by Tom Cox
People think they can get the hots for a house solely from seeing its photographs, but that’s not true: it’s ultim-ately all about a house’s pheromones. You need to have a chat with a house in 3D and see if there’s any chemistry. When I met the Lescaze house in person, I liked it, but not nearly as much as I’d imagined. As she showed me out, the Property Manager announced that by sheer chance a detached cottage had also become available that very day, on the opposite side of the Hall, and we wandered over, through the courtyard and a little way down the hill. Because we entered the garden through the rear gate, I didn’t initially realise I was looking at that same Gothic building I’d spotted a few years previously. It oozed charisma instantly from every brick. It was, like Dartington itself, a mix of many apparently disparate elements that somehow coalesced into a mellow coherence: classic inky Devon granite, 1920s Crittall windows, a touch of arts and crafts, a cottagey extension, that ecclesiastical front. It appeared very substantial from the back but much of the bulk came from the depth of the walls. ‘It’s like a Tardis!’ is the King Cliché Phrase of house viewings, an observation made so often, and often so inaccurately, that all meaning has been beaten out of it. This was a rare instance of the opposite, a house that was much smaller than it looked from the outside: the Anti-Tardis. Its core felt deeply old, but not spooky, with the sole possible exception of the understairs cupboard, which my cats would give a wide berth or gaze into in wide-eyed terror whenever I opened it to fetch a screwdriver or the vacuum cleaner. The house was only dark in summer, which ultimately wouldn’t matter because in summer, at Dartington, you always wanted to be outside. Close to the centre of the building was a second doorstep, an arch and a huge old painted hinge: evidence of a former main door, a suggestion of a solid, squat edifice dating from long, long before the Elmhirsts arrived here, when the estate belonged to the Champernowne family. In winter, the almost-hilltop location and lack of double-glazing resulted in draughts that slithered under the hedges, through the gaps in the doors and windows and up the legs of your pyjama bottoms. On the hottest days of July, every room remained a benevolent, slatey sort of cool. In four months’ time, returning shivering from the estate’s unheated outdoor swimming pool, I would dash up through that slatey cool, and warm myself in a hot bath, still feeling the buzz of the cold and the exercise, watching the purple gradually drain from my fingertips: a new kind of bath experience, better than any previous bath experience I had known.
What I remember most about my first weeks at the Magic House is the growth, all around me, a crescendo of it, building and building until it finally broke, in early July, and the universe momentarily attained total perfection. It was evident even in the alleyway near the station with the graffiti and the hooped barbed wire, where the walk to Narnia began; in a small patch of waste ground under a wall, red valerian, ox-eye daisies and St John’s wort formed a gang to suffocate broken bottles and crisp packets. That path to my new back gate, my favourite approach to any house I had ever known, was a waking dream of speedwell, forget-me-not, fleabane, wild strawberry, crocus, snowdrop, celandine, primrose, bluebell and teasel, if never quite all at the same time. Part of this could be attributed to early 2014’s particular combination of weeks of flooding followed by weeks of fierce sunlight, but partly it was just south Devon. When the Elmhirsts began to restore the gardens of the estate in the 1920s, they discovered it was possible to grow numerous sub-tropical plants there that they wouldn’t have been able to grow in the east or north. Horticulturally, and in several other ways, if felt to me like a different country, after almost four decades spent entirely on the other side of England.
