Dream House

‘There's a house with a wood for sale in Quorn,’ I said casually. My husband knows that under my mild-mannered, good-humoured persona lies another person: a cross between Pol Pot and Joan Crawford. I never make casual remarks. Accordingly, he got the message and switched on the indicator and we turned towards Quorn.

Quorn is not the headquarters of the meat substitute so beloved of vegetarians, it is a large village full of des reses. The hip'n'thigh flat stomach magnate Rosemary Conley lives there. In fact, the river that makes the village so ‘des' runs through her property. I expect it pulls its stomach in as it rushes by.

The house was called One Ash. There was a picture of a bad-tempered, growling Alsatian on the padlocked gate. I can't remember whether I climbed over the gate or limbo'd beneath it. I was in a fever of excitement because I had seen the wood.

Recent photographs of me may suggest that I spent my infancy, childhood and adult life in a subterranean nightclub, but I grew up surrounded by woods. As a small child I climbed the trees and made dens in the scrubby undergrowth. I collected conkers and acorns in the autumn, and picked the celandines and primroses in the spring. In the summer I took a bottle of water and a jam sandwich and had a picnic in the dark shade, and in the winter, in the snow (it always snowed when I was a child), I would take great delight in being the first to put my wellington prints on to the snowy woodland floor. I got to know each tree very well, and when most of the wood was cut down to make way for housing, I was heartbroken.

‘It's going cheap because it's been vandalized,’ I said to my husband as we walked up the long driveway through the wood. ‘But it's thirteen acres.’ He didn't flinch. He didn't point out that we found it difficult to find the time to tend our present garden, which is the size of a large slice of bread and has only five trees. We couldn't yet see the house, but we saw a paddock in the distance. We passed an overgrown tennis court with a sagging net, and a piece of open ground with a summer house.

Then we turned a corner and walked up a slight incline, and there was the house. Dark and boarded-up, looking like something out of a horror film; I expected to see lightning and hear thunder and the sound of a distant scream. We walked round the back of the house to look at the outbuildings and the smashed orangery and greenhouses. A swimming pool was full of slime and rubbish, but the garden even in winter – was lovely. There were ponds and a brick-built pergola, and everywhere trees and the glorious intermingling smells of conifers and rotting leaves. I felt weak with desire. I wanted it. I wanted it before I had seen the front of the house, or been inside it. I could see my grandchildren running through the woods. I could see myself writing in the summer house. I could see my husband replacing every single one of the hundred panes of glass in the orangery. (Strangely enough, he didn't share this particular vision.)

When I saw the front of the house, I thought I would faint with pleasure. There were shutters and a pretty Edwardian wrought-iron balcony, and a lovely front door. A pale man covered in coal dust came out. He was carrying a torch. Did we ‘want to see inside the house’?

‘Yes,’ I wanted to shout, ‘of course we want to see inside the house. It is our house. We are going to live here.’

The batteries were going in the pale man's torch, and every window was boarded up from the outside, so we stumbled around in deep blackness. But I did glimpse beautiful window frames, ceilings, floors and fireplaces, and vowed that I would live here and make it light and warm and welcoming. We thanked the pale man and he went back to huddle over his coal fire.

I was back the next day with my sister Kate and my two daughters. Kate was enthusiastic, but the girls recoiled in horror. We drove to the estate agents, where a young man told me that the house was about to be sold, for cash.

‘Anyway,’ said my relieved daughter, looking at my disconsolate face as we drove home. ‘You couldn't live in a house called One Ash.’

‘What would you call it?’ I asked her as I lit yet another cigarette. ‘Fag Ash?’ she suggested. We all laughed, but my laughter was more hollow than theirs.