I BET ATLAS SUNG......

I am confirmed as  'Trésorier,' which is all fine until I wonder however will I be unconfirmed?  Being Treasurer of a voluntary organisation is like taking up one of the more violent religions: apostasy being impossible, or at least very hard.  You slog away like Atlas holding the mountain of paper and bank accounts and audit reports on your shoulders, year after year, suffering the brickbats of all those who accuse you - often with reason - of not been able to add up until you can find someone else to take over from you.  It is not often that a Hercules comes around - and even then if you remember the story he tricked poor Atlas by saying that he would take the world upon his shoulders while Atlas went off for a spot of needy retirement, but would Atlas just mind holding the world one last time for a couple of minutes while he, Hercules, rearranged his lion skin to make himself slightly more comfortable for the eternity to come.  Of course once Atlas had taken the world back, Hercules, cad that he was, disappeared fast.  His word as obviously not his bond.  He wasn't British, clearly.  Although to be strictly fair Atlas had tried to trick Hercules before.

But what, I wonder, ever happened to Atlas?  They don't tell you these things in legends.  They say only that Atlas fathered many children.  Goddesses of the day were attracted, apparently, by strong men holding up the world.  I suppose they must have had their sex standing up, which is not recommended when you are trying to conceive. But I suppose gods make their own rules. Anyway despite having to hold up the world, Atlas pulled.  That much we know.

What we don't know is whether Atlas is still there doing his bit for mankind.  If that were the case you'd have thought the world would have got itself together to hold an Atlas day to give thanks. I mean if Atlas got tired he might drop the world into.......er.........space, I suppose, and we'd be left to drift around the sun for ever and a day, or until the sun burns up and we shall - as Tom Lehrer succinctly puts it 'all fry together when we fry,' though he had in mind something depressingly thermo-nuclear happening before that.

So maybe Atlas just got bored one day and wandered off - or maybe he succeeded in handing over the task of world's strongest man and multiple goddess inseminator to one of his many sons, who maybe was a lesser man than his father, or who maybe had arthritis or rheumatism and so cast the world into outer or, rather, inner, space.  And here we are today. Twinning Associations and all.

Where exactly were we?  Oh yes! Giving up.  Relinquishing the burden of Trésorier of the Twinning Association.  All is not actually lost because the Twinning Association is running out of funds at a fairly substantial rate and we shall have to draw a halt to our activities in a year or two, unless some benefactor comes along.  In past years that benefactor was the European Commission, plus a rather larger and younger membership with deeper pockets than is the case today.  Hosting and entertaining a coachload of visitors for a weekend costs some £5,000 - and although we have some income to offset this, the sands of our bank account are running out.  These visits take place every other year - alternating with our visits to them when they bear the cost - and we have enough money to host one more visit after this one. But then the bank account will be empty and it is just possible that I shall be free.

This time we shall entertain the visitors when they arrive to a Reception in our charming Physic Garden and the next day whisk them off to the Penderyn Distillery for aperitifs.  Then to a hotel for lunch before a ride on the Brecon Mountain Railway with a stop scheduled:  photographs for the taking of.  The following night, we shall uphold the Entente Cordiale by dancing and singing in the Town Hall.  Not boring disco dancing; we shall dust-off the lovely folk dances that they do better than we such as the bull dance in which you all make a circle and someone takes a tea towel and waves it, matador style, in front of someone they fancy.  That person then has to act the part of a bull charging the tea towel to the music. After a few passes the bull becomes the matador and the tea towel is dangled before another swain.  We sing French, Welsh and English songs; I have accrued a compendium over the years.  Singing like this - for enjoyment rather than exhibition - is something that has almost entirely fallen out of the social calendar.  We don't even sing in pubs anymore.  It is all rather sad.  Atlas would have sung, wouldn't he?  To keep his spirits up?

A BEAR HOWEVER HARD HE TRIES ...

