MARY: Another humiliating spectacle today on Pewsey Station. As usual, I’d had to work right up to the last moment. When it was time to leave either I would miss the last morning train to London by packing carefully, or I could simply fill bags with unedited piles of things I might need when I got there, including heaps of newsprint to read on the train and discard as I proceed through it.
Of course, it would be a disaster if I arrived in London and found myself without mobile, keys or money, but for some reason I don’t seem able to discipline myself to have them in a set position ready for me to grab each time I leave for the train. The inevitable result is that I often find myself serially scattering the contents of the various bags on the station platform as I search to make sure I’ve got them.
Meanwhile Giles, who doesn’t often come to London, turns Quisling, standing at a distance and disloyally rolling his eyes towards the other passengers as I scrabble.
GILES: As Mary, bent double on Pewsey Station, scatters the contents of her bags onto the platform and rummages through an assortment of biro tops, buttons and receipts, I recall the image of the peasant in the Van Gogh drawing Peasant Woman Gleaning Ears of Corn.
Mary has too much stuff. And on the theme of Van Gogh, I believe the only way to live in a cottage is with just the bare minimum of necessary items a table, two chairs, and an axe for cutting wood. Nothing else.
MARY: I too crave Spartan Van Gogh-style interiors. I’m never happier than when staying in a hotel with a manageable amount of stuff (and some empty surfaces to tip that stuff onto for sorting). But the reality is that Giles and I both work at home, and that although he is minimal to a self-sabotaging degree, I’m a writer with an archive of magazines I’ve written in. As a freelancer, your accountant requires you to keep all your bank statements and general financial papers for at least six years in case you are investigated. And what about packaging? You must think ahead to the moment when your computer or other electrical product goes wrong and the courier comes to take it back to be serviced. ‘Please retain all packaging for this purpose,’ say the instructions.
I also need to hoard clothes as I wait for them to come into fashion again. From an early age, I experienced the gratification of finding in our attic in Northern Ireland such mothball-guarded treasures as 1950s cocktail dresses, 1960s Pucci print sundresses with zips up the front and 1970s Forbidden Fruit mirrored hippy skirts.
Transported to my own Wiltshire attic these have been seized upon by our daughters, named Fleur and Rosie. No, of course those are not their real names but, to avoid invading their privacy, we’ll refer to them as such. Giles can’t see the expense spared by not having bought these clothes for huge sums from a vintage shop. He can only see clutter.
Oh dear – I also have memorabilia – old family papers and things like my doctor great grandfather’s leather and mahogany medical examination couch, which give me a three-dimensional link with the pillars of Presbyterian probity which made up most of my antecedents. There is no room for it in the cottage but neither can I bring myself to send it to a dump or to an auction at which it might raise two pounds.
As I said, it’s not really that I’ve got too much stuff. Rather that the cottage is too small, and Giles should be helping me sort and tidy the attic to make room for more stuff, but of course he’s too busy.
MARY: Looking down at the garden from Room Two I saw Giles going to and fro through the gate and into the road with a watering can…then I looked out of the front window and saw him inexplicably pouring the water into a trench in the road.
‘Have you gone mad?’ I called.
‘I was watering the road for the house martins so they can repair their nests. It’s so dry and dusty there’s no mud around otherwise. You say I don’t work. Well if this isn’t worthwhile work, I don’t know what is.’
MARY: Cyril and Ursula have come to stay. Giles and I are certainly compatible when it comes to our taste in people. We’ve always loved the same ones. We find that we gravitate towards eccentrics, bossy personalities and the opinionated, and we both seem to enjoy obeying the orders of the domineering. Cyril and Ursula, however, are Lib Dem voters and fall into none of the above categories. We’ve just known them for thirty-five years and our children grew up with theirs.
Sharing tastes in people is good for many reasons, one of which is because such people have a vested interest in your staying together and don’t try to undermine your partnership. We don’t have guests nearly often enough for my needs – but on the rare occasions when Giles nods his assent, the prospect of someone coming incentivises us to tidy the cottage, set log fires a-going – in our telly-watching room or, for bigger parties, in Room One. This is our biggest room whose purpose has never yet been clearly designated. Is it a work room, a dining room or Giles’s art studio? It’s not clear, so we call it Room One.
And then, behind Giles’s back as it is un-eco, I tackle the bathroom stains with the lethal but super-effective Spirits of Salt.
I’ve always found that other presences in the cottage provide welcome human buffers between me and Giles. In terms of a peace-broking initiative it’s helpful to see these independent observers (who harbour no bitterness about missing furniture, believed burnt on a bonfire, or broken seventeenth century Rummer glasses from Ireland which ‘just jumped out of the machine’ into which they should never have gone in the first place) roaring with laughter at Giles’s jokes, appreciating his cooking and his recherché collection of worked flints from the Stone Age, which he has picked up on the Downs.
