The moment Brian saw a magazine advertisement for the sale of Biddulph Old Hall, he was gripped by foreboding. He felt sure that if I were ever to catch sight of the photograph of the gaunt stone tower rising out of a cluster of mournful ruins, a calamitous chain of events would be set in motion. It was an uncannily wise and perceptive worry, which led him to hide the magazine and not mention it for two or three days. Then his own curiosity got the better of him and he slipped it, open, on to my desk (fig. 1).
I glanced at the picture and began to read. The text described the remnants of a great Elizabethan mansion on the edge of the Staffordshire moorlands which had been attacked in the English Civil War and brought to ruin. Alongside them, in fact built in to them, was a seventeenth-century inhabited stone farmhouse.
‘What do you think?’ Brian asked nonchalantly.
I slowly took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes.
‘We’ll have to buy it, obviously.’
Ten minutes later we had made an appointment to view it the following day. Worse still, an hour after that we had set off to find it.
Brian and I run a design business restoring period houses for clients, and for years had been searching for one special project to renovate ourselves. We had recently borrowed a lot of money to buy Bletchley Manor, a ruinous manor house in north Shropshire. It was desperately in need of major surgery if the disintegration of its timber frame was to be halted before it reached the point of collapse, and demolition. We had drawn up plans and got listed building consent for a radical restoration of the building from a sad collection of bedsits to the important historic house it really was. Work had begun with a drastic strip-out so that the deep-seated structural problems could be assessed, and a programme for tackling them put in hand. So what were we doing, meandering about the back lanes of Staffordshire on a rain-sodden January evening searching for yet another decrepit manor house?
We arrived at two low stone piers supporting a fractured iron gate, newly painted brilliant white over its pitted, corroded surface to try to disguise its decay. The gate was standing open and in the car headlights we could see a rutted drive disappearing steeply downhill between dripping, leafless beech trees. Without warning, a light flicked on – and a surreal apparition emerged from the impenetrable void. It was a building so incomprehensible in shape, mass and texture that we could not begin to decipher it. Facades from moorland farmhouses were juxtaposed with reticent ashlar elements which in turn collided with mighty, castle-like, sandstone blocks. Above all this, a cacophony of anarchic twisted roofs straddled their way upwards till they were crowned by an octagonal tower, the ogee dome of which provided a climax of ghoulish melodrama to the whole fantastic edifice. It utterly defied classification. Some parts were symmetrically arranged, but they made no attempt to conform to Italianate ideals of harmony. Equally, there was no hint of the contrived, spiky disorder of Victorian medievalism.
As suddenly as we had been admitted to this startling world, it vanished when the security light went off. We had been initiated into the mystical world of Biddulph Old Hall and we knew that, despite our better judgement, we would be back the next morning to view it. The following day the rain was replaced by pallid January sun. The clash of discordant fragments of masonry was no less peculiar than it had been the night before, but now the cumulative effect was more gently eccentric than monstrously assertive. The tower and the highest chimney stacks were revealed as being of a different stone, which at least made them understandable as distinct phases of construction.
The undisturbed quality of the hall and its setting seemed even more unusual in daylight than it had when the surrounding countryside was lost in darkness. The land fell away into a gentle valley beyond the building, made up of a series of hedged or stone-walled fields interspersed with copses and larger patches of woodland. There were glimpses of a river in the valley bottom, beyond which the land rose to a long ridge, sparsely dotted by sandstone farmsteads with long tracks snaking up to them. Even though it was January, there was only a single gap in the trees bordering the river far below, through which we could catch a glimpse of traffic. The whole pattern of the land was lyrically evocative of an age before intensive farming or ribbon housing development. The tower and its cluster of supporting structures lay in a context of enduring repose that was so improbable near Stoke-on-Trent that it was difficult to believe it had not been deliberately contrived for effect (fig. 2).
The car came to a halt in oozing mud and we sat in silence, absorbed by the still presence of the old house in its remote hiding place, apparently oblivious to the neurotic world around it. Far away across the Cheshire plain the weak sun shone through a slight haze on to the great white dish of the Jodrell Bank telescope.
