A Home for All Seasons E-Book

Gavin Plumley

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 377

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Gavin Plumley considered himself a distinctly urban being...until he met his rural husband, Alastair. Together, they bought Stepps House - a three-storey building in Pembridge, Herefordshire - on love at first sight. But then came the inevitable question from an insurance salesman: 'How old is it?' With ancient beams crossing the ceiling, the date they'd been given of 1800 seemed out by centuries. As Gavin traced Stepps House through various hands and eras, he saw the picture of a past emerge that resonates powerfully with our present. A hybrid work of domestic history and European art, of memoir and landscape, A Home for All Seasons is both grand in its sweep and intimate in its account of life on the edge of England.

Leseprobe

A HOME FOR ALL SEASONS

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Gavin Plumley is a cultural historian. He appears frequently on BBC radio, has written for newspapers and magazines worldwide and gives talks at leading museums and galleries. He grew up in Wales, before moving to London, and studied music at Keble College, Oxford. He lives in Herefordshire.

A HOME FOR ALL SEASONS

GAVIN PLUMLEY

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Gavin Plumley, 2022

The moral right of Gavin Plumley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Extract from Headlong by Michael Frayn reprinted with kind permission of the author and the publishers Faber and Faber Ltd.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 478 9

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 479 6

Printed in Great Britain.

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

to Alastair and Toby, my home

Often I had gone this way before:

But now it seemed I never could be

And never had been anywhere else;

’Twas home; one nationality

We had, I and the birds that sang,

One memory.

Edward Thomas

Contents

Prelude – Linenfold

    I. Never a Native

   II. The Unanswered Question

  III. Between Bark and Heart

 IIII. Picturing Arcadia

    V. Safely Gathered In

   VI. Across Miles

  VII. The Dead of Winter

 VIII. Bare Ruin’d Choirs

VIIII. Unsprung

     X. The Scent of Hawthorn

    XI. Before the Fall

My and Further Reading

Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Prelude – Linenfold

THEY’RE THE FIRST THING I see in the morning. Waking on my side, I immediately notice the dark outlines of the wood. They stand against sagey green walls in the weak light of daybreak, with a deadened gleam, buffed by time. I’m snug under the duvet, though there’s a bite in the bedroom air; last night, we had to close the windows for the first time in months. Beside me, behind me, my husband Alastair sleeps on – he’s never been a morning person. His feet are warm against my legs and his hand is under the edge of my pillow. The mild rush of his breathing is the only sound in the room, though outside there is the gravelly caw of a crow.

Reaching out to the bedside chair for my glasses, I can see more, though I know the view well enough. It’s dominated by a pair of wooden panels. I bought four in total, all taken from the same house – not our house, sadly – and sold to me at an antique shop close to home. I couldn’t resist them. I can never resist the opportunity to touch a part of history and enjoy that moment when something so distant becomes so tangible and mine. I wish I weren’t quite as greedy, as acquisitive and, once acquired, as possessive, but it’s part of trying to make what I read and discover more real.

‘They’re local,’ the shop owner told me. ‘They were taken from a large farmhouse near the border. Charming, aren’t they?’

I nodded in agreement and took out my credit card. I already knew where the four panels would hang: two upstairs, in our bedroom; and two where our friends and family sleep when they come to stay. They fitted perfectly into the spaces on the wall I’d chosen, though they were never intended for such a lowly house as ours, even if they are from the same period: the last decades of the tempestuous 16th century.

The panels are symmetrical, more or less. They were designed to hang side by side, placed within a framework to fill the walls of a room. As well as providing insulation, the purpose was protective and decorative, concealing wattle and daub or rendered stone, though the panels themselves are anything but robust. The style is called linenfold and was pretty ubiquitous in affluent houses at the end of the 1500s – and those that wanted to emulate them – not only in England but also throughout northern parts of mainland Europe. The Flemish were particularly good at it and created meticulous examples. The French and English followed suit, though the craftsman in question in our bedroom proved slightly less assured than some of his continental counterparts or the examples you find in National Trust houses, castles and the V&A. In our much more modest home on the edge of England, they nonetheless look ravishing. I love waking up to them at the start of the day.

