We have been in our new home for four months and although getting here was hell, the living is almost heaven. I am rather surprised to be in a modern house after 40 years of living in ones built centuries ago. How would I feel without any nooks and crannies, twisting staircases, elm floors and beams, not to mention the Aga? Well, how do I now feel without the draughts, rattling windows, uneven floorboards and energy bills the size of the national debt that come with every old house, plus the responsibility of too much land? We have only moved five north Norfolk miles but into another world, nearer the marshes, sea and seals, under vast skies in a light-filled house. We left a river valley for 500ft above sea level where it is several degrees colder with noticeably clearer, saltier air. Loud skeins of geese fly over morning and evening. At low tide we see oystercatchers, dunlin, godwits, redshanks, curlews and snipe, with huge murmurations of starlings rising and turning, falling and skirling. Biggles the border terrier has the runs of his life, leaping across the springy marsh, over, and occasionally into, pools of muddy water. At the top of our cul de sac, we hear no traffic, just the church clock chiming the quarters and the babble of children’s voices from the village school playground. Without street lamps our nights are starlit and Bible black.
Making a new garden is life-enhancing, possibly even life-extending. Dozens of bulbs, mostly tulips but the usual snowdrops, crocuses and alliums, have gone in, as have plants, plus too many roses. Madame Alfred Carrière is going up flint and brick walls, with her friend Madame Cécile Brünner, and among the Gertrude Jekylls, Ispahans and Gentle Hermiones I have planted Campanula persicifolia, an ace tip given to me years ago by master gardener Robin Lane Fox. Three white flowering cherry trees and two Betula jacquemontii have been planted, though not by me – I plan, select, buy, then order other people about. I don’t mind getting my hands dirty – I’m just too lazy and old to dig and weed, bend and stretch. The gardener likes to do things slowly, correctly and in an orderly fashion but he is getting used to my method: ‘Just bung them in.’ It generally works.
I am an autumn and winter person but these seasons still induce memory and melancholy. Some deaths shock, others feel right, even acceptable. The water comes together completely over some, but others leave a gap which never fully closes, even if it becomes less of a gaping wound as time passes. Few days go by without my wanting to see, laugh and talk with much-missed friends. Something will happen, there’s a bit of news or gossip heard on the wind, or I have a nagging question and I half-turn to phone them, to share, ask, laugh, and no one else will do. I want the voice at the other end to be Candida’s saying, ‘It’s Mrs Green’, or, still with its hint of Edinburgh, ‘Eric Anderson here’. My meticulous old book editor Jenny Dereham, who dreaded cancer above all things, died of it before Christmas. Death’s a bugger.
It cannot be true that I more than halved my library before moving because there are twice as many books overflowing the new bookshelves. I definitely shed two copies of The Good Soldier, so how do I still have two? I often reread Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, but do not need one in every room.
I don’t have a season for reading more but winter is especially good – in bed early because of the extra night hours, beside the fire which is lit at half past four. If ‘a sad tale’s best for winter’ so is a Dickens, a Trollope, a satisfyingly fat and frightening thriller by Michael Connelly, say. Then again, there are always the ghost stories, don’t you find?
Apologies to Virginia Woolf, but I have never found a room of my own for writing to be essential, just to be in any old one alone and in silence. This house is smaller than the last two though and not very soundproof, as is the way of modern houses, so an outside room, aka shed, has been put up. It smells of new wood, is painted soft blue-green, has two windows and just enough space for a writing table and chair, plus – if I can ever find it – the world’s smallest sofa. I don’t understand writers who must work facing a blank wall. My view doesn’t distract – it feeds me. A glance at the big sky or a blackbird scuttling about the flowerbeds is mighty refreshing and the next sentence will wait. These days I forget what I just said or why I came into the garage but sentences, indeed whole paragraphs, seem to be safe for days. Few were written in 2022 so I hope that with a new year the new room outside will encourage at least one new book.
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