Fig. 2. Biddulph Old Hall from the entrance gate – a disconcerting collision of shapes and textures.
Fig. 3. ‘The mud comes free’ – the back elevation of the Old Hall.
We had just remarked on the comparatively conventional character of the house’s back elevation when the door opened and a slim woman emerged.
‘The mud comes free, you’ll be glad to hear!’ she called as we got out of the car and squelched our way towards her. She stepped back into the house as we approached, revealing a step down from the threshold, over which two alarming little rivulets of water were flowing (fig. 3).
We shook her proffered hand. Mrs Smith was about sixty, with the manner of a slightly acerbic schoolmistress taking in hand two dawdling nine-year-olds. Brian and I gazed along a narrow passage with steep stairs rising along its left-hand wall. There were two poor-quality flush doors with plastic handles to left and right. The absolute predictability of the layout gave us the feeling of having walked into a conventional semi-detached house of the 1930s. The space felt mean, dark and dismayingly commonplace. How could this meagre corridor be the first experience of being enveloped by the hidden tower house we had driven up to? Every part of what we were looking at was a banal travesty, ruthlessly imposed upon the ancient fabric of the house.
Even then, in that first moment of engagement, we had a sense of outrage that something so inherently unique and precious, all the more valuable for being difficult to comprehend, had been deliberately suppressed and tamed. Before we had regained our equilibrium, Mrs Smith was chivvying us through the door on the right to her kitchen.
After the hall, it was at least animated by the cluttered chaos of everyday use. Indeed, such a density of necessities and bric-à-brac had been compressed into one low, dimly lit space that it had aquired the all-embracing claustrophobia of a caravan or canal barge. The confrontation of decorative idioms, working one against the other, and all, to varying degrees, in conflict with the underlying character of the building, was eclectic to the point of exhaustion. The walls at the far end of the room had been clad in varnished pine boards, and fitted with starkly simple white melamine units. However, the reticent intent of this ensemble had been completely submerged beneath a conglomeration of wine racks, sieves, painted plates, trivets, microwave cookers, abstract drawings, Greek peasant jars, cacti, ferns and scented candles. In the centre of the room this homely hotch-potch collided with the stern mass of a great corbelled chimney breast, obscured beneath an ill-fitting skin of woodchip wallpaper above a venerable cream Aga.
‘So that’s the kitchen – no doubt as designers you think it very passé!’
She led the way out into the hall.
‘Not that I’m out of sympathy with that! If I’d not got bogged down here who knows what subversive innovations might not have sheltered me. After all, I’m a modernist at heart!‘
As she spoke she reached the end of the hall and opened a door into another world. It was a disturbing place, with an atmosphere as distinct as it was possible to get from the banality of the hall and kitchen. It rode roughshod over the contrived ordinariness of those spaces.
Brian and I literally gasped as we stepped across the stone-flagged threshold of the room. Never in all our years of working with period houses, in every stage of dereliction or cosseted preservation, had we walked into a space that so vividly and brutally conveyed a sense of the remote past.
Fig. 4. ‘She opened the door into another world’ – The Great Hall as we first saw it.
It spoke of a harsh, workaday existence. There was no attempt to embellish or elaborate in order to impress – and yet the height of the room and its wide, stone-mullioned window were a world away from the cramped hovels that housed hill farmers, high on these icy moorlands, before the agricultural revolution. The window was set high in the wall. A short passageway led to an outside door, and three other doors indicated that it was intended to function as some sort of hall from which the other rooms radiated. It was not a particularly big room, perhaps twenty feet square, so it was a surprise when Margaret Smith announced it with a flourish as the ‘Great Hall’ (fig. 4).
However, she made clear that she concurred with the opinion of Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, who had described Biddulph Old Hall as ‘the ruins of an Elizabethan mansion into which is built a late seventeenth-century house of no pretension’. Since Restoration farmhouses were not built with great halls, Mrs Smith had felt compelled to conclude that the name was derived not from historical evidence, but Victorian affectation. Her distaste for this and all things Victorian was evident in her next words:
‘It is to banish the baleful ambience of that benighted age that I have made pure white the leitmotiv of my rejuvenation of this place.’