Normally, I then turn to give Alastair a kiss, but not enough to wake him, before rolling back to my side of the bed to put on my slippers – essential in a house with floorboards and flagstones. I make my way downstairs to the kitchen, put the kettle on the gas hob to boil and take our bounding working cocker spaniel Toby out into the garden for a pee. His morning constitutional done among the fallen fruit at the bottom of the apple trees, Toby trots back to the house to wolf down his breakfast of kibble and a little bit of canned tuna, before leaping up the stairs to join Daddy Alastair in bed. I follow with the tea – Earl Grey for me and robust English Breakfast for him – placing my mug next to a jar of asters. Outside, the church bells ring the hour, as they’ve done for centuries, from the days of fervent Catholicism to those of fading Anglicanism. The eighth stroke sounds and I return to bed, with every intention of reading, but, again, I’m drawn to the panels on the wall.

Each piece is about two feet long, ten inches wide. The symmetrical design fans out from the middle. Carved from oak, it gives the impression of something much lighter, much more malleable, hence the name: linenfold. And it is as if a beautifully creased piece of linen has been placed on top of the wood and somehow changed its nature. After the first pleat in the equal, mirrored design, the material folds back on itself, only to rise to another crease and then give way to a rolled flourish. It would take me hours to iron such a pattern into a napkin, let alone carve it into English oak.

If I take the panels off the wall, they are as light as air, fit to break down the pleats like an Elizabethan KitKat. Over time, four centuries and a bit, the wood has become thinner and cracked in a few places, even fraying at the edge like fabric. A bit of masking tape has been stuck down the back of the one on the left to make sure it doesn’t snap, while the corner of the one on the right is fixed to the wall with Blu Tack.

Yet for all the lie of the panels’ features, there is a detail in the centre of one of them that gives the carver’s hand away: it’s just above a cruciform pattern cut into the design, one at the top of the central fold and one at the bottom. Looking closer, I can see for the first time that the carpenter didn’t have quite as steady a hand as he might – perhaps, like me, he’d enjoyed too much wine the night before. There’s a slip, but it’s also a glorious mark of the object’s humanity. Certainly, no machine would have made such a mistake. Though no machine could have created such delicacy either.

There’s absolutely nothing industrialized about the view from my pillow – well, apart from a radiator, and an Anglepoise lamp that makes bedtime reading easier. Around the two noble if somewhat imperfect panels are the marks of other pasts, some linked, some contrary. Instead of a polished oak frame, the linenfold pieces hang on a cracked, bulbous wall between the joists of a rougher timber structure. A leaded light, with its view over to the 13th-century belfry and 14th-century church, is hidden behind linen curtains, which we bought at one of our favourite local shops. They feature a pattern that also looks back to the Elizabethans via William Morris. There’s a Victorian elm chair too, two brass candlesticks from my maternal grandfather’s farmhouse, a glass carafe etched with stars and a matching drinking glass that rattles in the night, as well as a few thumbed books. Among them is a paperback of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and a heavy catalogue of Bruegel paintings from Vienna that’s really awkward to read in bed, as well as various weekend supplements that will soon be used to light fires.

I love this bedroom and have always slept well here, which is not something I can rely upon. I’ve relished collecting the things within it, adding to them over time. And although many of the items reveal layers in which I had, and could have had, no place, I am afforded a quiet and belated opportunity to hold their histories in my hands.

It’s like the house itself, placed on the edge of an ancient churchyard in an ancient market town in one of the remotest corners of England: the house at the heart of my story. Here, I encounter villagers past and present, as well as centuries of overlapping seasons and traditions, to which we, Alastair and I, are adding our own. And all of them are reflected in poetry, prayers and paintings which deepen my attachment to the past, its customs, its objects and its characters, whether they’re as aristocratic as Orlando or as rustic as a Bruegel.

I.

Never a Native

BEING A GAY HISTORIAN is a paradoxical experience. Dealing with periods long gone, I always feel an incurable sense of homelessness, an exile from the place and time I’m investigating – and daring to call my own. Because it’s not my own, never was and never can be. It’s not just a matter of seasons having slipped away, but also because almost every age brings the realization that I – or my equivalent – would have had only a limited role within it, lacking identity or agency. Yet the past, L. P. Hartley’s ‘foreign country’, remains such a beguiling thing.

The obsession began in childhood. Most weekends, my parents would wield our family National Trust card and take my brother and me off in the Austin Montego to discover a new house, a new group of occupants, a new period in time. We even had passports and collected stamps at every property we visited. And there were the guidebooks too, to be pored over once we’d returned home, not least during the winter months, when the houses in question were shuttered, the tea rooms closed. As a result, I developed insufferably precocious levels of discernment. I knew good Chinese Chippendale when I saw it and would be able to note when a house’s painting collection wasn’t quite up to snuff. I delighted in the vestiges of past eras: the soda syphons, the bell pulls, the butter moulds. A budding musician, I also managed to wangle my way into playing the pianos of various grand houses when the lids weren’t locked, doubtless to the annoyance of other visitors. Generally, however, my interest was piqued by earlier (pre-piano) properties, with their moats and drawbridges and priest’s holes: places with fantastical names like Baddesley Clinton and Ightham Mote.

