Didn’t know we wanted a view
Chapter 9
Bob is driving us up a steep hill just outside Worcester. ‘It’s on the left” I shout, and we swerve off the main drag onto a narrow road which dips down through trees and back-jolting speed bumps. Past little houses perched at the top of flights of steps like birds on a telegraph wire. “Left again!” and we swoop round a corner past more houses but these have rather splendid balconies. We head towards a fifty foot high wall of dark conifers and with a sudden bend to the right, come out into sunshine and we’ve arrived. Bob stops the car. Turns off the engine. We get out into complete silence.
On our right, a little terrace of houses. On our left, a brief strip of lawn and then….. nothing. Air, space, eventually the opposite side of the valley. Hills, hedges with full grown trees in them, becoming hazy blue as they stretch as far as the eye can see. The estate agent’s description has not mentioned the view.
We walk, hardly breathing, to the front porch of the first house and take the key out from under the mat. The agent had told us to let ourselves in if we got there first. The house is full of light pouring in through big windows. I run from room to room yelling “Let’s buy it”. B is steadier, it’s our first day of looking at houses in this area which is unfamiliar to us. It’s the first on our list of several houses that we plan to look at today.
When the estate agent arrives he apologises for the size of the garden. “Some people don’t want a big garden.” I am not one of those people. And I’m not sure where the garden is. He takes me outside at the front to show me. We cross the little road and stand on the narrow strip of lawn. It turns out not to be the edge of a cliff. Below our feet, the land drops down through a sea of brambles to a terraced lawn. Then down again to a path and, “Oh, a little pond and it’s got newts!”. And down again, a plum tree and a gnarled tree covered in rust on another slope. Below that, a grass terrace and, “Yup’, another slope which ends in some straggly alders.
It's Saturday and we need to move on and visit the other houses on our list. The property in the middle of a moor is intriguing because the water pipe runs across a neighbour’s land. During a dispute he’d cut the water off. “But he’ll turn it on again for you”, the owner assures us, “He’s a funny bugger but alright if you keep on his good side”. Then there’s the ancient stone cottage with a kitchen bare but for a cracked stone sink. It's extremely expensive. The siblings who had inherited it can’t agree on the asking price which varies according to which sibling we speak to. There’s an elegant barn conversion with huge skylights but no windows in the walls due to planning regulations.
After a quick pub lunch we see an old timbered house which has quite a large hole in the roof. “In need of redecorating” suggested the estate agents’ description. But almost the entire back garden has been sold to a neighbour who is digging industriously a few yards away from where we’re standing. A rambling house overlooking the Teme is tempting except for the main road in front of it where the traffic busily and noisily hurtles past. The estate agents details often leave out little things like that.
Sitting in the car with rain now rattling on the roof, we each make our own list in descending order of preference for what could be our future home. It appears that we have completely different sets of priorities, except for one. At the top of both our lists is the same choice. That first house, on the side of the hill. We put in an offer at the end of the afternoon. It is accepted. A view isn’t something that we’d been looking for.
We’ve spared ourselves the stress of trying to move into our new home before Christmas. This is fortunate as between the different surveys and solicitors queries, “Shared land? Who owns the sewage plant? All of you?” It is late January before we get the keys to the house. In late February we still haven’t moved in. The carpenter really is coming soon to create a working studio for me and we’re popping up to our new home to receive a furniture delivery. In a storm.
“Oh, it’s still snowing. Thanks for picking me up” I greet Bob with a hello hug having given everybody at the party a goodbye hug. The party is to celebrate the new addition of India to the international training programme for women, which I draw the cartoons for. Each country has its own illustrated manual with appropriate features to suit its population. “The Delhi contingent are going wild, they’ve never seen snow before. And they’re all wearing their best saris and they are going for a midnight snowball fight after the party finishes.” I say, a bit enviously.
“Have you remembered your boots?” asks Bob. “Yes but it’s not worth putting them on just to walk to the car” I say picking my way through the crunching snow. My feet in sequinned ballet flats are quickly soaked as the snow dissolves into icy water on them. He starts the engine and begins to edge out of the carpark, “The weather’s going to be even worse as we go further north to Worcester.” he says. I stare out at the billowing flakes “I love snow”. “You wouldn’t if you were trying to drive in it”, says Bob leaning forward in a futile attempt to see better through the whirling flakes.
“My dad once did a handbrake turn on the ice in front of our school and my sister and I got out, then he shot off to work.” I beam. Bob fills in the next bit “And the snow plough would come to dig your lane out and it would get stuck. Then they’d send another snow plough to rescues that one and leave you snowed in.” “With at least three days off school” I say, sighing with pleasure. I see it as my job to remind him that I’m originally a rufty-tufty person from the Dark Peaks of the Pennines whilst he was born in a village close to Derby. In fact he knows much of the peak district through walking trips in his youth. My experience of the dales and valleys is from staring gloomily at it from the back seat of the car on our family weekend cruises. Under instruction to be quiet and enjoy the scenery.
