by John Challis
Caesar (Sid, not Julius) had a top-rated US TV show during the ’6os, and there’d been heavy pressure on the gag-writers to come up with an endless supply of good, fresh material. Simon had written a wonderfully funny account of how it played out in the Writers’ Room.
Our Sid Caesar was the well-known and highly regarded Frank Finlay. Years before at the Old Vic, Finlay had made a lasting impression on me when I’d seen him play a disturbingly convincing Iago to Laurence Olivier’s Othello. Also in our cast was Sandra Dickinson, bright, blonde and bubbly. Paddy had signed up one of Britain’s best character actors, Peter Polycarpou, who’d been in some great musicals as well as Marks and Gran’s Birds of a Feather.
He was playing Ira Stone, who was approximately Mel Brooks, another of Caesar’s scribblers. Then there was this bloke from Only Fools & Horses, playing Milt Field, probably based on Simon himself.
This production offered me a nice opportunity to indulge in snappy, New York patois. Frank produced a hilariously irascible Caesar and Peter a ludicrous, hypochondriac Stone, who nearly stole the show. He had some great lines: on one occasion, to Milt (for some reason – perhaps aping Tom Wolfe – always dressed in a white suit), ‘Milt, will ya sit down; you look like the entrance to the White House.’
Despite these stand-out individuals, it was a team effort, with several members of the cast from the London production, who brought with them a terrific company feel. I liked that very much. I was missing that warm, reassuring sense of camaraderie, now that Only Fools appeared to be over.
Despite all these qualities, once we set off on tour, we didn’t do great business. Although Neil Simon is one of America’s most popular playwrights, and a great Anglophile, he seems to have limited appeal in Britain. The theatrically sophisticated and the Simon aficionados turned up to see us but not in big enough numbers, though with each new venue – Edinburgh, Newcastle, Eastbourne, Windsor – we thought, ‘Now, they’ll like it here,’ but we never filled the theatre and, sadly, the tour didn’t make money.
Nevertheless, I thought it was a great show, as long as Peter Polycarpou was happy with the furniture in his dressing room. One evening he burst into mine, saw that it contained a reclining chair, a TV and a sun-lounger, and accused me of stealing them from his room. In fact, in spite of his being a Spurs supporter, he remains a good friend to this day. Once the tour was over and we’d settled down, Carol and I started thinking seriously about a new way of life.
Although our existence was very comfortable, I was getting more sensitive to the encroaching crush and racket of modern life in the South East of England. I’d spent two years as part of a group protesting against the extension of Heathrow Airport – the rate at which planes were passing over our home was already almost unbearable. And it wasn’t just us – literally millions of families suffer from excessive aircraft noise near our international airports.
However, I learned the hard way that in the end, you can’t beat big business, in this case, the Airports Authority, BA, its shareholders and the construction industry – and I’ve learned it again since, in protesting, in vain, against the erection of massive wind generators across the top of some of the loveliest hills in the Welsh Marches.
Sitting in our garden in Richmond early one summer’s evening, we had to stop our conversation for a minute or two because we couldn’t hear each other while Concorde, looking very beautiful, cruised overhead with a shattering roar on its approach to land.
It was ‘Time to split, Jack,’ as Dennis Hopper said to Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now.
Carol and I both enjoyed beautiful old houses and gardens and we had visited dozens of them since we’d been together. We began to fantasize about the possibility of finding an ancient house for ourselves that needed a little TLC, preferably with some land attached where we could create a garden.
I was conscious that I would also have to go on making a living, probably more than a living if wherever we found demanded a large amount of TLC and LSD (currency, not mind-destroying drug.) This effectively restricted our search area to places within easy striking distance of London.
We soon found that everything we saw and liked down the M4/M40 corridor was beyond our reach for one reason or another.
We looked at plenty of nice Georgian houses in a quarter of an acre for £1million or so but I didn’t have a million and a quarter of an acre was a pocket handkerchief as far as we were concerned. But I had a friend, Jean Boht, with whom I’d worked in pantomime. She’d also had a great success in the long-running Bread. Jean was a kind of train-spotter when it came to beautiful old houses; she had spent a great deal of time looking at such places that came up for sale, although I don’t think she ever bought any of them.