As she said this, it dawned on us that it was the contrast between the impossibly staring white walls and the blackened beams, floor slabs and furniture that accounted for the stark cheerlessness of the room. Not only was the uniform, brilliant whiteness of the paint an historical impossibility, but the flawless texture achieved by the latex in its composition blotted out every vestige of animating patina, built up by accidents and adaptations over the centuries. Had these been visible, the fractured, time-worn materials from which the hall was made would have softened and enhanced the enigmatic character of this precious survival from a lost world.
Certainly until we, or someone else, looked into it, we were not prepared to join Mrs Smith in her whitewashed certainty that the received name ‘Great Hall’ was no more than Victorian snobbery. We knew that it did not have all the defining characteristics of a medieval hall – there was no surviving cross-passage, or visible dais. However, we could see that it had been badly mutilated over the years, so it would be foolhardy to accept everything at face value. What had been hidden or lost? What had these changes concealed about the origins of this room? The more we gazed about us, the more curious we became about what we were actually looking at.
On the far wall there was an absurdly under-scaled fire-surround dating from the 1950s, which was almost endearing in its comic inadequacy for the task of heating the space. Above it a huge blackened timber, at least 14 feet long, was set into the wall. We could easily imagine how different the character of the Great Hall would be if the original fireplace had related to the width of that beam. The whole scale and dynamics of the room would be transformed into something inherently earlier and more communal in intent. Its archaic resonance, already so arresting, would be distilled and intensified. Also, crucially, a fireplace that size would be impossible to reconcile with the house being built after 1660, as Pevsner had suggested.
Mrs Smith led the way up another intriguingly individual feature of the room. It was a set of three steps, fixed within what looked like the stalls of a stable. They were incredibly simple and massive, being formed of heavy oak boards joined directly together and fronted by posts with crudely carved square finials. They led to the ‘parlour’, which proved to be a dark room with a pungent smell of sodden soot hanging in the musty air. It was ironic in the light of Mrs Smith’s preferences, and the continuation of her brilliant white offensive, that the ‘parlour’ contrived to capture the very essence of that most doleful of British institutions, the unused front room.
However, Brian and I had already become dangerously impervious to even the most glaring defects of the house. We were too enthralled by the atmosphere of this bewitching place to do more than follow in Mrs Smith’s wake, as she chivvied us from one outlandishly improbable space to the next. We found ourselves being herded back down the steps and through a wide door on the far side of the Great Hall, where even Mrs Smith faltered for a moment in mid-sentence. She was announcing yet another ‘hall’, the Staircase Hall, as she opened the door.
Fig. 5. The puzzling Staircase Hall.
It was night in the room beyond, apart from a single strip of brightness at floor level ahead of us. As our eyes adjusted, the handrail of a staircase appeared in ghostly silhouette, its skinny spindles spaced unnaturally wide apart. It seemed to be lit by a hidden source of daylight far away in the floor above. The next moment there was a click and a paper globe above our heads illuminated the blinding white dungeon or crypt surrounding us (fig. 5).
Ahead was a low archway set at a strangely unnatural height, barely five feet at the centre. Behind it was an unplastered niche of whitewashed rubble-stone. Our sense of disquiet was increased by the presence of a door in the back wall of the niche, which was logically out of kilter with the preceding arch and so defied the coherence of everyday common sense. The stone floor was black and glistened with beads of water.
The room contained the principal staircase of the house. As Mrs Smith pointed to it, the truly abysmal workmanship of this flight of stairs became clear to us. The mitres gaped, the tiny spindles were spaced so sparsely they were clearly illegal. The gaps and mismatches had been larded with filler and then heavily overpainted with brilliant white gloss, which hung in disfiguring runs over every element of the structure. It was utterly inconceivable that anything so feeble and inept had ever formed an integral part of the fabric of a building as massive and robust as Biddulph Old Hall. The devastating effect upon the architectural integrity of the building was tragic and had the effect of devaluing the importance of what still remained. But far from discouraging us, the more the house displayed the contempt with which it had been treated the stronger our compulsion to bond with it became.
