MARY: As I was applying moisturiser this morning in the upstairs bathroom off the miniature library, Giles suddenly burst into the cottage (from the garden as usual) and I heard his voice shouting ‘Mary! Mary! Mary!’
Eventually I had to come to the top of the stairs. ‘Quickly,’ said Giles. ‘Quickly, get a cushion we don’t want. Quickly! I’m a busy man. I’ve no time for explanations.’
It turned out that he’d seen a sixty-something workman, completely bald-headed (in the manner of Yul Brynner in The King and I) kneeling on Sandi Harrison’s doorstep, doing some sort of grouting and, since he had no kneeling mat, Giles, who had been spying on him from the scaffolding, realised he must have been in agony. I said we didn’t have any cushions we didn’t want; however I put one inside a plastic bag to protect it and brought it along to the boiler-suited workman, who had a weather-beaten face.
Since Giles doesn’t like to use up ‘emotional energy’ talking to people, he got me to do it for him. The man, called Patrick, told me he is a specialist in brickwork and woodwork and that he used to work on stately homes and historic buildings but now he wants to work around here as he lives locally and would be able to cycle to work. When he brought the cushion back later, we chatted to him and we felt that he seems to be on Giles’s wavelength eco-wise.
MARY: We have been so missing Gug and his fellow bed blockers. It’s one of the most stressy things about living in a cottage with twelve rooms because Giles likes to call me from the room he is standing in, and then start saying in that room whatever it is he has to say.
I then have to scuttle downstairs or otherwise towards him, invariably arriving at the tail end of his speech only to have him berate me saying, ‘I’m a busy man. The master of the house doesn’t expect to have to repeat himself.’
It doesn’t occur to him that he should come to look for me first, and then start speaking.
But none of it matters if we have a live-in Gug because then I get the ‘sympathy vote’ and often the Gugs question their master. ‘Giles,’ they ask, ‘why don’t you go into the room where you know Mary to be sitting rather than calling her from a few rooms away?’
One of the reasons I found Gug One’s presence in the cottage so agreeable was that he used to run on his young legs to whichever room Giles was calling from and then run back on them to the room I was in to report, like Mercury, whatever it was that Giles wanted and then back again with my response. This all added to the sense of calm that would prevail when Gug was resident. We envy our richer contemporaries Buster and Sharon who have an intercom system in their large cottage, which means that every so often a disembodied voice enters every room saying something like ‘have you seen my black trainers?’ and then the other person calmly replies yes or no. No shouting need take place.
Cyril offered to buy me, not Giles, a loudhailer as used by coxes in the sport of competitive rowing so that I don’t have to yell my lungs out to get Giles in from the garden, but I think this would introduce too brutal an element into the country atmosphere. However, we both agree Giles has more time on his hands than I do so if he wants me, he doesn’t need a loudhailer he can just come in from the garden and wander at his leisure around all the twelve rooms till he finds me.
So, because tension in the cottage has been unnecessarily high in the absence of Gugs, I’ve taken steps and tonight we’ve got a new starter Gug coming to stay before starting work for me tomorrow morning. He’s a good-natured and intelligent chap, and at 22, young enough to still think it quite fun to work for me and Giles…I’ve told him that the other Gugs have all gone on to be extremely successful.
MARY: Gug Six was on my side when Giles came back from the hairdresser, Ingrid, at Curl Up & Dye. As he left for the salon after breakfast, Giles announced to Gug Six that he was going to ask for what he called a ‘knuckle cut’, as by having it cut extra short this would mean he could get the value of two haircuts for the price of one.
‘But that would be self-sabotage Giles!’ marvelled Gug Six. ‘Surely you wouldn’t want to look terrible?’
When Giles returned he’d clearly thought better of asking for a knuckle cut. He still looked much worse though. And although he has a very thick head of hair and is absolutely not balding anywhere on his head, Ingrid has, for reasons best known to herself, created a weird new parting on the back of his head which makes him look as though the thick thatch at the front was a comb-over as in Robert Robinson’s day.
Gug Six took a picture of the back of Giles’s head with his mobile and showed it to Giles to show him what we meant.
I expected him to be dismayed. Instead dimples appeared in his cheeks (a sign that he’s happy). ‘That’s absolutely hideous,’ he enthused. ‘What on earth inspired Ingrid to do that?’
‘Did you ask her to?’
‘Well, yes,’ he confessed, ‘and Ingrid takes the view that the customer is always right. She’s always done me proud.’
MARY: When I was pregnant with our first baby, we didn’t ask the sonographer to tell us what sex it was – we wanted it to be a surprise. Just as we used to enjoy getting films developed in the chemist for the very same reason. But many of the layman observers told us we were expecting a boy. So we were prepared for one, although they were wrong. I was amazed when Giles insisted that the baby must be called Charles. Why? It seemed so poncey as a name and with no relevance to anyone in our family. Then I overheard him chuckling on the telephone to his brother Pip.