Giles served fishcakes which he’d made himself. After supper Cyril and I did a jigsaw on the card table in front of the crackler (cottage-speak for log fire) and we all watched a DVD of Andrei Rublev by Andrei Tarkovsky which, at 205 minutes, is, like marriage, another test of endurance and requires quite a bit of mental stamina. Few of our other friends would be interested.
Scrabbling about on the wooden floors in the background were our two dogs, Phoebe, our Tibetan Spaniel who is a girl but who we always refer to as ‘he’ – it’s a tradition in this neck of the Wiltshire woods to refer to all dogs as ‘he’, whether female or not – and Pip, the West Highland Terrier belonging to Cyril and Ursula, who actually is a he. Phoebe and Pip have known each other all their lives and always try to mate, even though Pip has been neutered. Ursula and I love to see the happy look on Phoebe’s panting face, though Giles and Cyril invariably tell the dogs off.
GILES: As well as too many possessions, Mary also has too many friends. Fortunately, fewer of them seem to want to come and stay these days. I’ve often thought of harnessing the data in the Visitor’s Book to produce a bar chart of what would prove to be diminishing guest numbers over the years, but Mary says this would be a waste of my talent, which would be better put to use on getting on with one of my many outstanding painting commissions.
Why have the numbers gone down? I don’t believe it’s because I’ve alienated people, as Mary sometimes speculates, it’s simply the fact that the conditions in the cottage are no longer good enough for people of our own age group. While economically most of our contemporaries have saved and prospered over the years, Mary and I have flatlined. Cyril and Ursula are among the few grown-up couples happy to brave the ‘Pointy Room’. This is the downstairs guest room off the sitting room, which has a vaulted twenty-foot-high ceiling. The children called it the Pointy Room because of its pointy ceiling.
We always provide clean white Irish linen on the eighteenth-century French bed (an Irish heirloom of Mary’s), but the room – three out of four of whose walls are outside walls, thinly insulated and clad with larchlap decking – is chilly to the extent that in winter it can even be almost windy in there. During bad weather, the whole Pointy Room turns into a wind instrument resembling a giant Aeolian harp as the draughts gust through it starting on one note and rising a full six tones before falling again.
The Pointy Room was originally used as a log store by our next-door neighbour, in the days when all the cottages in the terrace of five had a so-called easement meaning they were all allowed a right of way through each other’s back yards. No one had put up dividing hedges because there was no individual mindset. The occupants of the terrace all worked at the Manor Farm which eschewed brutalist farm machinery and had traditional toilers in the field, right up until 1985.
Bert, our next-door neighbour, had become a taxi driver when the farm was eventually mechanised. One of ten sons, Bert’s father used to keep order by boxing the boys’ ears, as was the norm in agricultural families. Who has even heard of a parent boxing someone’s ears today? It would certainly be illegal and social services would step in. Ear boxing has gone the same way as black eyes and scabs on knees. Using raw steaks to cure black eyes was a great feature of the Dandy comics of our youth. You never see them these days. The result was that Bert, born in 1928, was quite deaf and quite aggressive. His constant companion through the lanes and fields was his German Shepherd, Holly, trained up as an attack dog, who only Bert could control. He frequently asked our guests, who might have gone for a walk around the lanes, to ‘Stop right thur!’ This was not addressed to his own dog but to the person walking. He would then make a great palaver of putting the slavering beast onto a chain.
Bert had been used to storing his logs in that then-empty Pointy Room which had an open outside door leading into the communal garden. Bert knew his rights and announced that he would hang onto them even after we had bought the cottage and moved in.
But Bert was a betting man, and when the would-be vendor of our cottage turned up at Bert’s one night with a wodge of one hundred one-pound notes (which were legal tender in 1988) and offered them to Bert if he would sign a form relinquishing his right to store the logs there, Bert leapt at the chance and we were able to convert the log store, into our guest bedroom.
MARY: It can be chilly in there but, once installed in the bed, guests invariably attest to having had a sound night’s sleep. I think it’s because it’s cosy being in a room off another room where you can hear a television still going and a log fire crackling and, of course, once the television is turned off there is nothing but silence from the gloriously empty countryside around the cottage, or ‘Little House on the Prairie’ as Giles, a member of the soil association, refers to it.
GILES: Otherwise guests stay in the Slit, also known as Room Three. This is a tiny room only slighter bigger than a sleeper on a Scottish train. We named the room the Slit after an anecdote of Mary’s mother.
