It has been said that ‘though the mills of God grind slow, yet they grind exceeding small.’ The mills of bureaucracy and government in the UK, however, merely grind slow. We’ve been living in our new abode for nearly one month, but are yet to get a phone line; bank account; internet access or a TV connection and license. We are sorry to have been out of contact for so long and look forward to being able to use skype, email and this blog to keep up to date with all our family and friends.
Dairy Cottage is a cute little stone-and-brick semi-detached house built in the early 1800s as part of a dairy on an estate. Our neighbours, who share the other part of the semi, have lived and worked here for fifty-four years and have been extremely helpful in giving us advice and hints on places to shop and how to use various appliances we aren’t used to. Our house was refitted a few years ago with modern kitchen cupboards and a new stove (the English call it a ‘cooker’) but is otherwise much as it has been for years, apart from fresh coat of paint the week before we moved in.
We’ve a little glassed-in porch as you go through the front door, then a short hallway which provides the entry into the three rooms on the ground floor and the staircase. We’ve used the biggest ground floor room as a lounge room, and the other long narrow room full of windows as a playroom for Ewan. The final downstairs room is the kitchen which is floored with very old red terracotta tiles. We’ve a small table, two chairs and E’s highchair in the kitchen, which is where we eat our meals and where H and E spend much of their day when not outside. The kitchen is also the warmest room in the house, heated as it is by the residual heat from next door’s Rayburn stove which backs onto one wall of our kitchen. Both the lounge room and E’s playroom have working fireplaces (for coal & wood fires) with lovely old mantel pieces, which at present are doing duty as bookshelves.
From the hallway you can either go downstairs into the cellar (a nice cool place suitable for storing cheese, I’m sure!) where the boiler lurks, silently for the most part, and our dryer sits; or you can go up four wide shallow steps to the first landing, off which is a small bathroom with a lovely view onto the back garden. From this first landing you then go up seven narrow creaky stairs to the second (and final landing) off which (up one stair) is the master bedroom; E’s small room; the guest room and a dressing room that leads into the main bathroom. The highest room in the house is the airing cupboard which is up two very deep stairs from the bathroom. The master bedroom and the bathroom also have fireplaces and the corresponding mantelpieces and there is a central heating range in every room except the kitchen and the landing bathroom. There is quite a bit of storage in built-in cupboards in two of the bedrooms and the dressing room, which is quite unusual in a lot of English houses and for which we are very thankful. And that is the sum total of our lovely Dairy Cottage.
Except, of course, for the garden, which, when I first saw it, I remembered as small, but it is actually quite a reasonable size. You get to the garden through the back kitchen door. On the left hand side is a gate leading into the next door neighbours’ lovely garden; then the oil fuel storage and a small brick shed where we keep coal and the gardening tools. Heading up the garden path, on the right hand side is a long garden bed about 1.5 metres wide running up along the fence line, while on the left is lawn all the way to the next paddock broken only by a hedge which serves to give us some privacy. The garden bed is lovely in the English country garden style – full of bluebells; buttercups; daffodils; forget-me-nots; foxgloves; periwinkles; raspberry bushes (soon to be covered with lovely ripe fruit); roses and violets.
It was also stuffed to bursting with weeds, mainly ground elder and stinging nettles, which by dint of careful perseverance we have removed.
H and E have sown seeds (in very haphazard fashion) of sweetpeas, stocks, nigellas, poppies, lettuce and rocket and are keen to see what fruits are produced by their labours. Above this garden bed – running almost parallel – strung between the coal shed and another corrugated shed at the top end of the bed, is our washing line. It was there when we arrived and we are very grateful for its presence.
Despite the fact that people look at our washing askance, we love being able to dry it in the open air as at home. People similarly comment on how ‘old-fashioned’ it is to have a top-loading washing machine, when we tell them what we used in Australia, and are horrified when we say that we wash our clothes in cold water only! It is clear that we won’t be able to dry our washing outside for most of the year here, but H intends to make the most of it while she can.
There is a further shed beyond the corrugated one, made of wood, and bordered by a forest of stinging nettles and some well established young elders, which must come out. There is also an old, dead, spindly tree that we had to pull out of the big garden bed for fear it would fall on top of one of us, and it will need to be sawn up and put on our next door neighbours’ bonfire pile. R is in charge of the mowing, given his recent prowess, but is lamenting the lack of his Australian tools, as he is currently using a flymo electric lawnmower to cut the lawn and it is a laborious effort.
The estate on which we live is about 3000 acres in size and is split between arable land and woodland. At the moment there are about 1800 acres under cultivation with oilseed rape (which we know as canola) and wheat.
There are about 35 acres planted with soybeans and maize, but this is to feed the pheasants during the growing season, before the hunting begins. E and H try to go for a walk most days and tend to walk past all the farm buildings and machinery (which E loves to look at) and through the canola fields towards a huge Cedar tree. Today our walk was all in the blue unclouded weather and I am convinced we are experiencing a true English summer’s day. Our walk was improved further by being given a huge bag of lettuce which was delicious in our lunch salad.
All in all, reading over this before I post it, it sounds rather idyllic and I’m conscious of how blessed we are to have been given the opportunity to live here and experience this kind of life. It’s not all perfection however! There’s the little matter of the lack of mobile phone reception; the fact that it will be horridly cold in winter; the nasty finding of a dead rat on the driveway two days ago; the certainty that we are currently giving house (and chimney) room to a small and very lost bat who likes to fly around at night – when else would a bat fly, after all?; as well as the multiple creaks and cracks in a house like ours.
We love living here and E is appreciating the bigger spaces and freedom to play.
More of him (and Dairy Cottage) in posts to come!
(Written 17 June 2010)
allthingstendingtowardtheeternal 