Wainscot worlds

After that, I went to stay in Norfolk with my Cambridge friends, now modestly eminent.  (S. taught me in my thankless youth:  and a scowling, gibing, contrariwise, paronomasian, ill-read, rhapsodic thing I was.  But she coached me to a starred First on the Practical Criticism paper.  She’s that good.)

J. and S. have a genius for houses.  I remember their old cottage (alas, not near enough Cambridge), with its paradisiacal garden, in which every fruit and flower grew:  a great Morello cherry tree, cloaked like an empress in harvest, and crowned with marauding birds; gooseberries; currants (black, white, and red); damsons; quinces; even figs, which they coaxed to ripen.  We used to play crazy croquet in the garden, where J. had built himself a study from the old two-seater privy.  There were donkeys in the field across.

After that, there’s been a series of very small city houses—more or less vertical apartments—overflowing with books and Morris fabrics and their clavichord, and always the small house in Norfolk, very near the golden sands which played Viola’s brave new world in Shakespeare in Love.  (That beach is the only place I’ve ever played cricket {badly}.  S. is a demon bowler.)  The cottage is a glorious conglomerate pudding of stone and brick and tile and timber, with odd polygonal cupboards, non-Euclidean passage rooms, and Moebius stairs.  It must date to the dissolution of the local priory, whose stone it filched; but there’s a tiny Georgian bedroom (with authentic shallow cupboards full of P.G. Wodehouse), and a 1920s shop window in the sitting room.

And books.  And books.  And books.

Back in Cambridge, J. and S. had no space at all for guests, so they acquired a Wendy house, just across the street.  (They were outbid on the crotchety Gothic chapel round the corner:  it’s about the size of a piggy bank, with one room and an organ loft.)  All you can see of the Wendy from the street is a narrow door with a lion’s head knocker.  Through that, you’re faced with a ridiculously broad and stately inner door—and through that, just one room:  a grey-green, panelled, neo-Georgian formality.  There are French windows, opening on a tiny brick-walled secret garden.  Oh, yes, and a loft bedroom and provisional bathroom, up a sort of carpeted ladder.  And a tiny tiny kitchen, suitable for washing brushes in.  The Wendy used to be an artist’s studio, freestanding in the garden of a villa, long since vanished. 

I loved that place.

Ah, but this year, just before I came, it had to go.  After tense negotiations, J. and S. landed the place they’d been coveting for 30 years:  the 17th century sailmaker’s barn behind the Norfolk house.  (It belongs to the house, properly.  It dwarfs it.  Long ago the two were offered as one, but J. and S. couldn’t afford both at the time:  they’ve always regretted their cold feet and mourned for its loss.)  I got to be the first person who stayed there.  Like all their properties, it’s an endearingly eccentric patchwork with authentic bones.  Timbers!  Space!  (There’s an actual kitchen, better kitted-out than mine.)  And a tilted balcony looking out over their latest secret garden.  Time will tell what’s in it through the year, but in August it was crammed with roses (scented roses, if you please) and hollyhocks.   There are cyclamens springing up in odd corners, elfishly.  There are mossy stone figures—an angel from Autun, a lion's head—in the crevices of old brick walls.  You can carry out your morning tea to the balcony, and drink it, looking out above a pocket paradise, a quilting of butterflies.

Nine