As a blissful childhood gave way to the horrors of a dank, rugby-obsessed boarding school on the Welsh border – it was my choice to go, not my parents’, before you blame them – I was forced to realize just how hard it was to find complements to the person I was becoming. Reading novels, watching costume dramas stolen from the English department or dutifully recorded by my parents at home, I at least found some paths of escape to supplement the National Trust trips. Similarly, my searches for the locations in which the tales of the Bennet sisters and the Honeychurch family had been filmed allowed me to indulge in other dreams, including finding my own Will Ladislaw or a suitably secluded boathouse.

I had been born with nostalgia in my veins. The ailment began as an acute case, but soon turned chronic. And it really is a kind of disease. I suffered, and continue to do so, from a strain that the late Svetlana Boym called reflective nostalgia, the primary symptoms of which are collecting and hoarding. Those who experience the illness know its other signs too, particularly of yearning for times gone by – ‘a precious moment gone and we not there’. One of the healthier symptoms is self-awareness. After all, fellow reflectives and I don’t suffer from that much more serious – and increasingly widespread – disease of restorative nostalgia, when the patient, normally a populist politician, assumes it’s entirely reasonable to envisage rebuilding the past. Luckily, gay historians, knowing Edward II’s death, the Wilde trial and Alan Turing’s chemical castration by rote, are only ever likely to be reflectives. The gayness is key, for the nostalgic, as Svetlana Boym explains, ‘is never a native but a displaced person who mediates between the local and the universal’. But it didn’t stop me wanting to be a native or to find a home in that history.

Away from school and its boarding and bullying, my place was London. My mum and dad, living in the suburbs, were the warmest and kindest I could have wished for and the opportunities they gave me to explore the capital with a Travelcard during my teenage years provided exciting new chapters. I loved the thrill that London brought, not least the anonymity, as well as the layers of the city’s past and the chance to learn its streets and stories. It was like a giant stately home and my innate sense of direction meant that I could traverse Westminster and the City efficiently but absorbingly – I still can. Over three decades, as curiosity gave way to knowledge and teenage dependency turned to adult freedom, as well as happiness in my own skin, I felt safe in the city’s midst, drinking with friends in Soho or having a Saturday coffee at Louis in Hampstead (now sadly changed). I became thoroughly convinced I was an urban soul and no number of pretty pictures of the countryside could persuade me otherwise.

But Alastair did. At the height of my heady, hedonistic relationship with London, living in an attic room in Fulham, in a flat behind Olympia or at the top of a Victorian conversion above Swiss Cottage, I began cheating on my first love with a defiantly rural being. He was kindness personified, with a long face and a lithe body, smiling quietly but cheekily behind his frameless specs. Inquisitive though never boastful, he perhaps seemed a little too meek for me, though the glint challenged the meekness.

We met in Yorkshire. Alastair, a countertenor, was singing in a choir that I conducted there one summer, thanks to the invitation of a mutual friend. I’ll never forget the moment he walked, late, into my rehearsal. I couldn’t be angry; I was smitten. But despite us both having been trained as church musicians, with a love of music stretching back to the Reformation, and both being Roman Catholics – our first proper date was among the ruins of Fountains Abbey – it was a potentially terrible match: Alastair was just about to return to a job at a leading boarding school in the East Midlands.

Leaving my own school at the age of eighteen, I had vowed never to set foot in such an institution again – the rising cost of therapy was cause enough for my decision. Yet Alastair somehow made it worthwhile, a healing in and of itself. When I had a panic attack crossing the threshold from his flat into an adjoining boarding house, he simply held my hand and promised that it would be OK. And I learned that, even in a short period of time, such institutions had largely moved on. Being gay was no longer an obstacle to being a member of the First XV; there was even a Stonewall poster on one of the noticeboards. And around the school, the flat, expansive countryside, with its spires peeking through fields, made for a surprisingly welcome escape from town.

One wet April evening, I took the familiar, and familiarly drab, journey from King’s Cross to Peterborough, where Alastair was due to be waiting in his battered VW Golf. He was twenty minutes late, just like the day I met him, but I kept telling myself not to get irate, to remain calm, given that I was carrying a pair of silver cufflinks with which I was about to propose.