Mrs Smith crossed the hall to what she described as her pièce de resistance, the ‘quintessence’ of her contribution to the building – the Library. To our surprise the ubiquitous white walls gave way to duck-egg blue. There had been a real attempt to achieve a comfortable sitting room with a studious theme. There was a complete wall of bookshelves with upholstered chairs grouped around a brick fireplace of the inter-war era. A window looked out on to the ruins of the mansion, through which weak sunlight fell into the room. The chintz curtains and patterned fabrics ought to have created a relaxed intimate haven but, for some reason, carried no conviction. The room seemed ill at ease, forlorn and empty, rather than exuding the hush of a secluded sanctuary. There was a sense of the books being working documents or agents of self-improvement rather than beloved companions.
As we followed Mrs Smith up the dismal staircase we were careful to heed her warning not to put too much faith in the handrail. We crossed a landing and into the room above the library. Although the same dimensions as the room below, it had been painted an impenetrable black-green and seemed cavernous and sombre. Uniquely, it was lit by a huge north-facing sash window, indicating a later date than the rest of the building. The window, however, was in the last stages of dilapidation. The glazing bars were rotted through, and the discoloured glass panes were cracked or replaced by distorted hardboard. The floor had been repaired with varnished pine boards, but this petered out part-way across the room. Two bulbs hung from frayed plaited wires. The walls were completely misted over with condensation. The cold air was achingly invasive, its stagnant stillness infinitely more desolate than the healthy outdoor chill. It was a junk room, piled with cardboard boxes, broken vacuum cleaners, faded garden loungers and appalling abstract paintings from the 1970s (fig. 6).
Fig. 6. The Green Room or Studio – Mrs Smith’s ‘Waterloo’.
Mrs Smith described this room as her ‘Waterloo’, the place where she had finally drawn a limit to her commitment to rescuing the house. She recalled how, after they had been in the house three or four years, her husband John had proposed restoring this derelict room. Until then, she explained, they had dedicated their entire lives, and every penny they earned, to repairing and modernising the crumbling anachronism that fate had put in their path. She told us that she and her husband had convinced themselves there was something mysterious here – a hidden story that would reveal itself as they worked on the room.
Then, one day, the spell broke. They realised that they had become caught up in a dream world that was devouring them. They understood, in that moment, that there was no limit to the rapacious demands of this building. They could either decide to devote themselves entirely to relieving its progressive infirmity, or they could enjoy it broadly as it was and return to the vibrant world of jazz records and radical politics that they had abandoned a few years before. Disturbingly, I too sensed something intangible about this room, something hidden or forgotten, locked into it, despite its short history relative to the rest of the building. When I asked Mrs Smith what she had discovered about it she laughed.
‘Ah! You’re a sensitive, a believer! It’s drawing you in already! There was wild talk of forbidden Popish chapels and studios for nameless romantic artists. Not one jot of evidence for any of it. ‘
We set off on a chase through the rest of the house. But the pace was too unrelenting, and the labyrinth of landings, chilly bathrooms, crooked flights of stairs, bedrooms, derelict attics and box rooms was too bewildering to take in. Besides, the emotional tipping point, when our romantic infatuation with the place could have been mitigated by anything we saw, no matter how macabre, was far behind us.
Eventually we paused at the foot of a flight of stairs with the underside of the stone slates of the roof visible above us. Mrs Smith seemed intent on ignoring our interest, so we were forced to ask what it led to. She told us there was a room she never went in to. When she arrived it had contained a statue of Buddha, left by the community of Buddhist monks she had bought the house from. As we climbed the stairs she warned us that there were sometimes ‘dead things’ in the room. We pushed open an ancient plank door that caught and scraped over debris. Immediately at our feet lay the maggot-eaten carcass of a dead jackdaw, its tattered wings outstretched and its broken neck twisted into an impossible position.