In the course of her weekly scrutiny of grand and lovely houses for sale in Country Life, she had spotted a remarkable piece of medieval survival in the far north-western corner of Herefordshire. She rang me to tell me about it. It turned out to be an abbot’s lodging, a glorious, ancient and weathered stone edifice, sitting among a group of ramshackle farm buildings, which had once been part of a vast Augustinian abbey, destroyed at the time of the dissolution, four and a half centuries ago. Most of the main abbey buildings had been systematically knocked down and pillaged over the intervening centuries by locals looking to build a nice place for themselves. What little was left of the abbey church and its ancillaries stood in the five acres that surrounded them and came with the former abbot’s gaff, now known as the Grange, Wigmore Abbey. We agreed that it looked absolutely wonderful, but we had to be realistic: we didn’t even know where Herefordshire was, let alone Wigmore. I pulled out the map book out to find them.
‘By ‘eck!’ I declared in the dialect of my Sheffield forefathers,
‘That’s way out i’t’ blooody sticks.’
You could tell just from the map, the obvious absence of roads and the empty rising ground to the west on the Welsh border, that this was not a busy spot. With a regretful shrug of the shoulders, we carried on looking for places nearer the metropolis.
Gradually we began to give less weight to distance from London and more to the nature of the house. We started a mild flirtation with an Elizabethan manor house, not far from Milton Keynes. We got as far as offering, and being soundly gazumped, thank God! – as it turned out. We were told later that the whole roof had to be replaced at a cost of £400,000.
Coincidently, having discovered where Herefordshire was, shortly afterwards, in autumn 1997, we drove up to stay with friends, Robert and Hyllarie Borwick, who lived in Bircher, a village near the small market town of Leominster, very near Wigmore. It seemed like fate. We had to go and at least look at the Abbey.
The first thing we saw on our approach was a wonderful old halftimbered gatehouse. We drove slowly by, and turned down a farm track, which, we learned later, was the vestige of the Romans’ second-century Watling Street West, a kind of forerunner to the M5.
Peering through a hedge and a line of poplar trees, across an ancient meadow, we were transfixed.
A quarter of a mile away, through the autumn mist hanging in the air, we gazed at the eastern end of the house and to its right, a small mound on which stood a ghostly stone finger of the ruined abbey church, pointing up at the sky.
The house itself, surrounded by rampant elder, sycamore and great dark conifers, appeared a jumble of elevations and rooflines, as if the place had been put together as an afterthought from bits they’d found hanging about. Several towering brick and stone chimneys added to its somewhat eccentric air. The hairs on the backs of our necks were standing up. We had to have a closer look, right there and then. We drove back to the entrance and Carol boldly set off down the drive while I waited in the car.
She came back looking stunned. ‘It’s amazing!’ she whispered.
The owner had come out and challenged her.
‘I... we just wanted to have a closer look. It’s a wonderful place.’
‘It so happens it’s for sale; if you’re
interested you can make an appointment and then have a closer look.’
We did, the next day.
It was the most extraordinary house, started in the twelfth century and added to, changed, botched, reinforced over the centuries that followed. The abbot’s lodging had remained a dwelling after Henry VIII had ordered the destruction of all the monasteries in the land but it had shown signs of instability and had been suitably buttressed. In Victorian times, it had been strapped and tied with forged iron braces.
The gentle, melancholy old building looked like a badly- wrapped parcel but its stones and timbers gave it a sense of tranquillity and it seemed to breathe its eight hundred years of history. It was still lived in and over the previous twenty years it had been ‘modernized’. Where the plaster hadn’t been replaced with hardboard panels, it was painted stark white. Some of the ancient oak balustrading had been replaced with varnished brown pine. In other parts the grey stone walls stood undressed, in rocky nakedness. They cried out for warm colours, care and gentle understanding.