A headline in the paper suggests that even babies now are becoming addicted to iPads. Where will all this lead?  It makes me feel old.  When I was small electronic devices - other than the radio - were unknown.  Even television didn’t exist for most people and the radio was something big and boxy.   But life seemed liberating.  There was so much to explore, so much to engage the brain.  Now the default position of any age is to turn on something electronic; it’s a way of parking the brain. 

    Yet what fun there is to be had elsewhere.  Yesterday,  the town’s Twinning Association - or what is left of it now after almost more than twenty years - gathered for its AGM.  When the association first started in 1988 I found myself Vice-Chair.  I knew about European grants and I could speak French.  Those grants were the foundation of a healthy bank balance and I still think it was a shame they were scrapped. For a few thousand pounds here and the Commission was able to build an immense amount of cameraderie and understanding between nations and doing so was undoubtedly fun. We haven’t yet had a marriage from our twinning but there have been a great many sporting contests and language exchanges and trade promotions between our two towns. 

    Our twin town - Clisson - lies on the borders of Brittany, a little way inland.  Lying on the river Sevre, it isn’t too far from Nantes and is at the centre of the Muscadet vineyards.  Become a member of the Twinning Association and you will learn a lot about Muscadet, growing the vines, making the wine and drinking the product. The Clissonais will descend again on us in May and as usual their coach will be full of the stuff.  Nice to know the 'Entente Cordiale'  is in good heart.

    Clisson is a pretty town and at its heart sits a medieval castle of the sort that would grace any town in Wales.  It is every bit a proper castle with dungeons and battlements and wells full of skeletons.  Unlike our little castle here in Cowbridge - built incidentally around the same time - which never apparently heard a shot fired in anger.  The Castle at Clisson played a full part in that interminable struggle between England and France known as the 100 years war and later it was pressed into service during the French counter-revolution of the 1790’s which became, in this part of the world, the Wars of the Vendée.  This sad and forlorn contest saw some bloody and cruel fighting ever, with atrocities against civilians committed left, right and centre.  The French Republic won, of course, but not before virtually wiping the population of the Vendée off the map. 

    Clisson changed hands several times during this fighting and the town was wrecked although the medieval roofed market place was spared because each army wanted ready shelter for their troops. Around Clisson the countryside is fairly flat with, at the time, plenty of windmills.  The sails were used by the counter-revolutionary forces as signalling devices. The town was then rebuilt in an Italian style

    All these things and many others I have learned over the years in the course of frequent visits. But it is a question now of how long the Twinning Association will carry on.  The next generation seem to lack interest, preferring to find their fun electronically I suppose.  The old Committee officers have resigned: I gave up the Committee a long time ago when they refused to proceed to twin with a town in Ireland that I had worked hard to secure.  That town, Leixlip, also had a very fine castle and was the place in which Guinness had first been brewed, its recipe devised by a bishop.  It isn’t far from Dublin and I can recommend a visit. 

    But last night I found myself back on the Committee as Treasurer. Another rod for my back in a busy year.  Still it was a fine evening.  Our newest recruit, Elisabeth, played the piano (she played Ave Maria on the grounds that it was by a French composer, Gounod, as well as by Bach) and we sang some songs and told some jokes.   I asked her then to play ‘The Teddy Bear’s Picnic’ whose music was written apparently in 1907,  but whose words didn’t appear for another quarter century. How do you write a song without words?

    Anyway that was my cue to recite ‘A Bear However Hard He Tries.......’ the AA Milne piece whose EH Shepherd illustration was the first literary appearance of Winnie the Pooh - a companion who took the place in my childhood of today's ubiquitous electronic devices.  People seem to think that being able to recite a poem (or remember any sort of script) indicates a prodigious memory.  But it actually isn’t very difficult, being simply repetition. Anyone can learn a script.  But I am content to let them think I have some special skill.  It must be the only one I have.  I shall open a bottle of Muscadet for lunch to celebrate and try to find out what being Treasurer entails.
   