‘I’m going for the name Charles. It means, later on, when Mary is calling one of us we can pretend we thought she was calling for the other one. Really good potential for wind-ups.’
Unfortunately, Giles seems to thrive on tension, both low and high grade. It’s one of the reasons why he encourages Phoebe, our Tibetan Spaniel, to stand at the window of Room Two, or indeed at any window to which he could climb onto the sill of, to bark.
GILES: My feeling is that a Tibetan Spaniel should be allowed to fulfil the role of his ancestors, which is to take up a viewing point high on the monastery wall and with his exceptional eyesight be able to spot and announce the arrival of strangers heading from a great distance across the plains towards the monastery so the monks could send out the mastiffs in defence.
By enabling the dog to yap as much as he liked, it would make him feel happy that he was protecting his family, since, apart from keeping monks’ thighs warm, this is what the dog was bred for.
But I was ticked off the other day by Stewart Vardens because our dog’s barking meant that he couldn’t hear the music. ‘What music?’ I asked. ‘The music of the hounds’, he replied. This seemed a rather elevated thought from someone I had thought of as a gardener and terrier man. It had never occurred to me Stewart could regard the barking of the hounds with such poetic feeling as to describe it as music, and it means that I now shut Phoebe up when the hounds are in the area.
MARY: Room Four is where Phoebe jumps onto the sofa to have his harness fitted and then his lead clipped onto it. Scenting my walking boots, he came eagerly towards me. Phoebe’s made us very happy. Owning a dog, in my view, is only partly about the affection and the guaranteed welcome when you come through the door. In a world where humans are complicated and difficult to please, at least you can be sure of making one domestic being blissfully happy – your dog. A dog just wants walks, company and regular food to guarantee his happiness.
So today I took him out for a four thousand step walk, measured on the health app of my iPhone, and he came jauntily behind me with tail high, walking all the way off the lead. Now that he is older he no longer has the appetite for chasing sheep that he had when young. Nothing could give him a greater sense of power than being able to round up a whole flock of much bigger animals and end up with one of them, lying on her back, bicycling as Phoebe went in for the jugular. We had two very near misses vis-à-vis Phoebe being shot by the farmer. Farmers have no compunction in shooting a badly-behaved dog because sheep-worrying is a very real problem.
When I got back to the cottage our neighbour Jake the sweep was standing outside talking to Dave Dewey, the thatcher. Jake is rather magnificent, a sort of column of countryman with all the characteristics of John Bull, classically stout and stubborn. Jake bows to no one with any sort of conformity, he just dresses and acts to suit himself, with a thick beard and glistening eyes. Neither does he doff his cap to the residents of the ‘Big House’, despite living in this village for all of his seventy years. Giles likes to fantasise that Jake is descended from agricultural Luddites who, according to the Victorian nature writer Richard Jefferies, used to wreck machinery in this very area. In his mind, Giles – an obsessive Richard Jefferies reader – likes to trace a direct line between now and then.
For twelve of those years Phoebe barked at the window every time Jake walked past with Ernie, his Lakeland terrier, as he led Ernie through the village and up past the church to the Downs. Even when Ernie died, Phoebe continued the maddening tradition of barking at the window, just at the sight of Jake.
‘Don’t stop him!’ Giles always cooes. ‘I like the sound of him barking.’
‘You like it! You must be mad. What is there to like about barking?’
‘It shows he still has spirit.’
GILES: Mr Dewey has just popped a bill through the letter box for replacing the roof ridge and a large patch on the north side of the cottage.
MARY: I took Phoebe out for his walk. When I came back towards the cottage, I saw Dave Dewey next to his truck, tidying some bundles and rolling up some chicken netting. It was raining, so I didn’t linger. I just said pleasantly, ‘Oh thank you for your bill, Dave. I assume you don’t want to be paid immediately.’ After all, he only started five weeks ago.
‘Well,’ he countered. ‘Not immediately. You could pay half immediately and then the rest of it at the end of next week when I’ve finished.’
GILES: This gave me a shock – who has got thousands of pounds in their current account apart from Sir Philip Green?
Mary says that must mean Dave is making a very handsome sum of money every week since he only started five weeks ago. Nice work if you can get it. But then he works nine-eleven.
A lot of the time because the job is on the street side with scaffolding he has been distracted by Jake the sweep and Stu the gardener, both of them Vardens, fox-hunting terrier men, descended from original beaker folk, so called because of their characteristic pottery vessels which can be seen in Devizes museum, and all unaware that they are chatting amiably in MY time. I am becoming vexed by this, and spend a lot of time twitching at the net curtains so to speak.
