NONE NICER THAN NUNNEY

We had gone to stay with Elder Daughter whose husband had taken himself off to the London Film Festival as he does every year, he being a bit of a film buff. So the rest of the family moved in. Like mice. There was then a question about what we might do.

To tell the truth I didn't feel much like doing anything for I was ill, feeling really off colour and with little appetite. The dreaded stomach lurgi doing the rounds had stopped at my door. Still, one must battle on. Fly the flag, especially when there are those around whose health is far less robust, even if at the time I did wonder whether my own ailment might be the beginning of some mortal malady, you know the type of thing at which the black frock-coated gentlemen shake their heads and advise against the commencement of long books. Having just read Phillippa Gregory's 'The White Queen' I recognised my symptoms as just the ones that carried off King Edward IV, and he considerably younger than me, too.

Well, I thought, as I lay half awake a little before six in the morning that being the hour my grandson Theo deems appropriate for life to commence, I may just have time to finish the biography of Talleyrand that I am reading. He and I will then succumb - for the biography ends as most biographies do with his death - he and I will succumb together, but I shall never get round to reading 'The Road Home' by Rose Tremain, which I had bought at the Cowbridge Bookshop when I had gone in to ask whether they might take some copies of Chris's 'Turning the Tide.' I had wanted to buy this book anyway so it wasn't a special purchase and it was the same price as Amazon and no delivery charges and a good conversation with the bookseller thrown in. So why do we insist on buying from Amazon? That is one of life's little imponderables, I thought.

Still even when one is ill and on the point of thinking about putting one's affairs in order, Elder Daughter still wants to know where to go. She's not going to have us hanging about the house all day; we need to mount an expedition. "We'll go to the Castle," I say, thinking this a fool-proof option, only to be told that Frome - the pleasant little market town in jolly Somerset where she lives - doesn't run to a castle.
"Why not?" I asked. "Everywhere else has a castle. There must be a castle if you look hard enough." But there wasn't - or isn't.

So eventually we settled for Nunney castle - a mile or two down the road and as charming a little castle as you might ever hope to find this side of the English Channel. I say this side of the English Channel because Nunney Castle is French. It is as though it has been dug up and transplanted like London Bridge from the sunny folds of the Loire valley to this quaintly named chocolate box village in Somersetshire.


It is a small castle - almost a miniature or Doll's House (Doll's Castle?) castle. Just four pepperpot towers which once carried conical roofs. And with a beautiful regular square moat around it in which to view the shimmering reflection of its stones. One could easily fall in love with such a place and indeed many who lived there can't have done anything else. For it looks not really like a military castle at all, but a gentle-little-fairy-tale-Rapunzel-holding-princess-and-the-pea-sleeping-family-residence-of-a-minor-Baron-probably-called-Ludwig castle.

You can hear harps in the building and if you're really quiet, the fish calling to each other in the moat as you gaze on the far hills from those broad picture windows and imagine children and young folk chasing each other up and down the staircases and hiding behind turrets and shooting arrows at the villagers' pumpkins.


Nunney Castle was built in 1373 and would today be as good as new, but for Oliver Cromwell and his (sadly not at all merry) men who decided that the castle was altogether too blessed with sweetness and light and therefore that it was in need of a good ruination.

So he ruined it - pulling off the conical roofs - and turfing the young folk off the staircases and out into the country lanes. Then he bombarded the four towers with cannon - not altogether successfully for you can see where the cannonballs bounced off - before deciding it might be easier just to blow up the connecting walls with gunpowder. Which he did - gunpowder not being in short supply in 1646 - and, like Jericho, the walls came tumbling down.

Still, that didn't stop the castle being as charming and welcoming as a Dowager Duchess short of visitors. Cross the little wooden footbridge over the moat (surely jumpable if you were any sort of athlete) and you are welcomed into the central hall into which the sunlight is already streaming and where you can imagine yourself sitting down to dinner in Elizabethan robes with Gloriana herself, the Virgin Queen descending the great staircase and muttering about Spaniards.

Ah well, that was all a very long time ago.


I was still feeling ill when we left Nunney to go to Laycock, another bit of the Cotswolds that remains pickled in aspic and costume drama. There Elder Daughter bought me a lunch which sadly I couldn't eat but we sat first under a Eucalyptus and then under a strange tree like a magical walnut (except it wasn't a walnut). Some say it's a lilac but do lilacs - even Persian ones - bear nuts in green cases? A woman was selling apples at £1 a bag from a wheelbarrow in the street and put the money please through the letterbox. I ate an apple and immediately began to feel better.

I leave you with an image of little Theo literally (though on his elders' part quite unforgivably) dancing on the grave of some noble Laycock antecedent. Still, if the apple doesn't work, and I'm not here next week, I hereby give permission to infants under the age of two to dance on my grave to their hearts' content. There isn't much, after all, that one can do for the young when one is six feet under.