We arrived back at his flat and Alastair went to the kitchen. Standing just inside the bedroom door, where I’d put down my bag for the weekend, I breathed and silently rehearsed some sort of script, unsure as to whether I should kneel as tradition dictated. Finally determining to do just that, my plan was thwarted by Alastair bumping into me as I stepped onto the landing. He immediately saw the egg-blue box in my hand.

‘What’s that?’

‘Oh, um, I was just wondering whether . . .’

But even before I could complete my sentence, Alastair was pulling at the white ribbon.

‘You can’t have what’s inside without giving me an answer – and the right one!’ I snapped, jokingly. So, I began again: ‘I was just wondering whether you would like to spend the rest of your life with me.’

He was shocked at my timing, but, thankfully, said yes.

Living together full-time was going to be very different from what had effectively been a peripatetic weekend relationship. And although we were overjoyed at our news, I began to realize that anything resembling a permanent life in the countryside just wouldn’t work for me – and now, as a result, for us. At the time, I was glued to a desk in an arts administration job, long before work-from-home policies had become the norm. I knew, however, that it was going to be difficult for Alastair to leave his school and the countryside, to merge with that modern trend of more of the world’s population living in urban centres than outside them. But luckily – at least for him – it was only for four years, as Alastair’s promotions through the ranks meant that I was then forced to abandon London.

My career had likewise altered. Instead of tending to the needs and deals of talented theatre practitioners, I had taken the decision to focus on my own artistic ambitions, to write, broadcast and give talks about aspects of history and culture that interested me most, from gin-soaked Hogarths to doom-directed Habsburgs, and various other points between. As a freelancer, I could no longer claim the need to be based in the city, whereas Alastair’s career demanded new pastures, first in not-so-pastoral Bedford and then in the West Country, where he was set to become a headmaster.

Such a deeply rural location, three hours or more from London by road, and with no train station, made me nervous, despite the obvious pride I felt. And what of the natives? The only immediate bonus, as far as I could see, was that we would finally be able to put down roots and buy a house. Happily, Alastair had been given accommodation with the job, so we were in the privileged position of investing our savings exactly where we wanted them.

Together, we planned for the change and drew a large circle around Alastair’s new place of work, covering two hours in each direction. Even if we had wanted to make the longer journey to London, our budget didn’t allow for anything much more than a studio, so rural it would have to be. Alastair was overjoyed, while I made one thing absolutely clear: the property needed to tap into history – my sense of nostalgia, the love of the National Trust, died hard. Devon, Dorset and the Cotswolds were all within our target area, but proved on the steep side financially and, for our taste, a little too gentrified. So we began further west, in Herefordshire, near the border with Wales, with every intention of travelling east until we found the right spot, at the right price.

SPARSELY POPULATED, essentially agrarian and almost totally lacking in motorways, Herefordshire is unashamedly sleepy, the third least populous English county after the Isle of Wight and Rutland. Post-war modernizers forgot the region almost entirely, with a position on the periphery guaranteeing its preservation. Ancient structures were left more or less intact and, as a result, to drive through Herefordshire is to encounter that history firsthand. Blink, ignore the car you’re sitting in, and it could be the Middle Ages, given how little the settlements have changed. You can almost hear the stamp and bagpipes of peasants, with their white hose and scarlet tunics, accompanied by clattering empty pitchers. And it is such a beautiful county, the very picture of what ‘England’ is in the collective mind’s eye, with villages of black-and-white houses nestled among rivers, farmland and hop gardens. As a local and suitably Falstaffian shop owner bragged, ‘Civilization begins west of the A49, just don’t tell anyone.’

Two decades had passed since I’d spent any amount of time in the area. One of the few comforts of my years at school had been the ability to escape the boarding house and its bullies at the weekend. Come the longer days of spring and summer, I loved getting out into the landscape, taking my bike and crossing the Monmouthshire border into Herefordshire, ‘where the sexy airs of summer, the bathing hours and the bare arms, the leisured drives through a land of farms are good to a newcomer’, as another former resident, and one of my heroes, W. H. Auden, described. His relishing of Herefordshire and the entire Marches area, much as it was loved by Edward Thomas, Robert Frost and figures such as William Wordsworth, A. E. Housman and Edward Elgar, to begin an extensive list, told of the region’s cultural richness, alongside its natural beauty.

