THOUGHTS FROM A WET MILL

It is pouring with rain: bathroom-shower like rain that falls vertically in thick grey sheets. The lowest of the clouds are actually below the tops of the hills; the wispy vapour giving the absurd impression that the valley is smouldering. For the last couple of hours I have been getting steadily wetter and wetter, slashing at yet another hidden garden, this time beside the millpond.


Completely impenetrable it is with fifteen years of brambles, alder, and budleia strangling the remains of the fruit trees, apple, pear, peach, struggling to blossom in this pig of a spring. At one time this garden might have been a mini-orchard. In the middle of it, I discovered a perfectly serviceable clothes line, dating I suppose from the times when numerous people lived here; it must have been over fifteen yards long. The wooden line-prop lay on the ground. When I tried to pick it up it fell to pieces in my hands.


Still, most of the garden is clear now, at least clear enough to see your way around and ponder what trees should be removed and to sow grass in the sandy soil. It could be pleasant to sit in there, I suppose, under the trees, the dappled summer light reflecting on the water of the millpond; to drink tea or to take an early evening ‘Ricard.’ Just the setting to see a kingfisher patrolling the leat that carries water from the weir to the Millpond.

I have christened this place the Waterside garden. It joins the extravagantly named (by me) Sleeping Beauty garden, one bay of which I planted yesterday with potatoes. Of course, I may never be here again to see the potatoes for the Mill is still up for sale, the price reduced in fact. We (or rather for I must curb my irritating tendency to become proprietorial) have potential buyers arriving tomorrow, so I wasn’t going to invest in expensive seed potatoes. Equally, I have a horror of bare (well-ish) earth, particularly in the deluges such as occur here.

The local Spar supermarket however had a convenient 10 kilo bag of old potatoes that looked as though they might be persuaded to sprout and these I dug into the shallow earth. If they do grow a great many will be green as there isn’t much chance of earthing them up, but it will be the first time that the garden has produced anything edible for several decades. If it does that is.

And even green potatoes would be a miracle: for wild boar live in the woods and hunt constantly for underground comestibles. And even if the boar don’t break in, there are field mice hiding in every nook and cranny.

I still have another half of the Sleeping Beauty garden to plant. What I want is a Homebase or a B and Q where you can acquire Petunias and Marigolds in industrial quantities at knock down prices. Here they are expensive. In the market in Maurs this morning 10 petunias would have set me back by 5 euros, or £4, in our enfeebled currency. As I would need about 100 plants for my efforts even to be noticeable I shall have to find some other way of leaving a trail of colour behind me.*

Now I am in the warm kitchen, thawing out. It isn't cold, but the dampness penetrates, through the skin it seems. I am busy bashing away here without any means of communicating these thoughts to the outside world.

Those of us who complain about British Telecom might ponder whether France Telecom could just be worse. For we arrived to find the telephone had been cut-off and no reason given. An engineer eventually remedied the situation leaving a note to say the company would be levying a call-out charge. But surprise! It wasn’t the old line he reconnected, but a new line altogether. Now the broadband contract, of course, was on the old line and the new line isn't broadband enabled.

So we sit here out of touch with the outside world, my computer talking wirelessly to the new Livebox on the desk, (the old Livebox having suffered an ‘impact de foudre’ - a lightning strike - last autumn and given up the ghost). No doubt all will be sorted out eventually but by then we shall be home and I shall have missed the Party!

Without broadband to divert us we have fallen back to discussions on etymology, to wit how the Mill got its name. It is called ‘Moulin du Clout.’ Mill of the...what? The word ‘clout’ doesn’t seem to exist in French, though it does, of course, in English - as in ‘a clout round the ear.’ A clout nail also exists, or so I understand. It is a nail with a large head and perhaps it is from this that we derive the idea of ‘clout’ meaning ‘hit.’ The word nail itself is beginning to acquire a similar meaning. One rugby player 'nails' another these days.

The Scots, who derived many of their dialect words from French have that useful expression about ‘nae casting a clout till May be out.’ Here, ‘clout’ seems to mean coat - but maybe a clout nail is no more than a nail with a coat or cover.

