by F. G. Cottam
The Going and The Rise
By
F.G. Cottam
One
It’s said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I know this to be true because I’ve travelled it. It’s downhill, one-way and you gather momentum so fast on it that stopping becomes all but impossible.
I must have been aware of the site from the very first occasion on which I saw it. But I didn’t become consciously aware of it until I’d passed it maybe a dozen times. Then I began to speculate on what could be done with it. Architects don’t generally fret about the potential of a location, that’s already been long decided by the time we become involved in the project. But this was different because this was personal. I’d made enough money by that point in my career to be thinking about a holiday home for my family and after a fortnight on the island had pretty much fallen for all of its abundant charms.
I was on Wight supervising some complex restoration work on a Grade 1 listed Georgian building near Brighstone Forest. It was a house, more accurately a mansion, considered of great cultural significance because it had been the home of a very distinguished early 20th century painter. Its interior was exactly as he had left it, an artistic time-capsule, complete and intact. The exterior, after two centuries of exposure to coastal weather, was anything but. It was in urgent need of sensitive restoration and that was what my practice had made something of a specialty of, back in the worst of the recession, when nobody had the confidence to commission and new building projects were literally thin on the ground.
It wasn’t particularly creative work. But sourcing original materials and re-fashioning something on a grand scale using traditional methods was absorbing and challenging. I enjoyed the responsibility and the precision of the task. The crafts-people working to my plans were the best at their old fashioned trades. They were not just highly skilled but conscientious too, proud of what they were achieving. And when you work for paymasters such as English Heritage, you know exactly where you stand. They’re solid clients, courteous and reliable. Plus importantly, in real-world language, they’re not going out of business any time soon and so their cheques don’t bounce.
There was also something anomalous about Ashdown Hall, a mystery concerning its interior dimensions. I was intrigued enough about this puzzle to breach my conditions of employment to try to solve it. But that comes later, not at the start of this story.
That began in April. The mornings were getting lighter, the spring welcome after a particularly harsh British winter of bitter northerly winds and seemingly incessant rainy gloom. I was staying for the six-week duration of the Brighstone project at a holiday let in Ventnor. I spotted the site I thought would be the ideal location for the bolt-hole of my family’s dreams on my regular morning run, seeing it in dewy dawn light on a lush spot, a hundred metres distant from where the rock and shingle gave way to the hard, flat ground firm under my feet.
As I said, I must have passed this location a dozen times before becoming consciously aware of it and then I passed it several more before giving way to my curiosity, interrupting the rhythm of my run and climbing the gentle slope of the terrain to examine the area more closely.
Generally, in that region of secluded coastline to the west of Ventnor the land inclined, rising from the sea richly grassed and with a sprinkling of mature, mostly deciduous trees. But the spot that had intrigued me formed a sort of elevated platform, level and flat, a natural plateau flanked by two oak trees and to its rear, screened from whatever lay further inland by a line of poplars so dense they looked like a giant hedge. They’d block light from the north, should any dwelling be constructed on the level plot between this wooded barrier and the descent down to the sea.
But when I’d reached the point between the oaks and I turned, the view to the south and west out over the water was vast. It stretched emptily to a distant horizon, the sunsets the spot would witness suddenly flushing my imagination in glorious swatches of orange and pink.
Before me, the sea glimmered in subdued, April sunshine. There was just the hint of a breeze in the whispering branches of the oaks to either side of me. It moaned faintly like a shared secret through the dense foliage of the poplars to my rear. National Trust land, I thought to myself with a rueful smile. That or green belt, jealously guarded by Wight Council. I was standing on the perfect spot for a holiday home I would never be granted permission to build. I did some stretches, reluctant to depart that endless southerly vista, breathing the air, oxygen-rich, scented by sea-salt, filling my lungs with it. Eventually, I looked at my watch and resumed my run because dreams don’t provide much sustenance and I’d a living to earn and therefore a schedule to keep to.
That evening, having called my wife and then spoken to my daughter, I went for a beer at the Spyglass Inn at the western end of Ventnor’s pretty seafront. I bought a bottle of the Ventnor Brewery’s Admiral Ale and found a vacant table in a corner of the bar.
I hadn’t mentioned the bolt-hole daydream of the morning to Katie and I’d spent the time speaking to Molly, our daughter, reassuring her that I’d see her at the coming weekend. I’d committed to going home every Friday evening, only leaving for the island again on Sunday night. But my working away from London was a bit of a novelty, a disruption to my daughter’s usual domestic routine. And weekends just weren’t enough dad-time for an affectionate, often sadly ailing nine-year-old.
‘When are you coming home, Dad?’
‘On Friday, Sweetpea.’
‘You’ve got to stop calling me that.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s embarrassing.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Anyway Friday’s not soon enough.’
‘It’s the day after tomorrow.’
‘That’s what I mean. And then you’ll be gone again on Sunday night. It’s horrible.’
‘How’s school?’
‘Horrible.’
‘Is everything horrible?’
‘It seems like it is just now.’
‘It’s only for a few more weeks.’
‘That’s exactly what I mean.’