Alastair and I drove over from Bedfordshire one Saturday afternoon in late winter, travelling cross-country into Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. We saw the bridge over Edward Thomas’s famous railway at Adlestrop and passed through Stow-on-the-Wold, packed as ever with tourists and teashops, before descending Stanway Hill and working further west. As the deadest of seasons wended its own deliberate way, the countryside appeared much more bleached than I remembered from my springtime teens. But even without that chlorophyllous boost, it was impossible to deny the beauty.

The first property Alastair and I had landed upon during hours spent looking at Zoopla and Rightmove was situated in the shadow of the Black Mountains, in the south-west of Herefordshire. Perched on the side of a hill, it was an old woodman’s cottage and felt romantic enough to rouse my interest. After three hours in the car, we pulled into the driveway, hopeful but quickly losing focus when we went inside. Sadly, despite the love and care the owners had taken over the house, their taste, a dogged tribute to Formica, was far from ours and the garden much too large for what would, effectively, become a bolthole. They were confident and we tried to be as polite as possible when shown around, looking longingly at the views across the emptied fields to Hereford towards the Malverns, but as lovely as the vista was – and as even more glorious it would prove when filled with summer – the house was not for us. So we drove away, annoyed at having wasted our time and theirs, and wound through the back lanes, weary at the thought of a long search ahead.

The next property we were due to visit had languished on the market for over six months. It was hardly a recommendation, though the particulars had stuck in our minds and on our list of favourites. The main problem was that the house was situated at the edge of our two-hour circle, in the furthest corner of Herefordshire; I had thought of cancelling the viewing to make time for more practicable places. Travelling through the Golden Valley, past Arthur’s Stone and over the Wye at Bredwardine, where the diary-keeping priest Francis Kilvert had once ministered, Alastair and I made our way north.

The destination was Pembridge, a village I knew by name and briefly by experience. It was where the first gay couple I’d ever met had lived. One of them still does, though sadly without his husband, the man who, as my chaplain at school, had effectively saved my education and, it’s no exaggeration to say, my life. Together, John and John had turned a hamlet outside Pembridge into a haven of happiness, until a debilitating disease claimed the first of them. But despite such a sad ending, John’s memory had always been a cheerful one, as were the few trips we’d made to their 16th-century timber-framed cottage, latterly in John’s quiet sickness and, before that, in his raucously laughing health.

Alastair turned towards the village, dodging potholes and skidding through a half-frozen ford, as I looked again at the Pembridge house on my phone and tried to make sense of its mix of architectural styles and levels, as well as its perplexing position next to what looked like a small hotel. It was definitely a historic property, but neither the estate agent’s details nor the attached pictures yielded clues.

‘Is that a bedroom in the basement?’ I said, waving my phone in front of the steering wheel.

‘I don’t know, darling. Just let me drive. It’ll become clear soon,’ Alastair responded, patiently.

‘I hope it’s not damp down there.’

‘Is this us?’ he ignored, wiggling by a bland village hall and a series of 1960s bungalows. I wasn’t impressed. There followed some older barns and the entrance to a school, before a much more pleasing view down a gentle incline to the centre of Pembridge. We parked in the Market Square, a slightly rough gathering of timber-framed buildings, of which two stood out. There was an open-sided Market Hall in the middle, no more than a steeply-pitched roof on eight wooden pillars, but somehow redolent of ancient status. And beyond, there was the pub, The New Inn, an imposing black-and-white structure that was sadly no longer a hotel. The whole square was well kept, though there was a dustiness about the place, the colours mute with age and woodsmoke. I felt a sense of reality rather than museum reverence.

Across the way, Stepps House, the property in question, stood three storeys tall, opposite the front door to the pub and a little gangly in the context. We’d arrived half an hour early for our appointment, which the Leominster estate agent had underlined they wouldn’t normally take on a Saturday afternoon. So I’d exaggerated our situation, said we were in a terrible rush and very likely to make an offer. None of which was true.

‘Pint?’ Alastair asked, hoping to shield from the dank of the day.

‘Pint,’ I confirmed. A much better option than sitting in the car for thirty minutes. Plus, I needed to pee.

We made our way up the cobbles to the front door of The New Inn and I looked over at the house again. From this angle, the whole square somehow fitted together; everything was in proportion. Inside the pub, a couple was paying up after lunch, but otherwise, on a winter’s afternoon at 2 p.m., it was, to say the least, quiet. Behind the bar was a calmly unimpressed publican, who melted with a bit of flirtation. Her colleague, a cook emerging from the kitchen behind the public rooms, was contagiously effervescent and the two went into something of a double act, asking where we had come from and where we were going.

