A Horse in the Bathroom Read online

  A HORSE IN THE BATHROOM

  Copyright © Derek J. Taylor, 2012

  Plans by Rob Melhuish

  House sketch by Anna Martin

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, nor transmitted, nor translated into a machine language, without the written permission of the publishers.

  The right of Derek J. Taylor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

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  eISBN: 978-0-85765-697-1

  Permission has been sought to use the extract from 'Gulf Coast Blues' © Clarence Williams.

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  To Maggie

  Star of this book and of my life

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Derek Taylor grew up amid the coalfields of Nottinghamshire in a house just round the corner from where D. H. Lawrence had lived. His first big shock came when he won a place at Oxford's most aristocratic college, Christ Church. Baffled by the Wooster-like behaviour of his fellow students, he took refuge in university journalism, and that led to a job with Independent Television News.

  As a TV correspondent, he discovered that failure can be just as spectacular as success. In Rome, he was wrestled to the Pope's feet by papal bodyguards in front of 5,000 pilgrims. And surviving was often enough – he reported five wars and spent seven months in Iran covering the Islamic revolution.

  His later career, in broadcast management, held its own terrors. As chief executive of a large American news company, he often felt that dodging bullets and kidnappers in Lebanon had been preferable to the ritual humiliation of a New York board meeting.

  Derek now leads a peaceful life with his wife, Maggie, in Stow-on-the-Wold. He occasionally does consultancy work for arts and media organisations, and otherwise walks, travels and writes. He has one son by a previous marriage, Dan, who has a doctorate in aesthetics and lectures in philosophy. This is Derek's first book.

  www.derekjtaylorbooks.com

  CONTENTS

  Author's Note

  1 – The Squatter and the Landlady

  2 – Lark Rise to Marxism

  3 – The Nice Ham Syndrome

  4 – Cavaliers and Gasworks

  5 – Strange Encounters at the Burgage

  6 – Popping Out for a Tub of Olives and a Matisse

  7 – Hogsthorpe – Twinned with Paris

  8 – Nuclear Winter in Chipping Norton

  9 – The Crash of a Door Not Being Slammed

  10 – Hitler Love Child in Oxfordshire Village

  11 – A Bolivian Chinese Puzzle

  12 – Glibpert's Revenge

  13 – £*{],%@@, More or Less

  14 – The Wedding, a Two Act Drama

  15 – A Seventeenth-century Car Park

  16 – Fourth Apocalypse Horseman in Redundancy Shock!

  17 – The Golden Age Swindle

  18 – Tales of the Dead

  19 – Me and Bairt Lawrence – Part One

  20 – Me and Bairt Lawrence – Part Two

  21 – A Horse in the Bathroom

  22 – The Gypsy and the Jagman

  23 – Culturally Diverse Murders

  24 – OK, Ethel, Back off!

  25 – A Helping Hand from a Fairy

  26 – Of Walls and Wigmakers

  27 – Henge, Pound, Pump and Cross

  28 – A Stilt-walker's Guide to Hopscotch

  29 – Saving the Whale – or the Hedgehog, at Any Rate

  30 – King Penguins and Miniature Vampires

  31 – The End is Nigh… Beware!

  32 – Lottery Winner Falls Off Yacht

  33 – First Night Nerves – Again

  34 – PC Jobs' Lopsided Heart

  35 – The Old Stables into the Sunset

  Then What?

  Before and After Plans

  Acknowledgements

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  In what follows, I've sometimes swapped around the sequence of events in order to help the narrative along. I've also changed some names, as well as identifiable detail about their owners, in order to protect their privacy. Some place names have been changed too to avoid causing offence. Oh, and in case you do recognise your village and you think I've been unduly mean or even too kind about it, I'll share with you something I've discovered while writing A Horse in the Bathroom: there are as many opinions about the English village as there are village-dwellers in England. So my view is one in roughly twelve million, and should be given no more weight than that.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE SQUATTER

  AND THE LANDLADY

  My bare feet peel away from the flagstones like sticky-tape from a refrigerator door. I must have spilt some milk by the bed. But it's the same in the bathroom. So I unlatch the bedroom door and, trying not to wake Maggie, sticky-tape my way into the kitchen, then execute a leaden-footed slalom around packing cases and upturned chairs in the living room. It's like paint half an hour after you've put the brushes away. And it's everywhere.

  Stow-on-the-Wold church clock strikes and I count. Three a.m. The numbness of sleep is wearing off and I feel the panic rising. It wasn't like this when we went to bed.