The owner of the house, no doubt sniffing a deal, allowed us to wander around the house on our own. We took our time, finding on the walls of the panelled library some framed documents and coats of arms. Carol did a double take; she was sure she recognized the arms and when we found an inventory prepared for one Thomas Cockerham, of The Grange at Wigmore in 1763, she made the connection. The same arms and the name of Cockerham appeared in records of her own family.
Suddenly, we felt very much closer to this wonderful old hunk of historic masonry. We were standing in a stone-flagged corridor, looking past an ancient oak staircase, through a door into what was called the Abbot’s Parlour. We walked closer; a shaft of light from a south-facing tracery window cast a gleam on a brass crucifix standing on a rugged table. At that moment, wisps of some ethereal entity seemed to be seeping up through the floor and swirling round the sunlit crucifix.
This must be some kind of sign of Divine Providence, I thought, although I kept the thought from Carol, who is less tolerant of this kind of fantasizing and in this case she would have been right; the owner of the house had just lit a fire in the under croft beneath the parlour, no doubt to enhance its attractions when we came to inspect it.
Later, in the car, we did agree that it surely was some sort of a sign that seemed to reinforce Carol’s family connection. We left the house in a daze. It seemed so right, almost pre-ordained and we were absolutely unanimous about it. We discovered with subsequent research that the Cockerhams, who had lived in the house for two centuries after Henry VIII had dissolved the monasteries, were indeed Carol’s ancestors.
We drove back from Herefordshire, both in a state of quivering excitement about finding the house of our dreams but in the glare of harsh London sunshine, we were bombarded with doubts. It was too big, it was too far away, it was too much of a wreck, it was too much money and it had been on the market for two years. But we had to have it. It was a huge risk but like the white-water rafting, we had to have a go.
We told our surveyor and showed him the details.
‘Oh God!’ he said, but agreed to have a look at it, shaking his head as we left.
We talked to John Rawstron, a school friend of Keith Washington’s, who happened to be a conveyancing lawyer.
‘Oh God!’ he said, but agreed it handle it, ‘if it comes to anything.’
He shook his head sadly as we left.
As it turned out the survey was unexpectedly positive. For its age, apparently, the Grange was in surprisingly good shape. It had been re-roofed in the 1970s. Structurally, it was more or less sound, thanks to the timely Victorian cast-iron bracing. Of course, a lot of windows needed replacing, walls needed plastering and there was a good deal of plumbing work to be done.
Outside, the five acres of derelict ground that surrounded the house was in turn bordered on two sides by a messy farm that had become separated from the house a long time before. Scattered around, random remnants of the great abbey complex still remained. A fragment of the ruined nave of the church stood in the farmer’s rick yard, while the mill house, which had been part of the monastic set-up, also belonged to the farm.
All these problems we could live with, happily if it meant we could live in this wonderful old place, so warmly inviting to us, and cosily wrapped in its own history. We agreed that when a place that said so much to us had made itself known in such a serendipitous way, we had to jump in. We made an offer, we negotiated, a deal was done and an entirely new stage of our lives began.
It was not until all our possessions had been transported halfway cross the country from South West London to North West Herefordshire and the house in Deanhill Road had been sold that we felt we had really moved into Wigmore Abbey and there was no going back.
When we arrived on 23 July 1998, a few months before Carol’s Big ‘L’ birthday, we both knew we’d entered an entirely new phase of our lives, which we welcomed and were committed to, although, I found it very disorienting. Unlike Carol, I’d never lived in the real country before and I wasn’t prepared, even for the more obvious differences. It took me a long time to get accustomed to the complete absence of street lighting, even in some of the villages.
And while I was used to a certain amount of birdsong in the leafy purlieus of East Sheen, the racket a feathered chorus can kick up of a summer’s dawn among the spinneys and hedges of this very rural corner of England came as a shock. I had to get used to the absence of traffic in the lane that passed our house. What little there was, was largely of an agricultural nature and I learned the hard way, with a few near misses, that single-track lanes with ditches, thick hedges or solid banks don’t allow for errors of judgement.
From the moment we arrived there, I loved where I lived – the horizons of rolling, wooded hills, the daytime peace broken by the keening of buzzards wheeling in an empty sky, the air heavy with the aroma of grass, cattle and fox.
