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.’