Bob and I sink into silence as the car forges on, occasionally passing abandoned vehicles at the roadside. We’re driving further and further away from the people that we know and love. Hours later the car finally slithers up the hill to the turn off. Bob manages to squeeze past a few vehicles stuck in a drift at the entrance. It’s more like skiing, twisting round a left curve and then to the right. It’s well after midnight and the snow has stopped falling when our headlights beam across the glittering white blanket, towards our new home. In the deep drift beside the house, is a neatly dug out car sized space.
“It must have been the next door neighbours” says Bob, puzzled, “I didn’t think they knew we were coming up tonight.” I tell him that I’d sent them a postcard, just in case they thought we were burglars breaking into the empty house. “But I didn’t know that it would be snowing like this”. I add. For what is left of the night we sleep on a blown up airbed on the floor of our empty unheated, un-curtained bedroom. I keep waking and looking out of the windows.
No street lights or house lights. Just the darkness and thousands of stars in the cold black sky.
We’ve come up for the weekend to receive a load of furniture and, “Things that might come in useful” that Bob has kept in storage since his mum died and he cleared out his childhood home in Mickleover. A lot of her stuff had gone to charity shops but he’s kept a huge dresser that his grandfather had made, and some funny old cupboards that had once held tools in his mum and dad’s garage.
With the excitement and the cold night spent on the floor neither of us have slept much. It’s 9a.m. and we’ve just had cornflakes and long-life milk for breakfast when the phone rings! Our very first caller, and it’s a man from the Derby storage depot. Having made it through the infamous Derbyshire snow they hadn’t been able to negotiate the steep camber of our little road off the side of the hill. Instead, the big van has parked by the pub at the bottom of the hill and a smaller van, rather like a tug boat, is decanting the contents bit by bit and ferrying them up the hill and down our lane to the house.
As the men labour in and out in wellingtons and flat caps they frequently say “Eeeh! You’ve got a lovely view here.” Part of me is tempted to answer “Oh! Have we? I hadn’t noticed.” But actually, like the removal men, I keep on being struck by the view. I keep having to open the front door to look out and exclaim foolishly, “Oh look! It’s still there!” as I gaze out.
After the third incomplete set of cutlery is unpacked I begin to wonder about Bob’s selection choices. “This sixties era wooden bowl made out of contrasting squares stuck together, really?” I ask. He says that it’s very well made. The twenty undistinguished and unmatched mugs? He says “We might have a party”. I say that people at our parties don’t usually want to drink tea. Then I look at his sad face and stuff them into the huge dresser.
The removal men eventually leave and so do we. It will be a few more weeks before the carpenter has converted a bedroom into my new studio and we can finally move in. Reluctantly we return to Oxford.
On a mild April Fools day, bringing our cats and rabbits but no mugs or cutlery, we come to really live here, for at least a year. It’s sunny and mild and the woods around us are greening up with new baby leaves. Everything is looking good.
Our new home sits on a piece of land which we now communally share with thirty other residents. As home dwellers here, we also share an ancient woodland, some of which wraps our front garden around one side and the bottom. Then there is a communal orchard, a meadow of Special Scientific Interest and a length of the river which we could fish if we wanted, or had time.
Originally the land, comprising of around twenty eight acres, had been the site of a TB sanatorium. In front of it’s old location, two splendid lawns still remain. I picture the sick being wheeled about in bathchairs. Grassy slopes with short flights of steps inserted into them dropped gracefully onto the lawns. Actually I’m not sure how anybody could get a bathchair down there so maybe it was a victorious day when a patient was well enough to reach the lawns. Or maybe the visiting families were able to enjoy them.
Perched on the side of the hill above us there had been simple wooden chalets with windows but no glazing. Away from the damp atmosphere of Worcester it was hoped that lashings of fresh air would promote the patients recovery if pneumonia didn’t get them first. The old hospital had been closed over fifty years earlier and its legacy was the little strips of houses built on all levels, following the original footprints of the chalets. The posher houses with balconies replaced the hospital.
Our terrace of three houses is built on the site of the old stables. In front of our home, we can step out of the lounge french windows onto a grass strip full of mole hills. In front of that is a pavement running the length of the terrace. In front of that is the narrow road which serves our houses and a bungalow at the end. That final dwelling was apparently built on the site of the hospital mortuary and sports magnificent views at the front and right round the side too. The views may or may not have been wasted on the dead, depending on your beliefs.
Crossing over the little road you’ll be on the strip of lawn which runs without visible boundaries along the length of the terrace of houses. If you pause here, being careful not to stand on one of the many red ants nests, all you can see in front of you is the view of the valley and a glimpse of bramble tendrils waving at you from the front garden below. It’s already May and so far I’ve done nothing to the garden except peer over the little cliff, down into the chaos.
I remember what our new neighbour said when we first came to view the house. Whilst I was running around the interior shouting “Let’s buy it!” B was poking at the mortar between the external bricks and tapping window sills for something or other. Drawn irresistibly to the view I went outside again and stood on the little road staring at it. The man from next door came out of his house and stood beside me also looking out over the valley. “Aye”, he said in his Brummie accent, “Whatever kind of day I’ve had, when I get home and look at this view, none of it seems to matter.”