   
   

DIPLOMACY

I am running short of verveine tea again.  It is my usual bed-time tisane and without it I wake up shortly after falling asleep and toss and turn.  I’ve been taking it now for many years; the problem is that you can’t buy it in Britain.  Although here the supermarket shelves stock an ever expanding range of herbal teas, verveine in its various forms (verveine and peppermint, verveine and orange) is not among them.  Verveine by itself tastes like cat’s pee.

    So I buy it in France whenever I go over there, but I haven’t been since last August and that is why I am running low.  My neighbour sometimes brings some back for me. I received an email message from her last week containing a number of interesting recycling ideas such as using old boots for plant containers and making chandeliers out of old wine bottles.  It was written in French which made me think possibly she was at her French home in Tharon rather than fifty yards away on the other side of the road.  So I replied hopefully in French, but she said she was in fact over the road and wouldn’t be crossing the Channel again until Easter.

     I looked on the internet and tried our local health store. ‘You asked about this before,’ said the woman who runs it, looking at me suspiciously. ‘It’s impossible to get hold of.’  And so it is.  Nasty Continental habit. Obviously!

    The trouble is I need the stuff more than ever just at the moment what with the hoo-ha in the Ukraine and the outbreak of the First World War being rehearsed nightly on the television in the shape of that excellent drama 37 Days that traces the diplomatic missteps that blundered the Continent to catastrophe.  Even today it seems all rather worrying.  Of course everything has settled down, but only after two world wars and it is quite possible to argue that Russia’s actions today in the Crimea have their roots in the various German invasions.   Queen Victoria should have taken better care of her grandchildren.

    There once existed a game called ‘Diplomacy.’ (It may exist still for all I know).  The players each represented a major European country in about 1900. Turkey was given honorary status in this respect, though not Ukraine.   You were allocate armies and fleets which you could move around the board attacking other countries and defending your own. You could also form alliances, temporary or permanent.

    I once played this game on a Saturday in the Occupational Psychology Department of Birkbeck College, London where I happened to be studying. Each team representing a country had its own room complete with telephone, which meant that you could set up alliances in secret from the other players.  My team was playing France and I proposed the immediate strategy of a permanent alliance with Great Britain. Imagine, I said what Pitt and Napoleon might have achieved had they worked in alliance!  With France’s armies and Britain’s fleets they could have ruled the world.  The world might have been all pink (or at least pink and blue) instead of only half of it.  (Quite why British rule should have been represented by pink is a question that has never been satisfactorily explained). 

    Anyway this strategy worked brilliantly and during the course of the day we successively wiped the Italians, the Turks, the Germans and the Russians from the map.  Then in the last move of the game, in a stroke of perfidy that I am still smarting from, Britain attacked France, thereby demoting her from joint winner to second.  I never played the game again.

    Now the West and Russia play Diplomacy with Ukraine. There will be a solution however uncomfortable it may be to one or other party, but I suppose we shall have to pass through a lot of unnecessary pain to get to it.  So it is no wonder I need my verveine and peppermint tisane to help me sleep.  Of course other people would prefer something stronger.  A glass of malt whisky has long been recommended for insomniacs. But my stomach rebels and its rumblings would outdo Vesuvius.  While this is much to my chagrin, it is to the distinct benefit of my pocket.  For the price of a glass of malt I can buy a whole month’s supply of tea.

    Still all is not lost for I wrote for help to my friend John who lives near Le Havre and received an immediate reply.  Touched by my plight he went immediately to the French supermarket and purchased fifty sachets. This he put in an envelope which will be winging its way here shortly.  That is if the customs don’t intercept it on the grounds that I am importing an illegal botanical specimen.  You never know. 

WHY AM I CALLED PERIWINKLE?

