falling1

When I was about 11 years old my Father and Stepmother moved into an enormous Edwardian house in Surrey, owned by an eminent Buddhist scientist and a Thai Princess. The House had extensive grounds, being situated in a large wood complete with an old cottage that was now a private residence but would have been the servants lodgings a hundred odd years ago. My Father’s family rented one half – again, probably the servant’s half – of the main house, while the owners, complete with jet-setting, Lamborghini designing children, took the really posh bit. There always was, and is, something strange about moving through the main downstairs corridor that connects both family’s ‘homes’ – from the shabby, sepia tinted wallpaper that represented the world I lived in when I stayed there, and out into the clear, white, airy space inhabited by the other residents. There was a feeling of intruding, of being out of one’s depth. But as I got older and eventually got to know the entire place, I started to feel differently. In the end, the overriding feeling was simply that the way the other half tried to present itself was inherently dishonest. Not intentionally so, but nevertheless there was something anachronistic about the kind of aristocratic world that they, and the house, represented. Like a good deal of Edwardian stuff, it felt as though the house and its inhabitants somehow embodied the last, glorious, sad throws of a world that had only recently been devoured by social mobility, daytime telly and cultural relativism. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, but there was something deeply melancholy about it – as though by peeling back the thick, red, draped curtains that weighed heavily on the bedroom windows, you could reach out, through, and touch that other world of bright sunny days, tennis on the lawn, and all that E M Forster crap. The place, even in the high rent bit, always felt faded, and like all proper mansions was cobwebby, the black wrought iron window-catches didn’t work properly, the grass in the orchard was often unkempt, and it was COLD. Wherever you went in the house, my abiding memory was that it was often bloody freezing. And it hasn’t changed much in that regard.

You have to kick the backdoor to open it – it’s bloody stiff!