21 March

This is a tale of two houses. The first sat well back from the village street, with no near neighbours. It had a wild and tangled garden, with rambling roses everywhere, and a small orchard with fruit trees and a huge walnut tree. Inside were layers of dust, and crumbling plaster, and big reception rooms. Upstairs were eaves bedrooms with creaking floors that made you teeter and skid. It was an impulse view, an impulse buy. We were excited and confident; but something niggled. The house ticked all the boxes, though, and I admit I bought to impress. Not because it had any grandeur or gave us any great status; it was a cottage needing renovation, that’s all. But it summed up the dream so perfectly; our children (one baby, then) could run barefoot through the long grass, while I cooked on the Rayburn and friends sat on the window seat as the scent of the sweet peas wafted in. I’ve learned since then to trust my instincts, not my desires.

The house wasn’t for us. At least, maybe it was, just to show us that we weren’t infallible, for we made every mistake in the book. Some could have been avoided; we took on a huge restoration project, whilst moving to an isolated place where we knew no-one, we had a small baby with all the work and exhaustion that that brings, and I was already mourning the loss of my city life and close friends. We didn’t listen when people said that everyone overspends on their budget; we were already stretched to our financial limits. Some things were just bad luck; work from my husband’s key clients, for whom he could often work from home or in London, dried up, and most new work coming in meant working abroad for weeks on end, leaving me struggling with rural motherhood and a renovation project, and a rapidly dwindling pot of money. For months my kitchen consisted of a microwave in the dining room, and water had to be accessed by going round the outside of the house to the building site of a kitchen. Keeping a one year old out of said building site was fun, too. In my memory it rained all the time, yet logic tells me it can’t have done; we were there for three summers, after all. When I probe my buried memories, or tease them up by looking through the photo albums, other pictures come into view. Lying in a hammock under the oak tree with my son; the ‘Canary Bird’ rosebush which flowered each year on the 1st May; deer crunching on old apples in the front garden; collecting plums and walnuts; the jewel colours of the oriental poppies in the overgrown and blowsy borders. We have a photo of a spectacular snowman we built one year, pipe in his mouth, and of Christmas trees lit up with real candles (placed, high, naturally). There were good times, I think, no real tragedy befell us. My boy spent three years of his life there. Yet my memories are mostly of trying to push water uphill; of trying to coax a country idyll out of something that just wouldn’t yield. However much we put our stamp on it, the house didn’t feel like ours. When we finished a project, we couldn’t seem to rejoice, or relax; we could only see the blood, sweat and tears. And the other babies, the ones that were meant to run, barefoot and long-limbed, among the apple trees, didn’t come. Or they came, but only fleetingly, and wouldn’t stay with me. The more I try to remember, the more my mind hits a blank wall.

In the end, the bulk of the renovation complete but lacking the cash to take it to the next level, we decided to sell. We could have stuck it out for a year or two, got back on our feet financially, seen it through. But we couldn’t love the house – or rather, we felt it didn’t love us. It didn’t seem to want to give an inch. I spent long amounts of time alone there with a baby, and I can’t ever say that I felt scared or that there was any malevolent presence, or anything like that. I’m not sure how much I believe in the supernatural. But if pressed, we would both say we felt – well – jeered at somehow, scorned in some way. How ridiculous it sounds, now I write it down. We sold to a lovely couple who had fallen in love with it and wanted to raise a family there. I was adamant that I wanted a smaller house, with a large garden, on the outskirts of our local town. Something newer, Victoran maybe. I’d had enough, knew my place. I didn’t want to stay in the immediate locality, and we needed to be settled before my son started school. We took a short cut through a neighbouring village one day, and fell in love. Deeply and irrevocably. The house was unsuitable on so many levels. It was the same period, the to-do list too long for our weary hearts. The garden wasn’t really big enough, and was north-facing. There were plenty of spacious rooms upstairs, but the downstairs rooms were small and dark – surely the wrong way round? It was right in the centre of the village and jammed in by neighbours. But it was crazy and quirky and full of surprises, and it felt like falling in love after leaving an arranged marriage.
The day we accepted the offer on the first house, I discovered I was pregnant. By the time we moved in to our new house, the baby was kicking. The lady who’d lived here left us a carved owl and a print of some hares, which she felt belonged here; they have become our talismans. We bumped into the couple we’d sold to from time to time. They seemed content, and loved the house, but we couldn’t fail to notice that they were still only two. No family seemed to be coming along. We then saw the house was on the market, and we ran into them again last week. They’ve had a turbulent time, lately. He was made redundant, and money has been tight. They’ve sold the house. Things are looking up, though, now. He’s got another job, and they’ve found out she’s pregnant. They were both glowing. But they told us something else; they’d done a little research into the history of the house, and for a period in it’s life it was the village poor house. Explains a lot.