Our intelligent and kindly bookseller - 'Ross at the Bookshop' is how he invariably announces himself when he telephones - agreed the other day that he would take some copies of my book 'The Ill-Fated Battalion' to complement his displays of other books on the First World War.   I took them down to him earlier in the week.
      The Ill-Fated Battalion deals with the twin tragedies of the 1,000 men and boys of the 7th Battalion, The Royal Scots, in the summer of 1915 first at Quintinshill near Gretna, where the train in which they were travelling ran into another train standing on the same line, and then at Gallipoli where they became cannon, or rather machine gun, fodder, displaying all the while great bravery and spirit.  I began to write this story in 1983 on an old manual typewriter but concluded, by the time I had got to the end, that it was horribly overwritten and therefore turgid despite the fascinating story, culled mainly from contemporary newspapers retrieved from the bowels of the British Museum Newspaper Library at Colindale.  So I put the book away and put the effort down to experience.
     But with the anniversary of the First World War - and indeed the anniversary of the 1915 railway accident itself - looming, I thought I should take another look at the material and rewrite the book on a computer which is what I did.  I published it myself last year through Completely Novel.
      People who have read it have been kind enough to say that they like it, except for one individual who gave it a very dusty review on Amazon on the sole grounds as far as I could make out that I had omitted reference to some equally compelling Gallipoli bravery by another regiment involved in the same operation.  Still, there's no pleasing some folk as we all know.  We'll see how Ross makes out selling it to his patrons.
     It is hard, though, to drift into Ross' shop without coming away with a purchase and a displayed paperback caught my eye.  The book's author was Eric 'Winkle' Brown and it was his account of his life as a test and experimental pilot during the war years and afterwards.  He is credited by the Guinness Book of Records with having flown more types of aeroplanes than anyone else, ever:  four hundred and eighty seven types in all, including many German, Italian and Japanese planes captured at the end of the Second World War.  Many of these I had never heard of.
    But it was the nickname 'Winkle' that intrigued me - for my own father who had also been in the Royal Air Force during the war used to call me by the same name: 'Winkle' or 'Wingle'  (the two sound very similar); and sometimes 'Wingle Wangle,' and sometimes again 'Periwinkle.'
     I don't think I ever asked him whence the name came; I just accepted it.   I had thought - because he liked to read Edward Lear's poems to me - that it came from 'The Quangle Wangle's Hat' which goes.....

On the top of the Crumpetty Tree

The Quangle Wangle sat,

But his face you could not see,

On account of his Beaver Hat.

For his hat was a hundred and two feet wide,

With ribbons and bibbons on every side

And bells and buttons and loops and lace,

So that nobody ever could see his face

Of the Quangle Wangle Quee.

This gets us to 'Wangle' but from 'Quangle' to 'Wingle' is rather a jump so I wondered if my father might have picked up this nickname for me from Eric Brown, the author of this book whose purchase I was now contemplating.  

     What made this seem more possible was that I could read from the blurb that Eric Brown was only six months older than my father.  More than this they both were attending schools in Edinburgh at the same time, he the Academy and Eric Brown the Royal High School. Maybe they had met in Edinburgh, or maybe they had met sometime during the war or afterwards.  Or maybe, of course, not.

       I have since learned that Eric Brown's nickname was short for 'Periwinkle' and Wikipedia suggests he was thus dubbed by his service colleagues on account of his small stature. (Among other things a periwinkle is a small marine snail). This seems improbable to me. Periwinkle is a feminine name; moreover why call anyone after a snail? No, I feel sure there must be some common connection - a character in a film perhaps.  Or it might be an Edinburgh appellation or something to do with aeroplanes or indeed both. 

     I suppose it is possible that he had to be 'winkled' out of his cockpit on a couple of occasions when the aircraft he was flying crash-landed and so got the name that way with the idea that of pulling a short body out of a carapace of cockpit.  Maybe several airmen were so dubbed. Maybe the usage was common.  Maybe I had to be 'winkled' out of the cosiness of my mother's womb.  She always said giving birth to my head was not the problem but my shoulders got stuck.   I was born in Edinburgh and lived there long enough to have acquired this nickname if the nickname were local.   

     The matter is intriguing me now, so I would welcome any ideas anyone may have.