In April and May, below Nellies Wood – a wood without an apostrophe, so presumably an area where you might once have found several Nellies, rather than one Nellie who lorded it about the place – not far from the entrance to The Compound, the bank of bluebells always raged, but I have never seen it rage quite like it did during that period in 2014. The colours were like colours only normally seen on old postcards, or under the influence of drugs, or in a mid-twentieth-century Powell and Pressburger film with cinematography by Jack Cardiff, or in your vision of spring as you always assume it looks in your grandparents’ saturated memories. On the lane here someone installed a BEWARE FROGS sign. I never saw any frogs near it but as I passed I would often spin around, a little wired, vigilant for frogs in every way. I soon learned on my walks back from the station that the best way to the house was not to continue up the hill, but take a half-right shortly after this, along the footpath that runs parallel to the river and into a meadow. From April until summer’s end you found small rings of lolling teenagers here letting their river-damp hair dry in the sun, listening to the techno hippie music all Totnes natives under sixty bafflingly seem to love. Young cows with big eyelashes rubbed their sharp cheekbones ecstatically on the low-hanging branches of the oaks closest to the bank. Near the mainline station, the two trainlines of the area intersect: the more functional one running between London and Cornwall and the one used by the steam train that chugs down from Buckfastleigh. After that, the pair part ways and the steam train rejoins the line of the river. My dad was so excited when he first walked along here with me and saw the train make its gentle way through the valley that he ran alongside it for a little spell, cheering. If you were to turn the soundtrack of the Magic House’s garden into an LP, ‘Steam Train Whistle’ would be one of the essential tracks, along with, ‘Woman In Tunic Learns Flute Under Distant Mulberry Tree’, ‘Woodpecker’, ‘Bat Wingbeat’, ‘Newly Besotted Lesbian Couple Discuss Biodynamic Farming While Resting On A Navajo Blanket’, ‘Upmarket Dog Gets Lightly Scolded’, ‘Sudden Jackdaw’, ‘Industrious Bee’ and ‘Randy Owl’. From dusk, the tawny owls were a constant in the oaks near the river. My friend Nathan helped restore the crumbling eighteenth-century wall of the estate’s medieval deer park and was adamant that, during winter, not long before the end of his day’s work, he would hear the owls calling back to the whistle of the train, perhaps mistaking it for a giant owl, the Master of All Owls, an all-seeing Owl Deity.
After reaching the end of the meadow on my walk from the station, I passed through a gate into a wooded, often boggy area, where huge gale-blown tree trunks snoozed in the shallows, some horizontal and dead, some looming at impossible angles over the water, like tall hung-over executives who’d fallen asleep leaning on the desks in their office. A red setter once chased a fox past me close to this spot, and I worried for the fox until it found its extra couple of gears, leaving the dog in a pleasing, literal cloud of dust. Of its ilk, if it has an ilk, which I’m not convinced it has, the estate is virtually unrivalled for public access, a wish of the Elmhirsts that is still upheld to this day. Dog walkers are encouraged into the compound but asked by numerous signs to keep their dogs on leads. While I lived there many ignored the signs, unable to believe their coddled, perfect dogs could possibly do any harm to another living thing, until – as happened with depressing regularity – their dog killed one of Dartington’s sheep. It was always when the dog walkers weren’t around that you’d see the best wildlife Dartington had to offer: the foxes, the badgers, the kingfishers, the cirl buntings, the otters.
You can continue along the Dart here and, as a newcomer, be under the impression you’re walking far, far away from the Hall, not realising that the river forms a semicircle around The Compound, keeping you safe, looking after you, never putting you in danger of reentering society. That was the way I went on my walks in the early mornings, when I was looking for wildlife or mist, often still in my pyjama bottoms. But when I was coming back from town I left the river here. After a few more yards in the boggy area, I took a gate on the left and doubled three quarters back on myself, before taking a right turn up the hill, past a compost cradle set up by the estate to encourage Dartington’s adder population. A grass corridor, where rabbits hopped about sweetly oblivious to the narrowed eyes of stoats and weasels in the undergrowth, led to the long, rising meadow in front o
f my house, a deceptive steep place where I would always feel the ache in my calves and shoulders, especially if I was carrying the paraphernalia of a supermarket trip or train journey, and would yearn for the respite the Magic House offered as it came into view up the hill.
The meadow changed character drastically from season to season. During my second summer at Dartington, satisfying curved paths were mown into the meadow and the remainder was left unkempt, for the benefit of pollinating insects. On my lawn, on the opposite side of the lane, I mowed paths mirroring those in the meadow, leaving much of the rest long, and not just to get out of some of the giant job of mowing the massive, temperamental, wrap-around collection of grass patches that came with the Magic House. Corvids were always circling above the dead trees in the meadow, a 300-yard-long rectangle of ground where small moments of aggro occurred strangely often. In spring, obnoxious bullocks crowded and shadowed walkers who crossed the meadow, as if jeering at them in the way sailors might as they followed antisocially close behind a girl walking along a pier. Dogs quarrelled. Dog owners attempted to adjudicate, often without success. Here is a five-way dog and dog owner conversation I transcribed after witnessing it take place in the meadow in November 2016:
Pooka the Dog: ‘Ruff!’