Alastair found a seat beyond the first bar, next to a large open fire, as I asked for two pints of ale and explained that we were looking for a home and about to have a tour of Stepps House. Their faces lit up immediately.

‘It’s lovely inside,’ the publican gleamed, handing over the first pint. ‘The current owner’s done such a nice job. He’s spent lots of time and money on the place over the years, hasn’t he, Rose?’ as the other one began to chip in.

‘You’d be very happy there. It’s a super house and such a nice village, isn’t it, Jane?’

‘I’ve been here thirty-four years. Can’t complain.’

‘Thank you,’ I responded, taking the second pint. ‘Pembridge does seem nice. We like the look of the house, from what we’ve seen. I’ve just got to persuade him next door.’

‘Good luck,’ they said, as the conversation continued and I made my way through to what is known as the back bar to join Alastair. I sat down and he smiled, showing that he’d heard my plotting with the ladies of The New Inn, as well as registering his quiet delight. Watching a criss-cross of apple wood smoulder in the hearth, I began sipping my pint and slid further into the settle that filled the room.

‘This place can’t have changed for years,’ Alastair remarked.

‘Look at that shelf,’ I giggled, pointing to a structure that would have made Escher blush.

We sat contentedly for twenty minutes; the fire hissed and the chat continued next door. By the time we finished our beers and left, waving to the ladies who owned the pub while placing our glasses on the bar, the front door of Stepps House was open, with a dour estate agent on the threshold, keys in hand.

‘I’ve opened up. You can help yourself. Just let me know when you’re done,’ she said, more cheerily, but without a hello, an introduction or the offer of a tour. Instead, she sat under the Market Hall in the centre of the square.

We reached the door and took a breath, looking cautiously at each other before walking into the house. I was the first to step out of the mute sunlight, under a lowish lintel, holding the door back for Alastair. The house had a placid glow. In front of us there were stone steps, which broke at a landing. Rooms went off left and right, as well as further upstairs. The flagstones cooled the welcome, though this was countered by the afternoon light, which threw our shadows on the steps in front of us. Outside, I’d been unsure if intrigued, but inside, I knew immediately that this was a happy place.

There were quite a few rooms to take in – three bedrooms, I think. Odd choices of furniture too, including bits of Ikea and a collection of strange bespoke items. They didn’t fit at all. We walked around in silence. There were exposed timbers in the sitting and dining rooms, but the age of the house was rather concealed. Other buildings in the village were in that picture-book black-and-white style, like the pub, but I couldn’t place Stepps House in such a heritage, though it was surely old. In fact, the whole structure was just as difficult to piece together as it had been online. The outside space Alastair had remembered from the particulars was absolutely charming, with lots of box hedging, like a knot garden, though it was more or less empty that afternoon, bar a few serrated hellebores. And when I think back, I can’t really remember any of the specifics – nor, rarely for me, did I care – I was just happy to follow an impulse. This was going to be our home.

‘It’s nice,’ Alastair said, non-committally, moving towards the front door.

‘Isn’t it?’ I replied, eagerly, trying to slow his retreat. Nonetheless, we made to go and thanked the estate agent for her time, as Alastair remained utterly sphinx-like. I pulled myself into the passenger seat and sat in silence, furious at how oblique he could be. He pressed the ignition, still giving absolutely nothing away. We hadn’t even passed the village limits before I blurted, ‘Come on, you had to feel it!’

‘Feel what?’

‘We’re going to have to make an offer.’

‘But the road! It’ll be really annoying come the summer. We’ll be sitting in the sun and the lorries will drown out our conversations.’

‘The house is gorgeous. Perfect. And that garden.’

‘I wanted hills.’

‘There are hills,’ I said; ‘you can see them from our bedroom’ – already claiming it.

‘That’s a lovely room,’ he paused. ‘But we ought to check out a few more.’

Ever cautious, never one to let his emotions run away, let alone express them. Which is why he’s perfect – in many ways – and why he’s so bloody annoying. Alastair had nonetheless learned over fourteen years that any resistance was futile. So, turning to look out of the window, I pouted, ‘It always falls to me, the research, the enquiries. And now we see a house that is lovely and you’re dithering. Yet again.’

‘I’m not dithering; I just want to be sure.’

‘I’m sure!’

‘I know you are. And,’ pausing again, ‘you do tend to have the right instincts about these things.’

‘Stepps House will be a gorgeous place to live, to escape to, to get back to us.’