This involved the outing of a couple, a very old woman and a very young man, who no one in Mary’s family could believe could be romantically involved and yet when, in front of overnight guests, they disappeared together into a very small bedroom, described by Mary’s mother as ‘a slit of a room’, to spend the night, the family had to conclude that they were indeed a couple.
GILES: I enjoyed the visit of Cyril and Ursula. Usually, however, I prefer to have a single person to stay in the cottage. As a house guest, a single person is a much more manageable commodity. As Mary says, guests tend to act as human buffers between us and, in fact, they do make me behave better than I would otherwise.
If there are more than two guests, I tend to start annoying them. My grandmother said I was born to annoy. A boy whose surname was Arkle, like the horse, shared a study with me at school and I used to do elaborate spiral shaped designs in felt pen on the leaves of his tropical houseplants. Arkle was intrigued by the manifestations which he attributed to an infinitesimally small exotic pest which must be lurking on the underside of the leaves of the plant. To my satisfaction he wasted many hours with a magnifying glass trying to locate the mythical bug. It all came to a head one day when I went too far and drew a smiley face on one leaf.
I believe it all dates back to Middle Child Syndrome and wanting to get attention. In childhood at least I could always be sure of being snapped at even if I couldn’t get any other attention.
In the 1990s I owned a spring-loaded, ex-World War shell cartridge which dispensed one-pound coins and which I used, on occasions, to partially pay my Jungian psychoanalyst when I visited him in North London. I did this first because I felt it would highlight how difficult it was for me to raise the money for the sessions, and secondly to see if I could get a rise out of him – which would, of course, be unprofessional of him. I considered the few occasions when he did rise to be personal triumphs. Once, having finished the session and left the room, I popped my head back round the door and asked him if he had anything planned for the weekend. He snapped back, ‘That’s an inappropriate question. You’re not a colleague of mine. You’re an analysand.’
And once when I asked him, while writing a cheque to top up the coins I had dispensed, to remind me of the spelling of his name. ‘It’s Newman. There’s only one way to spell it and you’ve asked me about four times already!’ These I considered the high points of our relationship. Now, looking back, I realise that what could have been a unique journey of self-exploration was probably one of the wrong channels into which to divert my abilities to annoy.
The coin dispenser was more appropriately used in the days when I used to accept pheasant shooting invitations – despite the fact that all the other so-called guns were around a foot taller than me. I liked to tip the keeper using the one-pound dispenser kit, which I often had to struggle with, while the other ‘gentlemen’ were discreetly palming him a stiff note.
I know I am annoying to Mary when I stay up late for no real reason. Why do I stay up till 2 am watching B horror movies? For example, The Hills Have Eyes, Wes Craven’s movie, shot on location in the badlands of Dakota, about cannibalistic mutants from nuclear experiments who have devolved into a subspecies who prey on innocent campers and specialise in grabbing their feet from concealed mineshafts and yanking them down inside.
My reasoning is that I feel it’s my duty to watch, almost in the role of censor, so I can warn my children not to. Although I do have standards and would never watch any of the Human Centipede franchise…
GILES: Before Gogglebox, both Mary and I believed ourselves to be so busy that when disputes arose, there wasn’t time to let one have the chance to put their point across while the other one listened. As a consequence, we tended to both speak at the same time.
Some years ago, Mary made a double appointment for me with our excellent GP. Anti-depressants were then, as now, all the rage, and one of our friends (whose whole family had been chemically coshed) insisted that I too needed to be medicated. Moreover, Mary’s older friend Marigold, a professional psychotherapist, said my distinct lack of artistic, financial and even social ambition were markers to signal that I was suffering from depression.
When the time came for the appointment I refused to go unless Mary came too. In the surgery I announced that it wasn’t I who was in need of medical treatment it was instead clearly Mary. The excellent GP gleaned that we would do well to have ten (free) sessions of marital counselling provided by and at the surgery at tax payers’ expense. We took him up on the offer.
We enjoyed the sessions very much…at least I did, because (as with the Jungian analyst) I managed to make the counsellor lose her cool with me.
Mary had complained that I followed our nanny around the house too much to check on what she was doing. On one memorable occasion, while she was making the children’s tea in our tiny galley kitchen off Room Four, another room without precise designation but on whose table I was sorting chestnuts, the children ran through from the sitting room to urge Melly to come and watch J K Rowling on television.
Melly duly hurried through and I allegedly caused resentment by taking the opportunity to quickly follow her into the sitting room with a duster, saying, ‘That reminds me Melly. The screen needs a dust and polish. Perhaps you could do that while you’re watching.’