Rufus the Dog: ‘Ruff Ruff!’
Pooka the Dog’s Owner: ‘POOKA!’
Rufus the Dog’s Owner: ‘Rufus.’
Pooka the Dog: ‘Ruff Rawgh!’
Rufus the Dog: ‘Ruff Ruff!’
Pooka the Dog’s Owner: ‘POOKAAAA! NO! POOKA! Nooooo. POOKAAAAAA.’
Rufus the Dog’s Owner: ‘Rufus.’
Wilson the Dog’s Owner: ‘Don’t even think about it, Wilson.’
You couldn’t see a person approach the front gate of the Magic House from the meadow, due to the screen formed by a huge leylandii, my garden’s least interesting plant. So it was baffling to me how my cat Shipley was usually already three quarters of the way down the long path to greet me by the time I’d got through the gate. Shipley, a wiry, strutting cat whose meow wasn’t so much a meow as a swear-yap, was late into the autumn of his life by the time I moved to Dartington, but still had tip-top hearing and presumably could distinguish the sound of my footsteps from those of the postman, friends, the boiler repairman, and Ian the Dartington plumber. This is more than could be said for my even older cat The Bear, who, by the time I’d been renting the Magic House a year, lived in a soundless world and could frequently be found curled in a happy slumber, 2,000 leagues below consciousness, as I mowed the grass two feet from his tail. The total degeneration of The Bear’s hearing had robbed Shipley of his favourite pastime of creeping up on The Bear then blasting him with thuggish profanities. The pair had, in their respective old and older age, become friends of sorts, and ultimately Shipley’s swearing had always worked a little bit like the swearing of many of the people I’d grown up with in the East Midlands: calling you a colossal twat or prime bellend was his own special way of demonstrating that he liked you. As I climbed the path to the side entrance to the house, he’d hit me with a volley of salty anecdotes and affectionate slights on my character and appearance.
‘Squirrels pay me to take my collar off and twerk when you’re not here!’ Shipley would say to me, as I climbed the path, being careful not to slip on a damp mossy patch.
‘Why don’t you get your hair cut?’ he would ask, as I diverted diagonally across the lawn to the back door, past a tulip tree whose canopy contributed to the house’s darkness – and the garden’s lightness – in summer. ‘You look like one of the three crap Irish wolfhounds I ruined last night.’
‘I’ve been going around some local bungalows, shitting in bins,’ he would add, following me into the house.
‘You bought a job lot of this last month,’ he would say, as I hurriedly spooned out some expensive new cat food I’d bought, in an attempt to keep his life interesting. ‘I pretended to eat it then sold it online to some Russians.’
In the middle of any day outside the boundaries of winter, and quite a few within, you’d be able to lift petals and fronds in the Magic House’s garden and almost certainly find at least one cat snoozing beneath them. It gave the impression that cats were just another product of the rich earth, another element of all that rampant growth. In addition to Shipley and The Bear, there was Shipley’s sun-loving hippie brother Ralph, and, for a brief spell, George, a ginger and white stray I lured in from the nearby foliage for a summer before sending him off on a permanent spa weekend at my mum and dad’s house in Nottinghamshire. Finally there was Roscoe, my CEO, an industrious feline strategist who was attacked by a dog in one of the mostly strictly dog-free zones of the estate, brought back from the vet half-bald and covered in deep scars after two huge life-saving operations at Christmas 2015, then, over spring and summer, flourished against all odds into an even more dynamic version of her former self. The bald patches from her operations stayed bald for four months, then, in April, grew rapidly, as if her fur worked like the copper beech hedge in the garden, and had just been waiting for the right amount of warmth and sunlight to restore itself.