I wittered endlessly as Alastair returned to silence, a familiar tack. We were driving eastwards to the Malvern Hills and from there we would go back to Bedfordshire. Malvern would, thankfully, give us a moment of reflection. It was a favourite spot and our cocker spaniel Toby had been waiting uncomplainingly in the boot for his much-mentioned, much-delayed walk. I knew he would approve of the house, even if he hadn’t been able to see inside. If in doubt, I could always invoke him as another way of conquering Alastair’s reticence; my husband would never say no to the dog. A walk in the hills would cement the decision, I thought.

WE RETRIEVED Toby from the back of the car and, knowing the way from previous trips, he shot ahead, first climbing up Summer Hill and over towards Worcestershire Beacon. I lagged behind, as Alastair stepped past a drift of snowdrops. In time, they would give way to daffodils and bluebells and vaulting summer foxgloves. Above us, the sky grimaced with rain. Clouds were skirting where we walked, so we decided not to risk a caper to the summit. Instead, we stood on a plateau before the final pull to the top and gazed out over the county I was hoping would become ours. I’d been here before too, a dejected teenager, dreaming of the very moment when I might find a home with a man I loved.

The fading winter light was glorious. Amidst the scudding rainclouds, crepuscular rays pierced the grey, low on the horizon. The gleams picked out details with follow-spot clarity: farms and fields, and the odd grander house. The contrast between shadow and filtered sun rendered the landscape almost two-dimensional, taking on the quality of one of those interwar railway posters advocating FRESH AIR FOR HEALTH or some other such wholesome message, from a time when Elgar, Housman or Auden might have seen it too.

Elgar was a particular favourite among this crowd and he had certainly walked here, cycled as well and, in Ken Russell’s 1962 documentary for the BBC, cantered over the hills on a pony. We could also see into Housman’s country if we peered through a rain-streaked ray that was lighting the path to Wenlock Edge and the Long Mynd. And it was on this very ‘fathom of earth’ that Auden had stood ‘alive in air’ with an illicit beloved in the 1930s, with England (and the prep school where he taught) below him. And yet the sky looked as if it came from another time, perhaps like a Constable, the painter my mum loved best, with hibernal fog rising up in marshmallow clumps, only to plummet in a downpour of pewter. But unlike Constable’s scenes of Essex, Suffolk and Salisbury, we were not in the field; we were perched high above, as in something much older, an oil or tempera on wooden panels, seen by the eyes of an ancient deity or an artist presuming such a role.

It was like those wide views that reach beyond the virgins and the virtuous of a medieval polyptych, including the Van Eyck Ghent Altarpiece that we’d seen the previous summer, with its minutely detailed cityscape of the New Jerusalem, or the socalled World Landscapes of the 16th century by Joachim Patinir, Cornelis Massys and, most famously, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. As I stood there that afternoon, the images flicked through my mind like a medieval zoetrope, with dusty villages and lusty peasants, seasonal feasts and yearly famines, as well as scenes of religious observance and fun-loving secularism, cradled within a countryside that was both fertile and fierce. With the icy Welsh winds rising to the edge on which we stood, it was thrilling to be afforded that kind of Olympian view, condensed into a single mind’s eye.

‘Let’s do it,’ Alastair said. Toby paused on the path, as if he too were surprised.

‘Are you sure?’

‘You’re sure.’

‘I am,’ I said slowly, guiltily. ‘But just look at it.’

‘You’re right. It’s a beautiful place. And it is a beautiful house. Not too far from work.’

I wrapped my arms around the back of my husband, leaning my chin on his shoulder. We took it all in, bracing ourselves against the chill.

Alastair knew I had a sharper sense of direction and asked where Pembridge was within this shifting, Bruegel-like spread. But the sun’s late beams and his sudden change in attitude had dulled my senses too, and as much as there are major hills around Herefordshire, there are few defining features in the heart of the county. Dinedor Hill, where my sister-in-law had grown up, marks the southerly edge of the suburbs of Hereford and I could just about spot it behind another wintry squall. Dinmore, subdued and more of a gentle crest than a clear incline, separates the cathedral city from Leominster. And beyond Dinmore, but far outweighed by the distant heft of the Black Mountains, is Wormsley Hill and the twin cones of Robin Hood’s Butts, which helped me work out where Pembridge might be. Like most of Herefordshire, the village was burrowed within a jumble, shunning announcement.