The window to our right was broken, with blackened dried blood on the edge of the shattered pane and dotted across the sill. The whole floor was littered with droppings, feathers and lichen-encrusted twigs. Diagonally across the room was a tall recess with a brick stanchion rising in it that disappeared through the ceiling. Behind the stanchion was another small glassless window, with a huge bird’s nest built just inside it. The walls were Artexed in energetic swirls. Two were fitted with wooden wall lights, one broken and dangling from its wires, the other retaining a single mutilated shade, its dirty bobble fringe sagging from it.
Through the broken window was a distant, tranquil view over the far side of the valley. We watched transfixed as, far away, a single tiny vehicle slowly made its way up one of the unmade tracks to a farm. Framed by the jagged window pane, it had the intriguing intensity of the opening sequence of a film. As we gazed at it, Mrs Smith was called to her next viewing. We listened as her footsteps clattered away down the stairs.
The silence returned. Away to the left a crowd of jackdaws clucked and chattered as they wheeled around the blackened ogee dome of the tower. A kestrel flew into the middle of our view and hovered motionless.
‘Strange atmosphere,’ murmered Brian.
We were silent for a time.
‘Actually, it’s overpowering, isn’t it?’
‘In here?’
‘Yes, but all through the place. Outside as well. There’s something here. Incredibly strong. Not the usual old house spooks. A residue of something real. Too real to be laughed off. It could be sad, or even threatening, I can’t quite tell. But it pervades everything – intense, almost urgent.’
‘Steady,’ said Brian, turning to go. ‘We haven’t done the ruins yet!’
It was the scale.
Nothing had prepared us for the declamatory proportions or fractured massiveness of what confronted us when we ducked under the tomb-like arch and pulled open the door to the ruins. We blinked and gazed, unable to adjust our vision sufficiently quickly to respond to the awesome dimensions of our new surroundings. Without warning, the crooked confusion of the maltreated building, oscillating uncertainly between crude farmhouse and historic manor, was subsumed into an assertive new entity, which imposed its dominating presence upon the surrounding landscape with effortless self-assurance. The castle-like resonance of the bare stone curtain-walls, pierced by mighty arched apertures and blind openings, changed the whole character of the site. There was a greatness, a magnificence, about the scale that we had never anticipated (fig. 7).
In our minds, the poetical potency of ruins was rooted in the picturesque idylls beloved of Jane Austen’s heroines, or illustrated in the watercolour renderings of landscape parks by Humphrey Repton. Whether they were entirely contrived pieces of whimsy or genuine ruined buildings, their surroundings were invariably manipulated to evoke a sensation of refined melancholy. The abandoned fortress perched on its howling crag with foaming breakers hurling themselves against it was another popular variant. However, this relied on spartan solitude to convey its exhilarating appeal – it could not possibly coexist with avocado bathroom suites, crocheted table centres and kitchen-implement racks on the outskirts of Stoke-on-Trent.
Fig. 7. The ruins – they insisted that one engage with their former sense of self-importance, and the brutality of the forces that had been ranged against them.
The Elizabethan remnants we were looking at refused to conform to any cultural conditioning associated with ruins, either poetic or barren. They did manage to coexist alongside a fully lived-in domestic building, and their setting, although miraculously peaceful, gave no sense of being deliberately designed to heighten their scenic effect. They had an almost brutal candour, which retained clear evidence of the tumultuous struggle that had created them. There had been no attempt to soften or disguise their gaunt outlines, or repair the gaping craters where cannon balls had splintered their ashlar walls.
We had been told that the ruins were listed separately from the Grade II* house, and were designated as a Scheduled Ancient Monument. This implied a separate identity. However, as we walked round the site, we were conscious of a palpable underlying unity that bonded the ruins, the tower, the inhabited house and the great level plateau (the so-called Tilt Yard) together into a dramatic, thematic whole, despite its fragmented forms and materials. These pieces were interdependent components of a historical narrative that stretched back darkly into the distant past. The tragedy was that no one seemed to have taken the trouble to read the story written into the fabric of this wonderful place.
