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I got here earlier than I have ever done this morning, the fifth since my proud first possession of my new home. Sitting on a folding chair at a folding table, warming my hands around a mug of tea, I am looking out at the view that made me want to make an offer for the house without even bothering to traipse around its rooms. It is a half-acre of garden, jungly with neglect but full of peace and promise. A shaggy lawn meanders into enticing tangles of bushes, all framed in a casually balanced treescape. Halfway down by the eastern fence (sitting here in the kitchen I am looking north) is a magnificent four-trunked eucalyptus, 60 ft tall, its shaggy grey green leaves in a continuous dance of response to the wind. Balancing it to the west is copper-gold beech hedge that takes the eye to a 30 ft high willow. It is scarred and dead, but its trunk and branches make a spacious skeletal cage for a quartet of wood pigeons, feathers plumped out against the cold. I hear the rat-tat of a woodpecker and see him at work, a little lower down. Just behind the trunk of the willow is an old-fashioned red telephone box, my very own Tardis, one corner claimed by ivy. Beyond, a shapely twin-trunked sycamore is flanked by a magnificent holly tree, again twin-trunked. Beyond again is a handsome scots pine and two monster cypresses. Through the leafless branches of the deciduous trees is a slope of hillside, topped by a row of trees striding away into grey distance. The thin white-tipped shafts of snowdrops and the stout green noses of bulbs butt out of the edges of the lawn.
The house behind the view is late Edwardian, double-fronted and detached. Its roomy ground floor, five bedrooms and capacious attic conversion gives me 1000 square foot more space than I had in my tall thin four-storey family house in North Oxford. And all four of my children have left home. But the minute I saw it I had liked its face, even when seen blurred, grey and only postage-stamp sized, peering humbly out of the lower echelons of the property ads in the local paper. Although only as far to the west of the centre of Oxford as my old house had been to the north, it was not much more than half the ridiculous price of my old house; such is the premium placed on Victorian redbrick villas and proximity to schools like the Dragon or Oxford High.
Since reading E.M Forster’s story about a women who had a wood at the end of her garden (and disappeared into it one day), I have always wanted a wood, and here was one on my own domestic doorstep. I felt like Rudyard Kipling when he first saw Bateman’s. ‘This is She [etc]. Or Beverley Nichols when he moved into Merry Hall, ‘quote quote’. It only took twenty minutes of exploration and the looming doom of a rival with an offer already on the owner’s table to make me offer the asking price. An hour later it had been accepted. As it was being sold for probate, there were no hitches to prevent a rapid completion, and my own house, snapped up by a cash buyer three days after its first appearance on the market, was already vaulting its legal hurdles with thoroughbred insouciance.
It was Nick, my lawyer, a man with an unusually romantic streak for a man of his profession, who raised the idea of giving the house a name. Perhaps because the sale went so smoothly, he had time to browse into the house’s title deeds and discover that it had had two names before, Bexhill and Shutlingsoe. Bexhill had a sedateness at odds with the future I plan here. ‘Shutlingsoe’ was more interesting. It was a Cheshire hill, explained Nick after a session with a gazetteer. But it proved to have distressing tongue-twister qualities after a glass or two of wine, and though it had no doubt meant much to somebody once, it didn’t to me. Then an old friend arrived to see what madness I had descended to. She stood triumphantly on the doorstep, a copy of Matthew Arnold’s Scholar Gipsy raised in cheery greeting and declaiming ‘“At some lone homestead in the Cumnor hills/Where at her open door the housewife darns,/Thou hast been seen . . .” Gotcha! And whatever happened to down-sizing?’. I was unapologetic. Going west has freed up enough capital to contribute generously to deposits on my daughters’ future homes and provide dowries into the bargain. And space is what is needed now that they arrive with tall handsome chaps and in time, hopefully, my long-awaited grandchildren. Space is also needed to make things without having to tidy up all the time. A spacious and welcoming kitchen, a peaceful library, a sewing-room and my fine upstairs study leaves only four bedrooms, two of them tiny. Nor does the house feel enormous; it has a modesty of proportion that wraps around you snugly as you walk about it.
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