Mary had taken exception to this interference. The counsellor asked me what had been my motivation. I explained that I identified strongly with Hudson, the butler in Upstairs, Downstairs, memorably played by Gordon Jackson, who believed there was a natural social order. The Bellamys were on the rung above Hudson and the kitchen maids were technically on the rung below him. But Hudson somehow pulled off the brilliant feat of being neither upstairs nor downstairs but ‘on the landing’ so to speak.
Since I believed that, although in the outside world I too was ‘on the landing’, within the cottage, I surmised, I was at the top of the class pecking-order. I therefore considered it was incumbent on me to ensure that Melly worked as hard as possible.
The counsellor snapped, ‘I hope you are being facetious because if you seriously believe in any natural social orders in the late twentieth century, then these sessions are at an end.’
I consider it was very unprofessional of her to have risen to my bait.
But the sessions taught us a valuable lesson regarding the resolution of inter-marital disputes. This is that a couple will make no progress if they both speak at the same time. Mary and I found that just being able to express our grudges without the other interrupting was therapy in its own right. Ever since, during arguments, we will use an oven timer to take turns to allow each other five uninterrupted minutes for putting our individual point across. One holds forth whilst the other one listens although Mary has, on occasion, required me to wear a gag while it’s her turn to speak.
MARY: Marital concessions: I’ve made huge progress re throwing things out since my friend Louise gave me a copy of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying by the Japanese writer Marie Kondo. Essentially, Kondo’s message is that you should process one category of clutter at a time. Let’s say you start with cardigans. Collect all the cardigans in the house from wherever you have stored them. Place them all together in a pile. View them. When you see how many you have you will find it so much easier to differentiate between the ones which ‘spark joy’ in you and the excess which, realistically, you will probably never wear again and, in fact, feel indifferent towards. You make a pile for the charity shop, the dump, or to give away to friends.
You then move on to skirts, dresses, coats, hats, even underwear. Then you start going through books, kitchen equipment, cosmetics and so on.
The theory is that you are eventually left with a house which only contains things which you definitely love. Using this method I have managed to dispose of at least three car-boots full of ‘grot’, yet Giles is blind to the improvements.
The clutter dysmorphia from which he suffers, i.e., miscalculating the amount of clutter there is, was probably triggered in the first place by the incident when our shoe designer friend Emma Hope moved house and gave me about 30 pairs of her own lightly worn Emma Hope shoes. Equivalent value today to the three females of the household all with size 39 feet to around £10,000, but Giles could only view the treasure trove as ‘clutter’.
Then there was the time when our friend India got divorced. She and I were having lunch in London when she announced that she was going up to Scotland the next day, to clear her wardrobe and take all the contents to a charity shop in Dundee.
‘Can you tell me which shop and its address?’ I enquired.
‘Why?’ asked India.
‘Because I’ll be going up there and standing outside the shop the next morning ready to walk in and buy everything. When else would I be able to afford such quality stuff?’
We laughed, knowing it wouldn’t happen, but a few days later a delivery van pulled up outside and a courier came staggering towards the cottage with three washing-machine-sized boxes full of clothes – the entire former wardrobe of superkind India.
The contents have stood me and our daughters in great stead over the last ten years but instead of being grateful for the savings, Giles felt suffocated.
‘I’ll only allow you to take these into the cottage, Mary, if there is a simultaneous stream of clothes going out. So I’m going to stand here with these empty boxes until you’ve filled each one of them with an equivalent amount that I can take to the dump.’
‘Why are you robbing us of this moment of peak happiness?’ we three females screamed.
Looking back, I can see why Giles might have felt threatened by size of the influx. What was annoying though, was the Basil Fawlty-type mania and urgency with which he wanted to see the same amount of clothes going out.
GILES: In my view, the most destructive thing a ‘friend’ can do to us is to gift us another plethora of their own unwanted clothes. They turn the cottage into an obstacle course.
The one exception to the hoarding disaster is that Mary unearthed from the attic a video called No Going Back: Janique. This documentary about an English woman, Jane, who bought an island on Nicaragua’s mosquito coast for £150,000, named it Janique, a combination of ‘Jane’ and ‘Mustique’, and moved her children and husband there, is one of the most interesting things I’ve ever seen. It’s a grotesque inversion of the dream of buying a desert island, in a tale that would have provided suitable material for Joseph Conrad. Others agree so much so there is an online forum about it but, it soon came to be viewed as one of the most ‘unsuitable’ programmes ever broadcast, and so it has been deleted from Channel 4’s catch up site. It has achieved cult status amongst cottage visitors who watch this videotape (we have one of the last households in Britain with a video machine) with mouths agape.
