The Fruit of the Tree (6 page)

However, although I received sympathetic treatment from the gentleman concerned with our case, my visit made little difference. In view of the refusal of our neighbour to grant permission to the Electricity Board to cross his piece of land, certain prescribed paths would have to be followed, and as you can imagine, those paths would wend their way through skeins of red tape before arriving at a satisfactory conclusion.

We spent the weekend of the 19th July in Hove, relaxing for a change, before the impending move. We were to wake up early on Monday morning. Michael wanted to be in Guildford by eight a.m. to open the office, before driving me to the bungalow. We were ready to leave before seven o’clock and we switched on the television to see the first two men on the moon (Armstrong and Aldrin), eerily bouncing their way over its dusty surface.

Somehow, that historic event made our day seem all the more momentous and adventurous.

Coincidentally, Joan and Reg were moving too, to a house high up in the North Downs. Joan had three boys of school age, and ten years or so of her married life had been spent in that street. She was weeping as they drove away.

As for me, I shed not a tear as we drove off in the opposite direction. The house had served its purpose. It had acted as a sort of home for two and a half years, but I had sunk no roots there.

We arrived at the bungalow with the bulk of our furniture—our bed—on top of the van, and Michael immediately began work on the most important job of the day—the connecting of our gas-stove, an elderly model, with only three legs. The important thing about it was that it was able to be connected to a bottle of gas. There was no gas laid on, so the cooker was something of a survival kit. Even the iron was to be heated upon it. Old-fashioned or not, together with packets of candles, boxes of matches and torch batteries, our three-legged friend was our sole means of providing heat, hot water and light (as well as cooking facilities) for quite a long time to come.

With hindsight, we know there were things we could have done to make life a little easier. For example, we should have purchased a simple device which allows you to be connected to two bottles of gas and transfer from an empty one to a full one when necessary.

Without this facility, I lived constantly with the thrill—or fear—of running out of gas; and although we usually had spare bottles, I could neither lift them nor manoeuvre the spanner to connect them to the cooker.

It became a ritual to start the day, as we always had, by bathing. This involved heating three saucepans and a very large kettle on the cooker, and as soon as he had emptied his own water into the bath, Michael would fill up the receptacles for Robert or me. Sometimes I would bath Robert first, and then add a second helping of cooked water for myself. The little extra depth this provided gave me a feeling of luxury, though sometimes it had cooled so much, it was only equivalent to the cold water I would have added anyway. I was rather envious of Michael, as his large frame displaced so much water that he was actually covered by it, whilst I, at a little over half his thirteen stone, could never achieve that and had to be satisfied with sitting in a fairly deep puddle.

We continued this practice right through into the winter, when to start the day with a percentage of one’s body preheated seemed like a good idea.

The main problem in July, however, was not a lack of heat, but too much of it. We had no fridge, and the butter, the milk and the meat had to be bought in the smallest possible quantities. Ice cream, yoghurt and even frozen peas were a forgotten luxury, and the daily walk to the shops, carrying as much as possible on Robert’s sturdy pushchair, became another ritual.

I have never been much of a walker and in my mind I marked off the route into quarters. I had a choice between taking a narrow footpath which led away from the bungalow to the right towards the village and ran behind half a dozen houses on the main road, or walking to the left along a pathway which connected with another wider lane and then to the main road. I was resentful of any extra steps, so I initially took the route to the right, since the footpath took perhaps five minutes off the journey time. Thick holly bushes grew up high on either side of the pathway, giving it a mysterious atmosphere that was not pleasant. As summer wore on, I felt rather like the Sleeping Beauty’s prince fighting my way through the bushes. However, when they were trimmed, the sharp prickles covered the ground and made walking in open sandals almost an impossibility. I then took the alternative route, which eventually passed the houses whose gardens backed on to the footpath. I really preferred this route, as it meant that I occasionally saw human life and it was also easier for me to negotiate with the push-chair. The shortcut joined the other road at an old fashioned ‘kissing gate’, and the end of the first quarter of my journey was marked by a brick wall on the outside of which was a rambling rose and a border of salvias. I thought it was very kind of the person who lived there to attend to these plants, when he couldn’t see them himself from the inside of the wall.

The second stretch was the most boring, having only fields to observe, and this ended at the junction with another main road. A few houses appeared at this point, the main attraction of these being masses of rhododendron bushes that filled their gardens. I used to feast my eyes on the rich colours—the reds and purples and pinks—and hope that one day I might be able to offer these sights to a person passing my home.

Towards the end of the third leg of the journey was the petrol station, which seemed to me to mark the beginning of civilisation, and shortly after that came the whole range of shops, (all six of them) selling newspapers, groceries, hardware and meat, two public houses—and that was the beginning and end of the village.

Before we moved in, we had occasionally taken a Sunday afternoon stroll to the village just to get the ‘feel’ of the place, and it always seemed entirely deserted.

However, I soon found that, during the week, it was a busy little place, where the many local car owners often chose to make their purchases, in preference to the bigger towns and shopping centres within a two to four mile radius. For the time being, I was without that choice, but I soon found the friendly shopkeepers preferable to the detached supermarket staff.

The village shopkeeper is ‘owned’ by the village; they know his business and he knows theirs. For me, suddenly and for the first time, totally in isolation, the friendly chat at the end of my half hour walk was a lifeline—my only link with humanity. The hubbub of our old office/home contrasted dramatically with our quiet bungalow, for as well as the other essentials that we lacked, we were also without car and telephone. Consequently, lines of communication with the outside world were cut off, and although there were six other houses in the vicinity of our land, I rarely saw any signs of life emanating from them. Our nearest neighbour had in fact been widowed during the period of our building, for we had met her and her husband once in the early days. Although I often saw her television flashing through the windows and heard her dogs yapping, as I passed by, I did not feel able to inflict myself upon her.