Now the Mill is unusual in being (when it was working) a water mill driven by wheels that are horizontal rather then vertical. Each wheel is a sort of turbine - not unlike one of those desktop fans that have multiple blades, though a lot bigger, of course, and set on its side. The water then shoots out of a hole in the mill chamber and strikes the mill wheel from an angle of about forty-five degrees, sending it spinning around. Could this be called ‘clouting?’ I don’t know. Neither it seems does anyone else. Answers on a postcard please.


*In fact baulked of petunias I left a taste of Wales and sowed a packet of leeks, whose likelihood of becoming vegetables is probably even less than the potatoes.

ON DREAMS, POLTERGEISTS AND WILTSHIRE

My Great Aunt was the sort of person who saw portents. “I heard the Banshee again last night,” she would intone with a chilling voice, just as the conversation began to flag. “I wouldn’t be surprised if someone doesn’t fall ill very soon. It could be terminal.”

She was, of course, very old. Born in Ireland’s western hinterland in the 1880s. She died over forty years ago, convinced that an admirer from her distant past had somehow tracked her down and come back to claim her. She had bumped into someone, or someone had served her in a shop, and he had looked at her in a kindly, funny, inquisitive way. As that person bore some resemblance to the memory she held of her admirer - she had no photograph - so, it must have been him, however improbable.

This brought her some comfort in the weeks before her (to us) unexpected decease. The memory of my telling her not to be so silly haunts me to this day. St Peter, it seems, had come in person to escort her home. No wonder she grew angry at my rationality.

This recall of Great Aunt’s foibles was prompted by a great crash this morning outside my bedroom door. The noise sounded as if a wild animal, of generous proportions, had attempted to break in. It might, I reasoned, even now be slavering in ravenous anticipation on the other side of the door which I opened gingerly and in some alarm. Fortunately, I encountered no more than a pile of books which had somehow contrived to throw themselves off the top shelf of my bookcase, scattering themselves loudly against the wooden panels of my bedroom door. Is this an omen, I thought, picking up the books and replacing them on the shelf, or am I still dreaming?

For I had just awoken from a particularly vivid dream of being escorted around a country house by the late Alan Clark - he of diary notoriety. Now, I have to confess to being a bit of a fan of the Clark diaries and I keep all three volumes on my shelves. While he was a bounder of the first order, full of loutish and prejudiced opinions and despite much of his behaviour being both juvenile and boorish, he nevertheless wrote with memorable elegance and humour about a very wide range of subjects. He himself may not have been a great charmer but his diaries remind me just how interesting life can be.

Now I doubt if any woman would feel entirely safe alone with Alan Clark, but in this dream I was a member of a group, and though he spent some time talking to me - indeed I felt quite flattered - I managed to hold my own without being overborne.

It was a house that we were looking around, not his castle in Kent. I wondered if it was Seend Manor in Wiltshire, where he lived at one time. I have never so much as been to the village of Seend, though I used to pass the turning for it many times when my father lived in Dorset. Wiltshire villages may have been on my mind as I had read Little Brown Dog’s picturesque description of the one she lives in just a day or two before.

The tour over, we were in the garden through which a stream flowed. I asked AC what it was called. He prevaricated and then said something that sounded like ‘Bulg.’ I have never heard of a stream called ‘Bulg’ - and trying to place it woke me up.

In that half-asleep, half-awake time that followed I tried to remember the names of the houses in the diaries. Try as I might I could not remember the name of the castle in Kent, though the name must occur two hundred times in the books: Sandling? Sandwich? Sandford?

No good, it wouldn’t come. I had to look it up. I went to the bookcase. ‘Saltwood.’ Ah, of course, that was it. I returned to bed.

It was at this point that the crash of books against door occurred. Now the volume I had looked at was on one of the middle shelves of the bookcase, which is in any case screwed to the wall. I didn’t touch anything on the top shelf. Why then should a pile of books dislodge themselves and crash to the floor?

So I began to wonder - am still wondering - whether this unlikely and unexplained event was in any way connected with my dream. I don’t believe in ‘signs’ or ‘portents.’ I will accept poltergeists, and have an idea anyway that this house, may be infected by a feeble and non-malicious species of poltergeist that occasional tricks us into thinking someone is at the front door, or upstairs, when they aren’t.

But books crashing randomly out of bookcases, could become aggravating. Clearly, I shall have to stop reading charming accounts of Wiltshire villages and eat better cheese.