I sipped ale and opened up my laptop on the pub table in front of me. I hadn’t mentioned the episode of the morning to Katie only because it would have seemed to her like pie in the sky. My wife didn’t believe that daydreams had any place in a universe built on solid practicalities. I searched for the location I was looking for on the Land Registry website. It was a small acreage; not even that, less than an acre in size, but substantial enough ground on which to build a spacious and beautiful holiday home facing the sea and therefore on a clear day, with a beautiful, boundless view.
And then to my slight surprise, I found it. There was a clearly delineated, rectangular plot, rendered accessible because it was bordered on all sides by common land. Even better, the site was in private hands. The freehold was owned by an Antwerp-based Belgian company registered as Martens and Degrue. Their British interests were represented by a Portsmouth based company listed as Bullen and Clore.
The intricacies of ownership and licensing didn’t really overtly interest me. It was a bit curious that a firm based in Antwerp would own a patch of Wight’s rural coastline, but the really significant fact, to me at the time, was that the land was apparently potentially for sale and so at least in theory could be legally bought.
I pondered on it over a second bottle of ale. It was past nine in the evening, too late to enquire of anyone at Bullen and Clore. I googled them and discovered they were mainly concerned with oceanic recovery and salvage. They had a yard on Portsmouth Harbour. Maybe they were a subsidiary of the Belgian firm. I thought it possible that Martens and Degrue had bought the plot speculatively, hoping at some point in th
e future to build there, though the site seemed a bit remote for a boutique hotel or a pub and too small even for a modest visitor attraction. There had been talk for years of Wight experiencing a tourist boom and to some extent those predictions were finally coming true; but Ventnor was self-contained and seemed a town unlikely to expand beyond its current boundaries.
I called Katie, knowing that Molly by now would be safely asleep and not missing her dad anymore.
‘Twice in one evening,’ she said. ‘Either you’re feeling horny, or you’re feeling guilty. Anything my absentee husband would like to confess to?’
‘I’m guilty of two bottles of locally brewed ale. I might have a third.’
‘You devil, you,’ she said, ‘life on the edge.’
‘I pass this spot on my morning run which would be the perfect location for a holiday home,’ I said.
‘Your judgment can be a bit wobbly, darling.’
‘I’m going to take my phone tomorrow morning and email you some pictures.’
She was silent, thinking. Thinking that designing it would cost nothing, calculating the friends and family discounts on labour and materials I could count on from trade contacts owing me favours. ‘It would be great for Molly,’ she said, ‘getting her out of London, I mean. All those balmy island weekends we could enjoy together.’
‘She could sometimes bring a friend.’
Molly didn’t have many of those.
‘She could,’ Katie said.
My wife knew Wight well, she’d spent most of her summer holidays there as a child. She’d reminisced about those, fondly, when I’d first got the island commission. And our daughter suffered from arthritis; Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA), to give it its proper name, a chronic childhood disease. She thrived in the warm sun and the sea air would do her the world of good. Swimming off safe beaches would be great exercise for muscles weakened by her condition. This was going through Katie’s mind, I knew, in the silence on her end of the phone.
Then she asked, ‘How much is the land?’
‘Haven’t got that far yet. Wasn’t any point if you were going to shoot down the idea in flames.’
‘The very thought.’
‘Doesn’t do to assume.’
‘Sometimes, Michael Aldridge, you sound almost frightened of me.’
‘Sometimes, Katie Aldridge,’ I said, ‘I am.’ There was no ‘almost’ about it.
‘When will you find out?’
‘I’ll do it tomorrow. I’m ahead of schedule on the Brighstone project. The provenance is a bit strange. I want to deal with the land agents directly rather than via phone or email. I’ll call them first thing and press for a face-to-face appointment tomorrow. If we can agree a price and terms and there’s no problem with planning permission I’ll make an offer there and then.’
She was silent again.
‘What?’
‘It’s one of the things I love about you,’ she said. ‘When you say you’re going to do something you just get on with it. Decisiveness is an attractive quality.’
One I only ever manifested given my wife’s permission to do so. But I kept that thought to myself.
‘Give Molly a kiss from me in the morning. Tell her that her dad loves her.’
‘I do that every day you’re not here to do it yourself.’
After a couple of false starts the following morning, I got through to Peter Clore of Bullen and Clore who told me he was a senior partner in the firm. If he was surprised at my interest in the Wight plot, he didn’t give any hint of it in his tone. I asked him about residential planning permission.
‘It depends on what you want to build,’ he said. ‘You’d probably get away with a Huf Haus. You’d probably get away with Gothic Revival, that’s common on the island, though of course most examples date from the mid-Victorian period. In keeping, is the phrase used by the council’s planning department. A brutalist monstrosity would probably alienate the good people of Ventnor. What do you have in mind?’
‘Two-storey timber frame, quite modern in character, generously proportioned windows because of the views.’
‘Please tell me you aren’t intending to paint it bright purple, or a sudden shade of lilac.’
‘It’ll be predominantly white, maybe off-white, in weather-proof paint.’
‘You can’t build a Cape Cod saltbox on Wight’s southern shoreline. It would disorientate the captains of passing yachts.’
