NOSTALGIA IS WHAT IT USED TO BE

I have a creepy feeling visiting houses in which I used to live. The cracks and corners and carpets and cupboards prompt long hidden memories, some good some bad. Moreover, instead of being tidily arranged neatly along the washing line of time, these suddenly prompted flash-backs jump out untidily all over the place, like clothes pulled at random from the laundry basket.

Looking out of a window, for instance, brings a rag-bag of memories of the same scene, in winter and summer, of small children and teenagers, quite juxtaposed and jumbled, like hymns ancient and modern.

Last Sunday we were back in the old farmhouse that we rented when the children were very small and we were very poor. We had gone there for a year. In the event we stayed for nine years, loving the place and too frightened by the heroic rises in the price of property around us to contemplate moving.

With its ancient Grade II listed walls, broad lawn and views all the way south to the Bristol Channel and the hills of Exmoor beyond, it was definitely a summer house. We revelled with games and barbecues in the garden on hot days and when overheated sought cool shelter in its unplastered rooms of stone.

Winter, of course, was another matter. We shivered. The house was perpetually cold and impossible to heat. Doors and windows might be bolted against the gales but wildlife still sought refuge inside. Bats and jackdaws came down the chimney, mice bored through the rubble interior of our external walls and made the kitchen their hunting ground, while their larger cousins, the rats, played football around our furniture in the attic.

A curtain hang at the entrance to the great staircase of stone that wound about the fireplace and in winter it would billow like the mainsail of a three decker, as if upstairs every window had been thrown open. Draughts seemed to blow from every crack in the stonework, from between every floorboard, around every door, down every chimney, despite fortunes spent in proprietary draught-proofing preparations and contrivances.
We came through nine of such overcoat-huddled winters resolved that never again would we live in an old house without proper heating.

But the summer was another story. Across the lawn we strung a net between bamboo poles, made of pieces of Netlon, sown together. Then we painted out a tennis court with white emulsion. On this we played ‘soft’ tennis with an orange sponge ball that floated on the wind with the low branch of an overhanging ash tree an additional hazard. From the precarious top of the step ladder, Younger daughter would play ‘Umpit’ while Elder Daughter and I battled out together our Wimbledon final.

We also played croquet. Unable to afford proper Hurlingham kit we bought £2 tent mallets from the local ironmonger and coloured plastic water-filled balls from the toy shop that were originally designed for boules. We made hoops out of wire coat hangers and raced around the circuit knocking each other deep into the herbaceous borders. Younger Daughter won invariably. She is ultra-competitive in these matters and the aggressive viciousness of croquet obviously appeals to her inner warrior.

Our energies from these games must have been absorbed by the trees around this garden for when the owners of the house finally returned from their travels on many continents and displaced us to our present warm, modern but not totally characterless dwelling, they set about building a boules court - or petanque piste - if you will, of regulation length and surface.

Not only that, but they acquired a proper croquet set for the lawn and for the past few years, winter and summer, have invited the neighbours (we are neighbours in time if not in space) to participate in a tournament complete with silver cups. Indeed the mid-summer croquet and boules event is fast becoming a must on the social calendar of village life.

By some weird streak of fate I, who am normally a dunce at any game involving spherical objects, managed to win the boules tournament in each of the first two years. Not entirely as a result of my own physical efforts, but as a result of wrangling an energetic teenage lad as my partner, young enough to listen to what I opined by way of strategy and muscled enough to deliver, with me bringing up the rear, as it were.

Croquet, I have never been able to master and the less said about this the better. If I closed my eyes I am not certain that the ball would run any straighter than it does when I hit it. I invariably come last, much to the disgruntlement of anyone uninformed enough to partner me.

So there we were last Sunday, back in what I still regard as ‘our’ garden, playing boules and croquet. Without my necessary ‘yoof’ to partner me I was knocked out in the first round of the boules, though as this was by the couple who went on to win, some honour was salvaged. This anyway left me time to sit in the sunshine, glass of wine in hand and listen again in my mind to Younger Daughter perched on her step ladder, crying ‘Out,’ with her usual delicious satisfaction.