LITMIR.BIZ

      3

      The Manor House

      If I ever get to be so old that I can no longer recognise my children; when I hear my name being called and it means nothing to me; when I cease to be able to name the birdsong I have known all my life and when the pageant of the season’s turning fails to move me; when each day merges into the last and the next as a continuous fog and I hear people whisper, ‘He’s lost it, poor old bugger’ – they will be wrong.

      I shall be running free with the soft wind in my face, skipping through the shining grass of the damp Longbottom meadows, swiping with my stick at thistle heads to watch the downy seed caught and flown in eddies of sunlit breeze. I shall be straddling the old crack willow fallen into the pond where the moorhens built their soggy nest. I shall be under the ancient yew searching for tawny owl pellets, leaping the little box hedges of the ordered gardens and racing past the long glasshouses four in a row. I shall be heading out. The ancient flagstone floors will be cold beneath my bare feet once again and Nellie will be chasing me round the kitchen table with a tea towel. I shall be eight years old, laughter rippling through me till I ache, free as a cloud, embraced and held fast by the joy and the jubilation of careless youth. I shall be back at the Manor House.

      As you headed out of the quiet Warwickshire village, past the little brick bridge over the weed-waving brook that burbles through the green, passing between Borsley’s grocery store, the tart aroma from the block of cheddar cheese on the marble slab greeting you at the door, and Mr Anderton across the lane in his straw boater and a blue-and-white-striped apron, smile as wide as a valley, waving his cleaver over his butcher’s block – ‘Pettitoes not such a bad price this week’ – you turned up Church Hill, past the long terrace of cottages on the right, slate roofs staggered like a rickety staircase.

      Then past the Georgian vicarage, square, solemn and not a little smug behind high-boarded gates and an ivy-quilted wall. Opposite, on the south side of the lane, a low red-brick boundary wall to the graveyard led up to an oak-beamed and shingle-roofed lych-gate where the lugubrious Reverend Ferguson posted his notices every week. For years I thought his name was ‘Vicar’. ‘Morning Vicar,’ was all I had ever heard. In the background the grey church tower stood square-shouldered against the sky.

      The sweeping branches of ancient oaks and beeches trembled their shadows over the lichened gravestones of many of my ancestors, barely legible now. Far below, their bones and oak coffins were sifting down into archaeology in sure and certain hope of everlasting oblivion, earth to earth. Those trees seemed to me to be the very essence of antiquity. Their roots writhed silently beneath the tombstones and the flagged paths, tilting them drunkenly. The massive trunks powered upwards in plaited thongs of great strength, branched into an algal tracery against the sky where they clutched at the clotted nests of a hundred and more thronging, clamouring rooks.

      A bit further on, on the other side of the lane and right at the end of the village, matching ornamental ‘in-and-out’ wrought-iron gates, both invitingly and forbiddingly painted bright white, were set a hundred yards apart. A dense privet hedge six feet high ranged between them like a green rampart. Behind the hedge, a long gravel driveway crunched through neatly mown lawns to link the two gates in a sweeping arc. Those gates announced the presence of a house that didn’t need a name; it was and always had been the Manor House.

      It was the home I longed for. Even now, sixty years later, it is engraved upon my soul. Not my parents’ home at that delicate moment in my young life – my father was leading a peripatetic existence as he worked tirelessly to build a business and we had migrated to wherever he needed to be: Yorkshire, Bath, Devon, south Somerset; no, the Manor House was my father’s family’s long home to which we always gravitated as surely as bees return to their hive, however far afield the capricious winds of fortune had wafted us.

      Family lore had it that Henry VII had made an ancient branch of our family Lords of the Manor, vassals to their feudal superior, Edward Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence and 17th Earl of Warwick in his magnificent medieval castle, around which the county town has mushroomed. In deference to this historical patronage many sons of our family had been christened Warwick, right up to the present day.

      The house was built in the seventeenth century when fire ripped through the original Tudor oak-timbered manor house and razed it to rubble. Since then it had been added to seemingly endlessly, wings and extensions bursting out at every point of the compass and several in between, as if for centuries each successive generation had felt the need to append their own whimsical additions. By my time in the late 1940s, the original Jacobean oak-beam and straw-brick beginnings had been hemmed in on all sides by sprawling Carolean, Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian wings, each apparently oblivious to any sense of architectural cohesion. The result was a jumble of gables and eaves on steeply pitched roofs with plunging valleys beneath a thicket of towering chimneys.

      Getting around inside these ill-fitting extensions demanded long corridors leading to many external doors over countless steps, flights of stairs and varying floor levels more akin to a ship than a dwelling. And yet this random agglomeration of additions had awarded the house all the vernacular charm and mystique of a Cotswold village, in what seemed wilful denial of its much more formal intentions.

      The house stood at the edge of a modest estate of farms and woods and was surrounded by broad acres of gardens and grounds. Close to the house they started off with the prescribed orthodoxy and the unmistakable Englishness of a country house, dignity upheld by manicured lawns, clipped box, privet

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