Despite our longing to embrace that adventure, Brian and I knew instinctively what had daunted so many before us. Interwoven with the tantalising mysteries was a thread of real danger. If we once dared to search beneath the surface of these archaic remains and expose their secrets, they would never allow us to return to the workaday world unscathed should we become overwhelmed and try to abandon them. They had the power to impoverish us materially and spiritually if we trifled with them. If we tried to cheat by investing ourselves with their charisma but simultaneously withholding our commitment to their needs, as Mrs Smith admitted she had done, they would take us prisoner, as they had her.
Yet we could not deny that the place had spoken to us. We could not ignore its yearning to be released from its current humiliating ugliness. It was no less than our duty to respond to that hypnotic cry for help, by overcoming every obstacle to getting possession of it, so that the process of saving it could begin. We had to take action. We had to risk and hazard all, or live for the rest of our lives with the knowledge that we had come face to face with our moment of destiny and fumbled the encounter so that it slipped from our grasp.
We became obsessed. We went back day after day, until eventually Mrs Smith began to ignore us. Away from the house the pace was too hectic to permit a moment’s reflection. Within days our cottage was valued and on the market. It was priced reasonably for a quick sale, and soon attracted several potential purchasers. We made an offer on Biddulph, and were immediately told it had been capped. We attempted a preemptive strike by offering the full asking price. However, the agents had arranged for the house to be advertised in Country Life the following week, and Mrs Smith would not commit until she had tested Biddulph’s appeal at national level.
The article produced new viewings and new offers. Higher offers. A Dutch auction was developing, pushing the price to a level where we could not, honestly, take part. None the less, we offered again and, when we were capped, a third time. Suddenly, without warning, the agents called for sealed bids. The effect was stunning. The ensuing days were eerily still and ordinary. Confronted by the need to write down a figure, we went through a traumatically realistic assessment of what we could actually afford, and wrote it down.
In a desperate attempt to sidestep the implications of this collision with the real world, we went to Biddulph. We skulked past the house and crossed the Tilt Yard, where we found the start of a long, falling path lined each side by huge yew and sycamore trees. We guessed it must be the Yew Walk that Mrs Smith had mentioned on one of our visits. We decided to explore it, and in no time our tentative hold on financial sobriety was swept away on a new surge of enthusiasm.
As ever at Biddulph, the correlation between the expectation set up by key words, and the shock of what actually lay before us, was disconcertingly out of kilter. What we were looking at did not even function as a passable footpath. The Yew Walk was only discernible by the high banks that bordered it. These had become home to a thriving community of badgers, whose sets dotted its whole length. Their spoil formed great mounds of rubble, which had become intermingled with fallen branches from the bordering trees. The living branches had woven themselves into a continuous canopy overhead, which drooped down in places to touch the peaks of the disorderly hillocks below. Many were gnarled yews that produced a disquieting twilight where they met, and transformed the banks below into contorted skeletons of knotted roots, sitting proud of the pitted ground like old arthritic hands.
Brian and I began to scrabble our way over the debris. As we did so, squirrels leapt across branches just above our heads, and startled rooks flapped up through the twiggy canopy. The atmosphere was distinctly forbidding, but strangely at one with the outline of the ruins when we glanced back over our shoulders.
At the far end of the walk, the path turned and fell sharply between unruly banks of holly, until it passed under a beautifully simple bridge made of large sandstone blocks. We scrambled down to it and, on the far side, found ourselves in a steep wooded valley, with a fast-running stream, known locally as the Clough. The sense of privacy or seclusion was so strong that we felt as though we were being watched. It was the mournful ghost of a beautiful place – disfigured, but still faintly discernible (fig. 8).