‘There’ll be nothing Cape Cod about it. It will be vernacular, in keeping, in the council’s phrase.’
‘You sound like an architect,’
‘Guilty as charged.’
‘But it doesn’t sound like the sort of build that provokes controversy.’
‘I want a holiday home,’ I said, ‘not an argument. What’s the asking price of the land?’
‘It’s not the asking price, Mr. Aldridge. It’s the actual price, it’s non-negotiable. And it’s a hundred thousand pounds.’
‘I’d like to come and talk to you, in person, today if possible.’
‘You’re on the island now?’
‘I am.’
‘I’ve a diary window at 3.30 this afternoon,’ Clore said.
By 4.30 the deal was done. Peter Clore had a banker’s draft for a hundred grand safely locked in his ornate early 20th century office safe and I had the title deeds to the land in my bag. It was raining when I left the building we’d negotiated in and I drove my hire car back to the ferry terminal pondering on the meeting I’d just had, the sky a glowering grey above, the swollen raindrops percussive on the windscreen and the wipers a persistent squeal clearing my cobbled view of the salvage yard through the glass as I set off.
I’d paid for the freehold and I had a copy also of the outline planning permission, so that much was clear and straightforward. In Peter Clore I’d met a man I’d been quite unable to place age-wise. He could have been in his 60s. He could equally have been merely unfortunate genetically and only in his 30s. Fat people don’t get wrinkles and Clore was morbidly obese. I have too an innate distrust of men who wear a lot of jewellery. It’s a prejudice, no justification for it, but the ruby and emerald rings embellishing his fingers and the glittery diamond cufflinks and the heavy Rolex on its gold bracelet on his left wrist seemed to me more than a bit vulgar.
I’d thought a consulting detective would have a field-day with Peter Clore, with his waxy comb-over and port-marbled complexion and his nervy discretion on the subject of what I’d concluded were his bosses at Martens and Degrue in Antwerp.
I was buoyant, nonetheless. A hundred grand was probably over the odds for the size of the plot I’d paid for. My ballpark guess before speaking to Clore had been about thirty thousand shy of that. But I hadn’t really expected the land to be available to buy. I hadn’t thought it a practical proposition to build anything legally on the site. And I knew better than my wife just how much my own expertise and contacts could save on the build itself.
Mostly, though, I was utterly jubilant for my daughter. London life is attritional and truth be told, with her condition always to contend with, she wasn’t always up to it. It was why she didn’t have many friends. Nine-year-olds demand consistency in their friendships and Molly was far too often an absentee from the classroom and the playground to be able to guarantee her schoolmates that.
I left Bullen and Clore’s sullen, harbour-side graveyard of resurrected hulks with my spirits soaring at what the refuge I’d build at the edge of the sea on Wight would do for Molly’s health and future happiness.
None of this would have happened had Katie not given the proposal the thumbs up after seeing the location shots I’d sent her first-thing. For the second morning in succession, I’d interrupted my run. The result was worth it, though, because she okayed the deal as soon as she saw the shots.
‘It’s gorgeous!’ she texted.
It was. And I wasn’t about to spoil or despoil it with the sort of statement build Peter Clore had earlier amused himself pretend
ing on the phone to fear I might inflict. Statistically, most British architects with the means to determine that they can, live in late-Victorian houses. It’s the overwhelming choice. Even the most radically experimental don’t actually want to be the guinea pigs themselves; that’s the role adventurous clients are there to play.
I didn’t want to construct a brave new domestic world on the island. I wanted somewhere the three of us could comfortably call a home from home. My ambition was high but it was measured in the happiness I thought the place would bring, not in the scale or design of the structure. If I’m going to be completely honest – and there’s no point now being otherwise – I was looking for nothing other than a cosy, secluded, wood-burner-warmed sanctuary from the hectic harshness of metropolitan life.
I’ve left idyllic off that list. I realised it would be idyllic too later on that long day, sketching the outline plans for the structure at a table at the Spyglass in the evening. I did so freehand, using only a pad, a pencil, a rubber and a Perspex ruler. I’d software programmes uploaded onto my laptop to facilitate design blueprints, but this was a labour of love deserving of a purist approach. My skills were professional, but for the first time in my life, I was using them on a project that was wholly personal.
The pub wasn’t the ideal location in which to do this. The interior of the Spyglass was deliberately ill-lit by feeble lamps that gave an atmospheric allure to the brass-tipped ship’s wheels and ship’s clocks and the luridly painted oils showing sailing vessels at the mercy of storms clustered across its walls. Working with paper and pencil, I could have done with better illumination. But I managed.
My two-storey construction didn’t reach to the height of the poplars to its rear. I was sketching in their tips, above and beyond my roof, when I realised I was being watched. I was made aware of the scrutiny by that sixth-sense thing all of us have to varying degrees and turned my head to meet my observer’s eye. He was an elderly man with a face reddened and roughened I thought probably by exposure to the sun and sea wind aboard a fishing boat. He didn’t look at all the sort for regular applications of moisturiser or barrier cream. There was a briar pipe cradled in his right fist. He’d obviously been on his way outside to smoke it, shuffling behind me on his route to the pub door when he’d spotted what I was doing.