Meanwhile I can vouch for Eric 'Winkle' Brown's book which is most exciting if you like aeroplanes as I once did and it has rekindled a lost period in my life when I learned to fly (one of my few claims to fame is that I learned to fly a plane before learning to drive a car and all courtesy of the Air Ministry as I think the Ministry of Defence then wasn't).  

     But here's a funny thing:  I used to suffer from terrible and embarrassing air sickness, until I was actually flying the plane myself.  Then I could throw it about the sky without feeling the least queasiness.  Now why should that be?

THE STATUS OF THE BULGARIAN LEEK

Last week I went to London to see an old friend who has been giving me help with my novel Boraya.  She is Russian and now that the novel is written I have asked her to pick over any bits that don’t seem wholly authentic. I expect there are many. She is very kind. We met at the Maritime Museum in Greenwich and toured the Turner exhibition there before having a mid-afternoon meal in the Trafalgar pub just along the river.  The exhibition was fine up to a point, the point being that not all the pictures were by Turner for reasons not easy to ascertain - you’d have thought the Trade Descriptions people might have had something to say about it - and many of Turner’s best loved maritime paintings weren’t there either.  Still the well-known and staggeringly beautiful ‘Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight’ had been brought across the ocean from the USA and its presence made up for a lot.  How much more you see in a painting than in a print.

Greenwich features in Boraya: it is where Elizabeth is living when the story opens and I’d wanted to go to the Trafalgar pub because it too gets a mention.  I did go there once before writing it into the novel but now that the book is written going into the pub seems like some literary quest.  Something written about in a book of fiction becomes legendary in the sense that it acquires an existence beyond the ordinary.  The characters become ghosts, if you follow me.  This isn’t just ‘the Trafalgar pub,’ but the pub where Elizabeth and Ginnie have a rather strained meeting.  You wonder where they sat and what they ate or drank and who else might have been there at the time.  Given place, fiction easily morphs into fact.  And for the first time I wondered what other fictional characters might be hovering in the ether watching us while we ate our lunch?

As it happens at that time in the afternoon - too late for the lunch-time crowd and too early for those looking into the pub on their way home - the pub was almost empty apart from Maria behind the bar who hailed, breezily and bouncily from Bulgaria.  We began a conversation about leeks.

Once upon a time - not so very long ago - all those providing service to the public in London were born within the sound of Bow Bells - or near enough.  Now they hail from every country on earth, their English clothed in a panoply of accents. This is charming: a way of instantly engaging them in conversation. 

That was how I began to talk to Maria about leeks a conversation that seemed to carry over from the first Bulgarian that I ever met who happened to be the Chargé d’Affaires at the time Bulgaria joined the European Union.  A man built in the Brezhnev mould, mountainous and taciturn who I met at one of those celebratory receptions.  Trying to make small talk I rehearsed with the poor man Wales’ attachment to the leek as a national emblem, but he was at a loss: he appeared to have no idea what a leek was.  I drew a little picture but he continued in a state of bafflement.  Maybe he had only even eaten them in soup.

So, relieved at having met another Bulgarian at last I reverted immediately to the question of leeks and Maria at once reassured me that leeks were a culinary staple of the Bulgarians and that the second Bulgarian empire which dominated most of the Balkans, Greece and quite a bit of Russia in the thirteenth century, would never have grown as it did without the sustaining properties of these vegetables in the soup.  Or at least she might have done, had her concentration not turned at that point to pouring beer and seeing to the lunch: sausages for me, fish for my Russian friend.  The status of the Bulgarian leek was settled.

The light faded and the pub began to fill.  We drank our beer and talked of many things. Across the river Canary Wharf twinkled into a concrete Christmas tree and the roof of the Dome, exploded in a crown of floodlighting.  The blue sky, freckled with clouds, darkened to a robust indigo over the black water.  How much of this would the pregnant Elizabeth have seen, I wondered, that April day in the spring of 1997?   How much had the pub itself seen? The body of Nelson would have been brought along this very same river in 1805 and the pub looked as though it was old enough to have witnessed the event.