  It's our first night in The Old Stables, and here it is, going wrong already! Just when we thought it was safe to say, 'Phew, thank God no more guerrilla warfare with the Planning Office, or night terrors brought on by collapsing walls, poison gas and dozy apprentices. No more snow-blocked, wind-torn, flood-sodden delay.' Just when we thought our over-worked bank account could have a bit of a lie-in.

  I spy a plastic bowl on the sofa and fill it with warm water. The mop's on the sideboard. And I start to swab a test patch between the back of the TV and some boxes marked 'Precious'. My feet are getting warm, stuck on one spot.

  Of course, that's it. We put the underfloor heating on to take the chill off before we turned in. We always thought these so-called scratchproof, non-stainable floor slabs were too good to be true. The heat must be sweating something nasty out of them. Gawd, don't tell me we've got to hack the whole lot up. And there below are the heating pipes, waiting to puncture at the merest tap from a pickaxe.

  As the church clock tinkles out quarter past, I flop onto a packing case to watch the bit I've just swilled, willing it to behave itself. I calm myself with the thought that everything looks grim at 3.15 a.m. And I suppose we all get fretful and self-absorbed when a single project takes over our lives.

  It could be me, of course. Maybe I've not got the right temperament for it – a bit late to decide that now. We must have been deranged to think of converting a beat-up old stable. Too many TV home makeover shows, that's what it is.
How come we didn't just buy one, ready-made?

  It had all begun hopefully enough, two years before.

  After a career as a TV news reporter, I was working as a consultant and living with Maggie at her house on the outskirts of Stow-on-the-Wold in the Cotswolds. But we wanted to move to somewhere we could call 'ours' without me feeling like a squatter and she a landlady. Maggie came home one day – she has a women's fashion boutique in Stow – and mentioned that a friend of hers, optimistically named Sunny, had put her Grade II-listed cottage up for sale. She was moving to India. The cottage was right in the middle of Stow.

  'She's splitting the property in two,' explains Maggie. 'The cottage is one lot, and then she's selling off the rest of the land separately for development. Apparently, it's got full planning permission to build a new Cotswold stone house. Architect's plans thrown in, Sunny says.'

  'Well, her cottage is worth a once-over,' I reply. 'Did you know it's got the biggest inglenook chimney in the whole of Gloucestershire? And there's a little window in the kitchen that's supposed to date from the twelfth century.'

  Maggie groans.

  'No way.' She shakes her head. 'It's so dark. It's got minuscule holes for windows. We'd both go white and shrivel up if we lived in a pokey little place like that.'

  This is the same argument we've been having for the past six years.

  Maggie wants a house with lots of light.

  I need one with character.

  We've already rejected scores of 'gloomy' (quote Maggie) Cotswold cottages and 'soulless' (quote me) airy bungalows. It's not that Maggie hates character, nor that I loathe light. It's just that we have different priorities. And what we do have in common doesn't help either – we're both stubborn. So we need a place with both. They do exist of course. Peer into any Cotswolds estate agent and you'll see them, usually called 'Regency mansion with many original features'. They come with those big, square-paned windows that nearly reach the ground, and usually start at around £2.5 million – about £2.15 million more than we can drum up.

  'What I was thinking,' Maggie continues, 'was why don't we go for the bit of land, not the cottage? We could maybe build a home on it ourselves, something that's exactly what we're both looking for. I don't mean you and me actually laying the bricks and doing the plumbing. But get one built to our design.'

  'Well it's hardly going to have much history to it, is it, if it's a new build?'

  'Humour me. Let's look.'

  So that's what we do the next day. Me dragging my heels and getting my nose ready for some turning-up.

  Sunny leaves us to wander about on our own. The land is overgrown with privet hedges as wide as a bus, unpruned rhododendrons, the odd fruit tree, knee-high grass, and there's a weedy bit of gravel at the far end where Sunny keeps her VW.

  On the far corner by the road is a bunch of old garages, a bit like the ones you see round the back of every 1950s block of south London council flats. Admittedly, Sunny's version doesn't have chipped blue paint on up-and-over doors sprayed with 'Kylie is a… whatever'. Sunny's doors are old style, creosote daubed swing-openers. And Stow-on-the-Wold doesn't do graffiti, unless you count the mason's mark scratched on its church porch.

  We have a poke around inside. Behind the end garage door there's a carpet, a couch and a little sink.

  'Sunny works as a chiropractor,' Maggie explains. 'She must use this bit as her consulting room.'

  The inside of the rest of the building though looks like a place that giant spiders and rats might call home. We can make out a back wall, 4 or 5 metres high, fashioned from irregular Cotswold stones. They're supposed to be honey-coloured but are as grubby as a Victorian factory chimney. With a bit of struggling over heaps of broken roof slates and shifting of rusty wheelbarrows, we also see behind the grime and cobwebs that the two end-walls are built the same way.