Even though I am physically standing a mere two yards from these village gossips to eavesdrop, on the other side of a one brick thick wall of a labourer’s cottage – my own – I can’t decipher a word that is being said on account of the patois in which all three men are speaking.
I’m convinced this patois is being deployed to confuse us ‘yups’. There are gales of laughter to be shared and it’s a lot more interesting than James O’Brien, the sanctimonious liberal pontificator on LBC which Mary substitutes for local birdsong. One in ten words I can hear and a lot of ‘Oh well, better get on then’, repeated over and over, before starting another conversation.
The one thing I would never dream of asking Dave Dewey is ‘are you winning?’ This is the maddening phrase repeated up and down the land by the well-meaning but patronising middle classes to any one who is labouring.
MARY: Giles’s chippiness, we have agreed, is not based on reality but more to do with nostalgia for his boyhood when definite class divisions existed and his parents were constantly changing their accents depending on to whom they were speaking. He thinks it is a red herring as his general feeling of being persecuted by the village has been deconstructed by my going through each cottage one by one and getting him to admit that everyone in the village probably does like us, even despite his eco warrior stuff. I must admit, however, that Jake Vardens probably doesn’t.
GILES: With hindsight, we should never have chosen to live under thatch – it drips on our clothes. Unlike in a normal house with guttering and drainpipes, it goes down the back of our necks. This is why we are gagging for a porch, with a place to put wellies and a bench to lever them off again. The constant drip drip drip can be Chinese water torture but then Mary says I’m mad anyway. As Richard Jefferies put it in The Toilers in the Field:
The cold wind comes through the ill-fitting sash and drives with terrible force under the door. Very often the floor is one step lower than the ground outside, and consequently there is a constant tendency in rainy weather for the water to run or soak in. The elm tree overhead, that appeared so picturesque in summer, is now a curse, for the great drops fall perpetually from it upon the thatch and on the pathway in front of the door. In great storms of wind it sways to and fro, causing no little alarm, and boughs are sometimes blown off it, and fall upon the roof.
The thatch of the cottage is saturated; the plants and grasses that almost always grow on it, and the moss, are vividly, rankly green; till all dripping, soaked, overgrown with weeds, the wretched place looks not unlike a dunghill.
MARY: Looking back, Giles has reflected today, ‘I would say that I have probably wasted a good ten years of my life in trying to prove that other people were bad and I was good in various lone wolf eco campaigns against palm oil production, cow parsley spraying and the methodology of planting new trees where there were already trees. Questioning the public funding for the ruination of an existing wild hedge which seemed to me wasteful and unecological, grubbing up these older trees which could have been coppiced or pollarded in order to put in the same bog-standard euro mix of mixed hedges of the same varieties no doubt grown from saplings in Holland up and down the country making no concession to regional variations.’
His eco activities make him occasionally paranoid when we are driving in the nearby lanes.
The locals are always friendly towards me but it is a difficult juggling act since whenever we are driving and another vehicle approaches Giles always hisses, ‘Don’t wave! Just lift one finger of acknowledgement. Or do a knowing head swivel.’ But as the passenger I can’t do this since I’m not gripping a steering wheel. And I can’t depend on Giles to do it since he rather relishes conflict. Moreover, he often spurts when he sees someone we know coming towards us because this will trigger a rictus of fear and anxiety in my face and preclude my beaming pleasantly as I scream ‘Stop it Giles!’
I am not one of those people who memorises number plates and nor can I differentiate between types of cars, unless they are Minis or Volkswagen Beetles. Hence I consider it sensible to just wave vaguely at everyone we pass…just in case I know them.
GILES: Live and let live ought to be the watchword by which villagers rub along together, cheek by jowl, in the case of our own terraced row. Our next-door neighbours are delightful, the best we have ever had since the legendary old timers Bert and Polly. The new people, Mick and Sally, are country folk through and through who obtain game birds, pheasant, partridge and wild duck by helping out with their working dogs ‘picking up the casualties’ at local shoots.
I no longer shoot owing to a bad chest, but also to the dawning realisation that after so many invitations it would be churlish not to reciprocate…which as a pauper was out of the question. The beaters and keepers didn’t seem to like my dispensing coins from my shotgun-shell coin dispenser rather than palming them a crisp note, and neither did I own a shotgun. I had to borrow one. And I certainly didn’t look the part in my wicked Uncle Donald Cotton’s dodgy antiquated Norfolk jacket, which he used to wear around the drinking dens of Soho, such as the Kismet Club, in order to build up the mystique of himself as a countryman and as if in denial that he was in the Metropolis.
Knowing my interest in, but conspicuous failure to ‘live off the land’, Mick and Sally last week donated a brace of pheasants and two mallard which I have displayed conspicuously by hanging them outside the cottage to advertise that we too are authentic country people who recognise the part played by blood sports in the preservation of traditional countryside features that might otherwise come under the plough: spinneys, ponds, rough field edges, etcetera. It also improves the flavour. Game from the butchers or supermarket has never been hung long enough to become ‘gamey’ in flavour.
