn, signalled by the leaves from next door's sycamore blocking The Old Stables' gutter, has seen our siege and successful capture of the spare bedroom. The ceiling-high stacked boxes of unread novels, childhood photos and Great-auntie Phoebe's chipped potpourri urn, all the bits needed in humdrum life, are now suddenly available, and the spare bedroom has been liberated. We're all ready for our first staying guest: Ralph.
'He said before he left for Italy that he wanted to come and see us,' I remind Maggie, 'once we'd got settled into the new home.'
'I bet that's not exactly how he put it,' she says.
'No, you're right. He was rude about it in that all-English-villages-are-full-of-middle-class-retirees-trying to-re-enact-Lark-Rise-to-Candleford sort of way that Ralph has.'
'Oh God, yes, I remember all that stuff now. It got under your skin.'
'Be fair. I've conducted an intellectual study of village life,' I say, gesturing with the rolling pin.
'Steady on,' says Maggie, as a spot or two of wine spills on the floor, 'I still don't know whether we should trust these floor slabs.' I ignore her concern – I've run out of worry for the likes of floor slabs – and start to clothe the salmon fillets in what will soon be croute. 'Go on then, tell me,' she challenges, 'how are you going to defeat him in this battle of intellects? What's the typical English village really like now? You've done enough research.'
I slide our supper into the bottom oven. 'Well, I think I've found out a few things that'll have him rattled. For a start there's no such thing as 'typical'. Hogsthorpe and Swinbrook, for instance are chalk and cheddar.'
'You mean hundreds of two-bed bungalows in parallel lines as against a cluster of exquisite eighteenth century mansions.'
'Quite.'
'I don't think I'd want to set up home in either of those villages,' says Maggie.
'I know. I agree. Ouch!'
'I've told you to be careful with that fat-bladed chopping knife,' she warns.
I give my left thumb a quick suck, and attack the red peppers. 'OK, discovery number two. The idea of the English village as some eternal rural paradise, where all has for ever been ri
ght with the world, is about as accurate as Jack and the Beanstalk. If the history of Bledington is anything to go by, misery, poverty, starvation and the workhouse used to be just as common in agricultural villages as they were in the slums of the big cities.'
'And I guess what was true for Bledington was definitely true for the pit villages further north, like Newthorpe.'
'Yeah. Some Golden Age, huh, where Great-granddad Isaac Taylor celebrated his tenth birthday a mile underground, down a coal mine.'
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