FIFTY YEARS ON - SHOOTING AT BISLEY

Artists Rifles Clubhouse at Bisley

In his novel ‘Any Human Heart’  William Boyd has his his protagonist, Logan Mountstuart, reflect on playing golf and getting a hole in one.  One day Logan, a lifelong amateur golfer,  is on a course in Nigeria, playing just for fun with a work colleague when he wallops the ball hard on a par three hole and then watches as the ball runs unerringly into the hole.  As Logan acknowledges, his shot could not have been played better, even by the most accomplished golfer in the world and he concludes that in no other sport could a rank amateur perform, if only on a single occasion, as well as someone who was at the top of their game. Well, there is another sport and that sport is rifle shooting.

    Last Sunday I went to the National Shooting Ground at Bisley for a reunion of some of the members of my school’s old shooting team.  I hadn’t shot a rifle for more than 50 years and so the invitation to have lunch and then a shoot in the afternoon was too good to miss.  I had never been a great shot: I was always too erratic; good on my good days but indifferent at other times.  I had a good day one summer afternoon on Otmoor where I became the Under 16 Oxfordshire full-bore champion and I shot at Bisley for my school on several occasions, though to no great effect.  After school I gave the sport up and since then I haven’t shot a rifle in 50 years.

    So it was with trepidation that I approached the occasion.  First there was the nervousness, exactly like entering a new school, of finding Bisley and then the right clubhouse within the camp and then meeting new and strange faces, but I needn’t have worried.  Ducks to water, even.

     The lunch was at the aptly named Artists Rifles clubhouse - originally deriving from the Artists Rifles regiment which must have been great fun to be in, composed as it was of writers, poets and actors, composers, painters and musicians of every kind.   Yet they were a serious bunch and won 8 Victoria crosses in the First World War.  Noel Coward was a member of the regiment at one point.

    All the clubhouses at Bisley must have been built, I imagine, about 100 years ago and they are redolent of Edwardian England.  Indeed collectively they look like something you might find in India, perhaps, from the days of the Raj.  Inside the Artists Rifles Clubhouse the decoration was as eclectic as you might expect, full of regimental memorabilia and recruiting posters from the first world war.  The service and linen tablecloths also spoke of a bygone age. 

    Sixteen of us turned up and incredibly five of these were people I had shot with at school, so once we had recognised each other it was just like old times.  It is strange how people change.  Appearances change, though the eyes are a constant as are people’s mannerisms, their ways of smiling, moving, walking and their tone of voice.  What was also slightly comforting to me was that they were all deaf or, like me, heading in that direction: a consequence of the lack of hearing protection in our younger days and the regular blast of the .303 service rifle in your ear from a couple of feet away.  Nowadays hearing protection is mandatory: you can see why.

    So after a good lunch and a chance to catch-up, it was on to Bisley’s great Century Range - so called because there used to be 100 targets there.  Now there are 108, colour coded alternately red and yellow.  The assets are being sweated.

    Fifty years ago we used army service rifles - No 4’s from the second world war - and ammunition left over from that conflict.  I remember someone saying that there was enough .303 ammunition to last 50 years.  Well, the 50 years are up and today shooters use mainly modern  0.762 millimetre rounds;  it is more accurate they tell me.  The rifles have changed too.  Gone are the heavy service rifles; the shooting today is with modern target rifles which are lighter.  The targets have changed, too: they are smaller now to match the greater accuracy of the rifles.  Even the bull has been changed and is now divided into an inner and an outer bull - on the same principle as the A* at A Level.  The inner bull (called the ‘V’ bull) is now the equivalent of golf’s hole in one.

    Certain things, however, do not change and induce nostalgia.  The crack of the report that seems to carry its own momentary echo, the dull wetness of the grass of the firing point, the flags that indicate the wind strength and direction, for a bullet is carried by the wind like a bird and you have to allow for this.  Above all the faint scent of burnt cordite drifting in the air.

