Old Thatch - A Memoir

I remember lazy summer holidays at my grandmother’s house, a seventeenth century thatched cottage nestled deep in a lush valley in the heart of the Oxfordshire countryside. The cottage was quaintly lopsided, and so small and squat that my father, not a particularly tall man, had to bend over to avoid banging his head on the low beams. The straw eaves drooped over the windows like bushy eyebrows, and among the sheaves lurked a myriad of creepy crawlies, far bigger and more menacing than anything I’d ever seen in my comparatively modern Victorian semi on the east coast of Scotland.

My grandmother was a stout, robust woman. She had strong forearms made thick from decades of beating eggs, whipping cream, chopping mint and kneading dough. I only ever saw her wear one item of clothing, a blue and white nylon housecoat with two deep pockets on the front where she kept an endless supply of paper tissues for mopping up tears and spilt tea. Her hair was white with a bluish tint and it hung in large soft curls around her lined face. She was a fierce woman who believed in hard work, strong tea and no nonsense. She’d been divorced from my grandfather for many years, but she wasn’t lonely. She had a constant companion in the form of her precious corgi Kim, who waddled along faithfully at her feet. The two were inseparable – she referred to Kim as her ‘little man’ and was always spoiling him with titbits.

Like many of her generation, my grandmother was a great admirer of the Royal family. I later learned that her father, my great grandfather, was a butler at the ‘Big House’ – not Buckingham Palace, but the stately home that stood majestically above the village, where the ‘Major’, the owner of the land, lived. It was to the Major and his family whom my grandmother and her family before her paid rent, going back to the seventeenth century when the cottage was built. As a butler for the Major, my great grandfather had many stories to tell and the most memorable one was that when a certain member of the Royal family came to stay at the Major’s house, ‘she wiped her feet on the doormat and wiped the smile off her face’. So the story went. It was one of many anecdotes my grandmother loved to tell us over and over again.

Appearances were everything to my grandmother. She was fiercely proud of her little house and she worked hard to tend the immaculate lawns and flower beds. Of course, the front of the house was the part that everyone could see, so she spent the most time on it. It had a white front door that was always freshly painted, with a black door knocker and handle. Pink clematis grew in a pretty arc around the doorway, and in the summer, rose trees, lupins and tulips stood guard on either side like colourful soldiers on parade.

To make sure the facade stayed pristine, my grandmother kept the front door locked and we accessed the cottage by going around the back, via a white wooden gate at the side. A winding path led round to the back door, which opened into the kitchen. Inside, the floors were made of flagstones, worn smooth in places into gentle furrows by generations of busy feet coming and going over the threshold.

A little way to the left of the back door was a magnificent weeping willow tree. I remember how its leafy branches swayed and whispered gently in the breeze. On scorching summer days we’d strip off and give each other cold showers with a watering can under its cool canopy of pale green leaves.

The path carried on past the willow tree and down between two halves of a large pristine lawn that was mown into neat rows. The path eventually came to a wooden gate under a magical arch of privet hedge, which led to the vegetable garden. Beyond the abundant vegetable garden was a trickling brook where we never dared to venture for reasons that I still can’t fathom. Some sixth sense told us that we mustn’t go there. We often heard our grandmother tell stories of how the local gentry rode their horses at full gallop through the land, churning up the vegetable patches, in pursuit of some unfortunate fox that would be ripped to pieces by their baying pack of hounds. My mother told us that as a child out playing, she might be ordered to hold the gate open by the ‘toffs’ on horseback so they could ride through the garden unhindered, and they’d sometimes throw her a penny for her trouble.

I remember helping my grandmother pick and prepare the vegetables for Sunday lunch. My sisters and I would sit cross-legged on the lawn by the back door, shelling peas and broad beans into a colander. The temptation to pop the delicious vegetables into our mouths was impossible to resist. Or we’d have the job of scraping the skins from baby new potatoes, some as small as marbles, the skins melting away under our fingers. I remember their fresh, earthy smell. Then we’d pick some fresh mint and my grandmother would take the aromatic leaves into the kitchen to make mint-sauce. She would chop vigorously with a large knife on a wooden board with short, sharp, expert movements, first one way, then the other, before adding the vinegar. The smell of fresh mint always takes me back to that time and place.

After that we all deserved a rest, so we’d go to the dank little shed at the bottom of the garden where spiders and beetles lurked, and pull out some old faded deck chairs covered in cobwebs. We’d shake the chairs out and unfold them on the lawn to dry in the sun, then we’d doze to the sound of bumblebees humming round the foxgloves and honeysuckle. Then, with a delicious clinking of fine bone china, my grandmother would bring us a tray of tea and home-made fruit cake, still warm from the oven. The sudden arrival of bluebottles was a sign there was a thunderstorm coming, and sure enough the sky would blacken and the heavens open, so we’d snap up the deck chairs and retreat to the coolness of the cottage, where we’d flop down in armchairs and doze again to the hollow ticking of the cuckoo clock.

Sometimes we would peer through the latticed windows out on to the village green, where tourists often stopped to take photographs of the cottage’s quaint facade. Almost half a century later, with my grandmother long gone and someone else living in the cottage, I stood on that same spot on the village green and took photographs myself. I still occasionally catch glimpses of the cottage on calendars, postcards, jigsaw puzzles and birthday cards, and my childhood memories are stirred once again.

In the evening after supper, my sisters and I would climb up the tiny spiral staircase to bed, and lie awake under stiff white sheets, too excited to sleep, alert to every creak of the floorboards, imagining ghosts coming through the cracks in the plaster. There was no toilet in the house, so if we needed to go during the night, we either went in the enamel chamber pot under the bed, or we took a torch and ventured down to the bottom of the garden for what seemed like miles to the smelly little shed, where unspeakable horrors lurked in the darkness.

In the morning we awoke to the sound of a cock crowing, and the smell of bacon and eggs frying. The bacon came from locally reared pigs. My grandmother would have the ‘wireless’ tuned to Radio 2 and the kitchen door standing open with the sun already streaming in. A slight haze hanging over the valley was a sure sign it would be another perfect summer’s day.­­

Sometimes, with my mother and father away on some mysterious errand, my grandmother would take me and my sisters for a picnic on Cow Hill. My grandmother would prepare a basket and we would skip down to the bottom of the lane and swing on the wooden gate at the entrance to the field. Then we’d run up to the top of the hill to find a spot amongst the thistles. We’d spread out a red checked table cloth and settle down to eat hard boiled eggs, home-grown tomatoes and Melton Mowbray pork pies, washed down with locally made cider. My mother often told us stories of how, as a child, her favourite place was Cow Hill, and she would sometimes go there alone to escape the boredom of village life and dream of getting away from the countryside and living the life of a Hollywood film star.

Back home in Scotland, if we ever had trouble sleeping, my sisters and I would conjure up in our minds an image of our grandmother’s little cottage with its lawns and flower beds, and the whispering of the breeze in the branches of the willow tree. The memory was enough to lull us into a deep and blissful sleep.