Below us was a wide flat area of black mud, smelling of putrefying vegetation and defaced by discarded plastic sacks, rusty corrugated iron, old tractor tyres, half-submerged supermarket trolleys and fallen trees. The stream threaded its way across the quagmire between the pieces of rubbish, until it disappeared into a concrete pipe that had been used to breach what must once have been a dam. Despite our wariness, we followed the stream until it cascaded out of the other end of the pipe, splashing down over fallen rocks and broken paving slabs, transforming them into an exuberant waterfall. Gradually, the rubbish petered out and the valley was undisturbed, except for the occasional fallen tree lying across the stream.
Fig. 8. The ghost of a beautiful place – the drained upper lake in the Clough.
The further we went, the stronger the sensation became of being drawn into an isolated, personal space, with a consciously heightened atmosphere. The stream was too good to be true. The water tumbled over weirs, rushed down little stepped rapids, and rippled over great flat plains of rock, before arriving at a second broken dam. Although this had been a substantial feat of engineering – tall and well constructed out of coursed sandstone blocks – it had been blown up to breach it and release the water held behind it. The great slabs of ivy-covered masonry, haphazardly strewn across the valley floor, bore silent witness to some ambitious human endeavour, whose purpose had been forgotten long ago.
By now an inexplicable conviction had taken hold of us. We could not rid ourselves of the sensation that the atmosphere of the Clough stream was so closely allied to the disturbing intensity of the Yew Walk and the ruins that they were bound together, not merely by their proximity to each other, but by the intervention of some manipulating historical force which we felt, but could not guess at. By the end of our walk through the wood, we had convinced ourselves that uniting the Clough valley with the hall was a vital element in understanding the true historical significance of the whole site.
We discovered that the Clough and its surroundings belonged to the brewery that owned the local pub, the Talbot. I rang them and was told that the brewery did indeed own the valley, and that they were looking to sell it. We became so transfixed by the possibilities that this presented that we lost sight of the date when the bids were to be opened for the house, the acquisition of which had somehow become a foregone conclusion in our minds.
Then, at 2 o’clock on a busy Thursday afternoon, my phone rang.
‘Hello, Mr Daly, this is Strutt & Parker. This is just a courtesy call, really. Mrs Smith has asked me to inform you that your bid for Biddulph Old Hall has not been successful. You were outbid by two other parties . . .’
I stopped hearing her. I had passed into a state of shock – a sort of pins and needles of the soul. Somewhere, miles away, I heard myself asking how much more they had been offered, and being told it was in excess of £100,000. Perhaps, mercifully, this figure was hopelessly out of our reach. The game was up – except that we had ceased to perceive it as a game long, long ago. By the time I put the phone down, Brian had heard enough, and did not ask.
What had happened to us? It was a house, bricks and mortar or, in this case, a haphazard pile of stones – that was all. How could it be that the two of us, Brian and I, hard-bitten old professionals at the property game, who had worked on houses old, new, ugly and beautiful all over the country and beyond, had so comprehensively lost contact with our sanity that we had honestly come to believe in some sort of mystical destiny that bound us and Biddulph Old Hall together? It was unthinkable.
Very gradually, with the aid of a few drinks, we began the agonising process of applying a dishonest film of rational ointment over our raw disappointment. By the end of the first evening, we had made a valiant effort to become resigned, rather than speechless with resentment and self-pity. After the first week it began to occur to us that it might, possibly, be for the best in the long run. After all, we still had Bletchley Manor, and this gave us the opportunity to concentrate wholeheartedly on that and, of course, our work for our clients. By the end of two weeks we were congratulating ourselves on a narrow escape, and vowing to learn the lessons of our stupidity.
That was when the phone rang again.
‘Mr Daly?’ I knew that voice. ‘I’m ringing on behalf of Margaret Smith. She has instructed me to accept your offer for Biddulph Old Hall – if the house is still of interest to you. Both the overbidders have withdrawn . . .’
I was trembling.
‘We’ve got it!’ I whispered. ‘We’ve bloody well got it!’
‘Of course, I think it was meant,’ said Brian as he enveloped me in a footballer’s hug. ‘Never doubted it for a moment!’
Fig. 9 (see page 45). The Staircase Hall after restoration – a conundrum resolved.