Therefore, I turned a deaf ear when Mick, who is a builder working exclusively with concrete foundations, parked up his tip-up truck outside our cottage and started working in the road with an axle grinder and power tools.
He was making a dickens of a mess with sawdust and wood chips, and intermittent grinding and mechanical whining noises.
GILES: One of my guilty pleasures is watching Neighbours from Hell, a programme which in Mary’s Gogglebox words is ‘substandard on so many levels’. Often the TV neighbours will start off on a good footing on friendly terms only for a tiny incident, relating to noise or boundaries, to tip the balance towards adversity and suspicion.
We once attended a recording of Gardeners’ Question Time in the Bouverie Hall, Pewsey. I was sitting next to my betters, of a superior rank, the Sandersons, when I asked the panel the bombshell question. ‘My neighbours have built a hideous eyesore extension. Can you suggest a quick-growing evergreen climber that will help to camouflage it?’ ‘I hope your neighbours aren’t listening,’ said one panel member.’ ‘They are sitting right next to me,’ I quipped. Philip Sanderson laughed nervously.
I used to laugh at the idea of twitching net curtains but I am getting more and more twitchy myself. Not least is my strong reaction to too many ‘traffic movements’, which I consider to be something associated with the suburbs. Another of my lost causes is the creeping suburbanisation of our rustic hamlets. ‘Where are they off to now?’ I demand as I hear the car doors slamming once again. ‘They’ve only just arrived. You’d think they might want to stay in one place for more than fifteen minutes,’ I harrumph to Mary who says ‘get a life’. One of my greatest – Mary says most – irrational fears is that our neighbours might start ‘tinkering’ on their cars or vans in the street. STRICTLY NO TINKERING. Is this a sign whose time should have come?
My attitude towards tinkering she therefore deems negative and a good example of why I need a course in Neurolinguistic reprogramming. She can see on-street tinkering as a positive. As a resident of Northern Ireland who witnessed the Troubles at first hand, she sees the tinkerers outside as doubling as potential security guards or burglar deterrents.
The tinkering need only become a problem if I choose to let it do so. More annoying is the constant bombardment of helicopters flying too close to the village and crop sprayers dusting us with toxins. Oh, and the street lights. That is the project of a lifetime: to dismantle them and educate folk as to their inherent disadvantages.
It seems a shame that these stars which started their journeys so many millions of light years ago should be stymied from showing their glories a few seconds from earth by some council official in Swindon who is adhering to a street safety agenda and has consequently turned the village street into a Martian landing strip. The Campaign for Dark Skies is a peculiarly middle-class interest.
MARY: Phoebe has been acting strange, licking the sides of his plastic basket and later the eiderdown I threw down as a sheath between him and the windowseat of Room Two.
Yesterday the vet said he was probably confused by the dose of methadone he’d had for his cough.
This morning he woke me at three and wanted to go outside. We went downstairs and I opened the door to see a deluge. Phoebe walked out into it and then stood, stock still, resistant to my calls to come back, staring ahead. Eventually I had to go into the deluge myself and carry him back in. I wrapped him in a towel and we sat in silence on the sofa of Room Four. I rang Maureen the breeder. She said she thought Phoebe might have had a stroke. He’s onto his third day of no food.
MARY: We wrapped Phoebe in a fur coat and he lay on the sofa staring ahead, but he drank only water and ate no food. In the garden he walked around and around and Lee, the Gogglebox sound man, said he thought he was looking for somewhere to die. We agreed to take him to the vet in the morning.
MARY: All these recent months I have been dreading taking fourteen-year-old Phoebe to the vet, leading him in there and asking for an injection that would kill him – a dog who trusts me. I could see how ill he was though and I hoped the vet might give him daily doses of morphine so he could glide slowly out of life like a canine Keith Richards.
We wrapped Phoebe in his zip-up dog’s towelling robe and took him to the vet. He sat like a baby on my knee but I could tell there was little brain activity going on as his eyes were dull and misty and he didn’t respond when other dogs, including a spaniel, came into the waiting room. He was breathing deeply and then he gave three deep, final breaths.
And then the door opened and the vet said, ‘I’m so sorry to have kept you.’
But I wasn’t sorry. I felt proud as I said, ‘I think he’s just died,’ and we unzipped his towelling robe and the vet took his heartbeat and looked in his eyes and confirmed that he had indeed died. The vet was almost as upset as we were.
But I was proud because, as Giles said afterwards, ‘Phoebe was far more intelligent than we gave him credit for. Mum said he knew everything that was going on and he was so considerate that he even spared us the vet’s bill by dying at will and he spared himself the indignity of being put to death.’