    Shooting at 500 yards and using a borrowed rifle too long for me in the stock I nevertheless shot a 27 (out of 35) including one of those ‘could not be bettered’ ‘V’ bulls:  a score which would have let down my shooting team in the old days but which nonetheless would not have been unknown.  Incredible, I thought.  50 years on and so little  changed.
   
   

AN APPEALING HOUSE

I am writing this in my favourite place: in bed. On Saturdays I can be quite self- indulgent. ‘I am allowed,’ as the children used to say defiantly when they were growing up.  I like working in bed, it has many advantages and when I turn my head from the laptop I can see out of the bedroom window across the intervening valley to the white gable of a tall house on which the sun is shining.  Behind the house are trees and behind the trees is a sky of grey-blue.  It isn’t far away, this house, we are not talking of a big valley.  The house is no more, I should think than 300 yards away, 400 yards at most and the curious thing is that, although I must have walked past this house many times, I could not go to it and point it out and say ‘This is the house I can see from my bedroom window.’  The ground rises and falls, there are trees that hide and reveal, everything looks so different close to. 
    Houses are funny things: they have personalities of their own.  Last night, walking around the village for exercise and meditation I passed a house called ‘Greenfield’ that cries out to me in sadness whenever I pass it.  And always my reaction is the same.  ‘If my fairy godmother touches me on the shoulder with her sparkly wand, I shall buy you and pour money into you to make you snug and watertight and warm with thick carpets, and John Lewis kitchens and at least two staircases and roaring fires of apple wood logs. Outside there would be soft lawns around the ash trees and where I would take afternoon tea and listen to the tinkling of the brook running close by.  It is that sort of house. An old house, a traditional house, a comforting house, a house that feels home.
    Refurbished the house would be worth a £1 million, maybe more.  As it is - I cannot remember it ever having been lived in for at least twenty years - it might probably be worth half that. I doubt that it’s habitable at present.  What I cannot understand is why it has been left for so long, accumulating dereliction.  Once some years ago an estate agent’s sign went up plastered with the word ‘SOLD.’     A couple of weeks later it was taken down and the dereliction continued.
    Yesterday as I walked past - for the house lies at the bottom of the bluff on which St Quentin’s Castle stands and the Castle, which may once have housed the deposed King Edward II for a night or two, is one of my favourite places to walk to - I again felt the house’s presence calling to me like a stray animal or an orphan child.  Not so much, please take me home - such sentiment would be difficult for something made of a thousand tons of stone - but rather please let me be your home and look after you and keep you warm in winter and cool in summer where you could write to the sound of the tinkling brook, sitting with your back against the trunk of one of the ash trees.  And again I responded, that should my fairy godmother reach out and touch me so that I have fortune galore, then, yes I shall buy you and live in you.
    At this point I was approaching ‘Greenfield’ from its back, down the hill.  I now turned the corner, my unspoken declaration ringing in my ears as it were and suddenly there, in the garden, was an enormous double sign advertising the presence of a construction company.  Well, well, well.  Perhaps refurbishment will start at last.  Maybe the house will become grand again and all I shall have to do is either to win the Lottery on a rollover week or maybe have ‘Boraya’ hit the all time best-seller lists and to be made into a film - a box office hit of whose proceeds I would be awarded five per cent. 
    Or, on a more modest scale, I wondered whether they might be going to turn the house into retirement flats.  I might then even be able afford to buy one and so could write in the house to the sound of the tinkling brook after all even without fairy godmother’s intervention for I shall be needing such a flat sooner or later. 
    But then I wondered: suppose they are just going to demolish the house and instead build three or four modern ‘executive homes,’ stamping on the old house’s mystery and charm and grinding it into the dusk like a cockroach?  Or even maybe remodel the house, destroying its old world charm with some ghastly modern carapace of glass and steel.  I shuddered at the thought.
    So maybe that was the house’s sudden call to me as I walked down the hill: it really was the cry of an orphan child shouting, ‘Save me from the architect and his wrecking ball.’