But it was impossible not to be impressed by the county’s boundaries, defined by an almost unbroken ridge. We were standing on a major part, the Malverns, the eastern limit, with their Tuscan contours emerging from the Severn Plain. To the south was Monmouthshire, the site of my teenage unhappiness, with Gloucestershire’s May Hill and the Forest of Dean at its edge. Most impressive, however, bar the Malverns, were the darkling Celtic frontiers, from the Skirrid and the Sugar Loaf to the vertiginous drop of Hay Bluff and further into Wales. Also straddling the border, a little north, was Hergest Ridge, with its ancient trails, and Radnorshire and mid-Wales beyond. Then our eyes moved along the base of the Shropshire Hills, through Housman’s landscape of lovelorn lads, and closer into view via the Bromyard Downs to Malvern itself. Words such as punchbowl and crucible were often invoked in these instances, and they would have been fitting for Herefordshire were it not for the scale: this wasn’t one feature, it was an entire county.

I stood there and realized that the hills and the places between them provided another analogue, at least to my mind. Between the hills. It was the name of the farm where my mother had been born and raised in Wales: Bwlch-y-rhiw – sometimes spelled as one word, sometimes hyphenated. It was far in the distance, due west in fact, in the Cambrian Mountains. But the flattening afternoon light made its presence quite palpable. The farmhouse, long since sold, sat beneath my late grandfather’s ‘mountain’ of Mynydd Mallaen, though it was only a little taller than the hill on which I was now standing and made in part of the same Llandovery sandstone, the earliest Silurian rock, that also rises to the Malverns. My uncle still owns the land, and just as my granddad’s traditional hill-farming life has continued, so too has our family’s attachment to the place. It is where my mum’s parents are buried and where we go every year to hear the cuckoos sing.

‘It would be lovely to feel a connection,’ I said, breaking the silence.

‘Like in London?’

‘Yes. No. Not just that . . . with you. It would be nice to have a geography for our marriage. To be rooted.’

‘Isn’t it odd that it’s not the city, though?’

I asked Alastair whether he would have preferred London after all.

‘No, I don’t mean that. It’s strange that you’re being so gungho about the countryside,’ he responded. ‘You were always a city boy.’

‘I suppose I was.’

For the first time ever, I thought my urban life could have been an aberration, the real connection being with the countryside: the family farm in South Wales and the mountains of Snowdonia, where I’d lived until the age of seven. But I didn’t have a home as such. Even Oxford, a giddy place, was only ever going to be for a three-year stint, and my happy early adult life in London was again punctuated by various moves between flats and friends. Maybe the locus of feeling settled was irrelevant. The most important thing was the association itself, the ability to know a place, inhabit its past and present and witness the turning of another year.

II.

The Unanswered Question

AFEW DAYS LATER, OUR offer on Stepps House was accepted and everything was put in train. But after the initial hurry came the tedium of phone calls to mortgage companies, as well as providing proof of income and engaging solicitors. Spring came and spring went; weeks went by. It blinded you to the potential joy of the situation and the thrill of new discoveries, to say nothing of the realization that we were getting much more than we had ever bargained for. Choosing Stepps House, I had followed my feelings – and persuaded Alastair to do likewise – but we really hadn’t thought about what the property meant: a house in the middle of a village that, as in that view from the Malverns, looked like it had come straight out of a medieval or Renaissance painting.

Quickly, however, we had to start grappling with that history, even before we had completed the purchase and could call the property our own. We were asked the question by our insurance company. The solicitor reminded me that the responsibility for insuring the building was ours from the day that we exchanged contracts. I’d just finished giving a history of art talk to a group of pensioners in a village hall in Oxfordshire when the message arrived. The voice on the other end told me that all the outstanding issues with the purchase were resolved and exchange had taken place. Sitting in a stuffy car outside a pub, I had to phone the insurers.

‘What’s the number or name of the property?’

‘Stepps House. Two p’s.’

‘And how many bedrooms does the property have, sir?’ ‘Three.’

‘Is the roof made of tile or slate?’

‘Tile.’

‘Walls. Brick or stone?’

‘Both,’ I said, ‘though it’s also partly timber-framed.’

‘Tim-ber fray-m-ed,’ I heard, as my answers were typed into the database.

‘Partly,’ I added.

‘And what is the age of the house?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘OK. Could you have a guess?’

‘Well, it’s old! I know that. I’ve asked the estate agent for more detail, because I was curious, and they’ve now checked with the current owner. Supposedly, it’s 1800, but that can’t be right, given the timber frame.’

‘OK . . .’ the response came, with a further pause. ‘What we could do, sir, is take the 1800 date now and when you’ve got a more accurate answer, come back to us. As soon as possible, preferably.’