  'They look solid enough,' says Maggie.

  'Hmm,' I add. 'I tell you what, they look pretty old to me.' We stumble back out into the daylight. 'And what's more this bit of land is a burgage,' I say. Maggie's used to my pseudo-academic burblings, so she ignores me. 'Some burgages in the north Cotswolds,' I persist, 'go back over a thousand years. They had a cottage at one end – like Sunny's – then vegetables and a few chickens and pigs down here where we're standing.'

  Leaving Maggie working out the direction of the rising sun, I start to stride through the undergrowth to pace out the length of the land, scraping my forehead on a damson tree almost before I've started.

  The burgage is a classic length. It measures two perches wide by twelve long. That's a perch as in a 'rod, pole or perch' found in lists of antique units of measurement, a perch being the length from the back of the plough to the nose of the ox. To save you nipping out with a tape measure to check, that's about 5 metres (apparently medieval ploughs and oxen came in standard sizes). So Sunny's burgage is roughly 10 metres by 60.

  I wade round the bindweed, duck under the damson, and go back and find Maggie.

  'What I'm thinking,' she says, 'is what if – instead of knocking down this old building where the garages are now – we converted it? We'd get the morning sun. And we could have a courtyard here that would be warm and sheltered all day long.'

  'OK, OK, I'm starting to see it,' I chip in. 'If we keep these old walls at the back and the side, we could get them cleaned up, and have the stones exposed in a big high-ceilinged main room – maybe with some oak beams. Then you could have six-foot-high windows all along the front.' There's a tinge of triumph oozing into my voice.

  Maggie nods and 'Hmms' a bit. It's enough for me.

  'You know, this is it,' I say. 'We just need a good builder, that's all. Let's go for it!'

  So that's how it all started. My little eyes went wide. And all I could see was a vision of how it would end up, in a perfect home for both of us. Without the slightest thought for the two years of hand-wringing by day and sheet-twisting by night which was on the cards before that.

  'Hang on, hang on,' says Maggie. 'There's loads of stuff we've got to find out about first.'

  'Well, yes, I know that, of course,' I insist. 'But I'm just saying, can't you see it? A dazzling facade of glass for you and a tall, exposed wall of mellow stone for me. And there should be just about enough room to hold all our clothes and books as well!'

  'I reckon it could be.' She's getting keen. I can hear it in her voice.

  Now I don't want you to get me wrong. We don't go about drooling our way into adventures like fourteen-year-olds having a first crush and singing 'Love Will Find a Way'. No. We can be quite organised. And back home that night, we make a list of questions. They boil down to two big ones. 1) Can we afford it? And 2) Would we get planning permission?

  'I can handle the money,' I say to Maggie. 'I'm good with numbers.'

  She gives one of those smiles where her lips are clamped together. I'm affronted at her lack of enthusiasm for my suggestion. After all, I've got more financial credentials on my CV than just filling in expense claims as a reporter.

  'You know, I did used to manage a company with a $150 million-a-year turnover,' I protest. This is what I went on to do after I stopped working in front of camera.

  But Maggie knows that the American owners of the TV news company I found myself 'in charge of' insisted on putting in their own twenty-five person accounts department to track every dollar and cent of their investment. And they appointed their own finance director to ask me questions, such as, 'So, do you want to start a new service in Latin America, or would you rather fire a hundred people?' My job as chief executive was to guess, from the way he phrased the questions, what the right answer was.

  'Well maybe we could do it together,' Maggie adds. She doesn't need to mention her hands-on ownership of a successful retail business for me to get the point.

  'Sure,' I say. And I pull up an Excel spreadsheet on my laptop.

  We look at the two sides of the equation. Sunny wants £125,000 for the burgage. And if we can get the asking pric
e for Maggie's house, where we live now, after paying off the mortgage, we'd have about £170,000 for the building work. Sounds plenty when you consider the new house isn't going to be that big. Still, I put my name alongside an action point to find an architect who'll give us a rough costing. My other task is to phone the Cotswold District Council Planning Department in Cirencester.

  Before I can get round to these jobs, I'm due in London the following day for a meeting with a client (I'm doing a bit of consultancy for a small media company), and I've arranged to have lunch afterwards with an old friend, Ralph.

  CHAPTER 2

  LARK RISE

  TO MARXISM

  'What you wanna do that for?' asks Ralph. I've just told him about our plans in Stow. He licks beer froth from the moustache that rounds off his pointy beard, then screws up the left side of his face. 'You looking to back out of life and sit in a hole waiting for a quiet death?'