Our other near neighbours, Doug and Beryl, in the foot of whose garden we resided, were almost invisible from autumn onwards. If only we had had a telephone, we, or they might have picked it up to say, ‘Why don’t you come over? Have a coffee—have a sherry,’ but to walk to someone’s front door to say the same is a much more difficult task. So we saw each other by chance, and infrequently.

Robert and I were now each other’s main companions for the major part of the day. But in some ways, I felt like one of two incompatible prisoners, sharing the same cell. There was no contemporary or friend like Joan with whom he could stay for an hour or two, not even the facility of leaving him in the office with Michael, as I had done in the past. Robert was a sociable child, and, possibly missing the activity of the office himself, constantly sought my presence. I, on the other hand, yearned for a period of complete solitude. Including him in the daily chores doubled or trebled the length of time they took, and I never found time to play with him. Sometimes I grumbled and told him to go away and play with his toys, but he still seemed to have no interest in doing so. Often in desperation, I would place him in his cot for an afternoon nap and sit reading, unkindly ignoring rising murmurs of complaint from an unsleepy child.

Another wedge between us was his masculinity. There had been a period, when as a small baby, he had felt so much a part of me that I felt uneasy when I was away from him. Now he was no longer my baby, but a small boy who was inclined to be naughty or daring at times, and who had no wish to be frustrated in his desires by a mother saying, ‘No.’ As an only child myself, I was inexperienced at dealing with children, and having had mainly female cousins, I regarded small boys as an alien breed, and was often surprised, irritated or aggrieved by the very normal disobedience of a toddler. Without a companion of my own age, I was unable to share my child-rearing problems with anyone else. At the same time, I was aware that Robert’s life, too, must have become more empty. Guiltily compensating for the unchanging and uneventful passage of each day, I would draw his attention to the arrival of a friendly robin, Max, the visiting dog who came to turn our dustbin over and collected a biscuit from Robert’s tiny hand for his pains, or the magpies that swept dramatically across the garden.

I got quite fond of Max, the wandering Labrador, like many lonely people who become attached to animals. I pictured him saving me in some dramatic situation and even considered writing this in the form of a short story. However, I was not sufficiently fired with enthusiasm to put pen to paper and, in any case, there never seemed to be quite time in the day for such pursuits.

By the end of the first six weeks of our ‘no-mod-cons.’ existence, Michael had taken our old electric fridge (a silly piece of bachelor-size equipment), and by dint of some brilliant engineering, had converted it into a machine operated by bottled gas. Admittedly, it was highly inefficient, but it served our purpose, and enabled me to cut down a little on my journeys to and from the village.

Our first visitors, Ruth and Roger, had arrived within a month of our moving in. The bungalow was a great improvement on our first home, and despite its unfinished nature, I could show it with some pride to my friends.

Nevertheless, in the early weeks, we were not in the state of readiness I had hoped for. Very few of the furnishings were ready and, worst of all and despite my protestations, there was simply no floor covering in the major part of the house, and we clattered around raising dust on the concrete floors.

But slowly things took shape; with the arrival of the furnishings, the lounge took on the elegant appearance I had pictured in my mind. The restful shades I had chosen became an extension of the colours of the countryside, and the curtains acted as a frame for the view outside, the five stately trees that were the focal point of our drive, backed by fields and with very little intrusion of houses into the landscape.

The arrival of the carpet also enabled me to demote our old living room carpet to our bedroom. Although it didn’t fit awfully well, I managed to get the worst bits under the bed, so that at least our feet came into contact with a warm surface instead of the cold concrete. It stayed there until the early seventies, but by that time I had become accustomed and unsurprised at our slow progress, and even rather appreciated it, for each innovation could be enjoyed on its own account.

At the present time, however, we did not even run a car and Michael frequently travelled the four miles to the office by bus. We had owned a rather smart second-hand Wolseley, which we had abandoned at the ‘site’ when it developed a major fault. To our shame, it had remained there, gradually decaying for the next few years. Therefore, the event which ought to have made a lot of difference to me, the passing of my driving test in August, made no difference at all. Since I was quite petrified at the idea of driving on my own, I was really quite relieved that no car, other than the untaxed, uninsured Wolseley, sat outside the door waiting for me to jump into it.

It was still good walking weather, and the summer sunshine stretched on into the autumn.

I, who had never appreciated the delights of the countryside before, now gazed out of my windows at unbearably beautiful scenes. The majestic oaks, acacias and chestnuts at the front of the house retained their stately dignity at each change of season, and even though the view from my kitchen window was marred by the weed-ridden wilderness that was our own garden, the boundary was marked by two copper beeches and an enormous conifer, perhaps sixty feet high, as well as the more commonplace deciduous trees. The giant conifer would remain—a symbol of life in the depths of winter—but the copper beeches would first turn scarlet at their climax, before the brilliant foliage finally withered and died.

Now the mornings were sometimes cool before the sun emerged; then Robert and I would wander outdoors, crunching leaves and twigs beneath our feet as we collected dead sticks to make up a fire. The hedgerows were full of blackberries and we picked out the biggest and best on our walks to and from the village.

But we still felt strangers in this countrified world, Robert and I. He would not set foot outside the door without me; and I, for my part, felt unnatural carrying out these rural tasks. I was at loss in this unpeopled world. The beauty of the surroundings did not make up for the lack of humankind. Sometimes, as I gazed at the view, I longed for a car to appear, spilling out friends to share it with me.

My old friend Susan, who would now have lived so close to me, had moved to her native Ireland with her husband, Bruce and her two children. However, her English parents-in-law lived a mere mile from my home, and one day a car did indeed draw up unexpectedly and Susan and her family emerged.