That same February, while Roscoe was recuperating, I was told by the vet who’d saved Roscoe’s life that a scrawny Shipley was experiencing chronic kidney failure and had a maximum of two months left to live. By April, he had gained several pounds and was greeting me at the front gate more saltily than ever. The Magic Spring at the Magic House had done its work, again. I was told, repeatedly, that I’d had ‘bad luck’ with cats since moving to Dartington, but my take on the situation ran to the contrary. If you had several cats, three of whom were past the age of fourteen, it was likely you were going to have problems to deal with, and I felt lucky to be dealing with those problems here, rather than elsewhere. I lived with the increasing belief that this place had extended the lives of two old cats, one extremely old cat, and one cat who’d suffered critical injuries. No, it was not Cat Paradise – as what Roscoe had been through proved – because Cat Paradise did not exist, but it wasn’t far off.
One of the first ever photos of the Dartington Estate that is still in circulation – maybe the first – features a cat. It’s lurking in the background, through the archway near the then derelict-looking courtyard, in what is thought to be 1925. Although the photo is faded, you can see the cat is staring the camera down punkishly, possessive of its rich territory, eager to be in on the action. The spot, close to what is now the entrance to the Barn Cinema, in is more or less what was known to me as the outer northern limit of Roscoe’s roaming territory, about 400 yards from the Magic House’s back gate. But who can say for sure? She might well have regularly wandered much farther. She became the latest in a long line of cats who’d flirted their way into the Dartington culture, regularly sidling up to summer drinkers on the Great Lawn, climbing on the leaning sepulchres of the ruined church and beheading shrews beside the walled flower garden. During Dartington’s annual classical music festival, in late summer, I would walk through the Gardens and frequently witness her jumping coquettishly into the outstretched hand of a flautist, life coach or kinetic healer.
Once you climbed the wildflower path behind my back gate you were effectively in the Gardens: a vast area where people drank, kissed, practiced t’ai chi, sang, played didgeridoo, sensitively dissected their diets and friendships, and my smallest cat took on an ambitious second CEO position. And why should Roscoe have distinguished between our garden and the bigger one beyond? Both had been inextricably linked for a century, probably much longer. It was even there in the Magic House’s real name: Gardens Cottage. Before the Magic House had undergone a spell as cramped student accommodation then been tenanted by a string of Dartington employees and me, a succession of the estate’s Head Gardeners had occupied it, beginning with William Percy, the first ever gardener employed by the Elmhirsts upon their arrival in 1925. So much that was going on horticulturally at the Magic House echoed what was going on just up the hill. The two clipped Irish sentinel yews, b
eneath which The Bear liked to take his long deep naps, were scruffy siblings of the dozen at the back of the Great Hall, overlooking the Tiltyard. Fleabane self-seeded in my wall, just as it did in those beside the paths leading up to the White Hart pub. For decades, tiny flecks of magic had been blowing over the copper beech hedge that separated me from the Gardens, downsizers looking for a more humble home. A crackhead clematis spread its long ungainly legs all over my paving stones. In its spidery shadow, euphorbia danced in ever-decreasing circles. Behind that, bees violated a gangly buddleia, under the shadow of two trachycarpus, a magnolia and a pink hawthorn. In more senses than one, I lived in the place where the renegades and misfits escaped to make a new life.
The Elmhirsts, with the help of several experienced British and American garden designers, including Edith Wharton’s niece Beatrix Farrand, made the Dartington Gardens the magical combination of wild and neat, relaxed and formal, that they are today, but a vast garden of sorts had existed behind the Hall for centuries. The clipped Irish yews, known as the twelve Apostles, had been planted in the early 1800s to provide a screen between the old nursery and an area traditionally used for bear-baiting and dog fights. When the Elmhirsts first found it, the tiltyard at the Gardens’ heart was – besides being vastly overgrown – relatively unchanged since the fourteenth century, when it had been used for jousting matches. In the 1940s, a reclining Henry Moore sculpture was installed above its huge, restored terraces, beneath which I once saw a lone woman in a black leotard dancing very tenderly with a feather on a stick, as if it were her partner, rather than a feather on a stick. This was all in particularly sharp contrast to the area directly behind my previous house, in Norwich, which was used for the disposal and compacting of county council waste and was not associated with any known history of jousting, interpretative dance or modernist sculpture.