But it took me a long time to feel that I wasn’t an impostor, or an incomer with no right to be there. I felt I was polluting this beautiful peaceful innocent country with my nasty urban, showbiz habits. I knew that this minor paranoia wasn’t helped by my continuing drinking and I made a determined effort to curtail it. But it was a process of adjustment that had to be gone through and took some time. It was a good two or three years before I felt I had really bedded in and become a genuine part of my surroundings.
One of my earliest and most urgent tasks at Wigmore was rodent disposal. We found some enormous rats, mostly dead for some time, presumably poisoned, although the one we found behind an ancient fridge among a pile of prawn shells had probably just failed to read the ‘best before’ date on the packet.
We found a whole family of the little fellows, who had clearly seen better days, eking out a living from inside the insulating jacket of the clapped-out boiler we’d inherited. Carol was horrified and disgusted; I felt a little sad. A Sunday tabloid had once described me, in a banner headline, as a THREE-TIMING ROMEO LOVE RAT so I think I had a little empathy for them.
At the back of the Aga we found what we thought at first was a batch of ancient musty black cannon balls, although, on closer inspection, they were forgotten baked potatoes that must have carried on baking for years.
Around the rest of the house, small constructional horrors that had been rendered invisible by the rose-tinted spectacles we’d been wearing when first falling in love with the house started to appear – little holes in the ceiling patched up with Sellotape, hunks of loose, crumbling render, gaping holes in the ancient oak and elm floor boards and areas of devastation on beams brought about by hyperactive wood-worm.
Surprisingly, the plumbing, although medieval in appearance, generally worked and there were no obvious leaks in the roof. But we also began to see that the house, started in 1174, had been tinkered with on and off for eight hundred years – with builders telling the owners, ‘If you was just to knock a bit off ’ere, no one’d know, and we could turn that door into a window,
or fit another little privy between this wall and that stanchion,’ sort of thing – eight centuries of bodging.
Of course, each new discovery represented another substantial future bill, but, perversely, we loved it. We had no children and, without the workings of a miracle, weren’t going to have any, so we’d sort of adopted the abbey – it was now our baby and whatever it took, we’d make sure it was going to be all right.
We were glad that we hadn’t been granted the benefit of hindsight, for if we had, we might simply have not been there. We had taken the place on with all its flaws and the open-ended responsibility that entailed. We had no knowledge whatsoever of renovating ancient properties – and they didn’t come much more ancient than this; we hadn’t even vaguely costed the job, or indeed, had any real idea of how many jobs were involved. It was a massive undertaking, totally impractical, and we were in our fifties. Not surprisingly, a lot of our friends in London and the new friends we were making in the country thought we were barking.
But moving to Wigmore Abbey wasn’t about expediency or practicality, it was about the feeling we had for the building and our response to the bizarre chain of events that had led us to it.
Carol, who had grown up in deepest Dorset, had warned me that people in the country could be different, as if they were some kind of aliens. I soon understood what she meant. In fact it’s not the people who were different, but the priorities, ground rules and terms of engagement, which are more old fashioned – generally in a good way, we felt. There are a number of underlying accepted tenets in country life, which, if one wished to blend in, it was sensible to acknowledge.
On the whole, people were more polite, certainly compared to the free-for-all back-biting bitch fest which the London thespian world could sometimes be. I felt as if I were taking a step back in time when going about the everyday business of catching trains, having a pint in a pub, shopping and buying food. Life here was lived at a much slower pace. Even in our nearest town of Ludlow, which offered a choice of four (very good) butchers, there always seemed to be time for a chat and catch up between shopkeeper and customer. Most people seemed interested in what we trying to do at the Abbey, delighted that some one had taken on responsibility for preserving what was left of an important piece of history. On the opposite side of the broad glacial valley from the Abbey stood the ruins of Mortimer Castle on a rocky tump, from where in the middle ages, Roger de Mortimer and his clan had wielded influence on the Marches, deep into Wales and ultimately, on the English throne. I soon found myself becoming an amateur historian and there was no shortage of people to teach and encourage me.