VT Coughtrey - Orchard Cottage (2)

NOTES	By the end of the six months for which we had rented the cottage, we had done nothing about trying to find somewhere else to live, apart from getting ourselves on the local council housing list. But that hardly counted, as we had been given very few points and were told that we could expect to wait at least nine years to be rehoused. Fortunately, the owner had still not decided what to do with the cottage, so agreed to let us stay, on a week-by-week basis. That arrangement went on for over two years and was eventually ended by us, not the owner.
	In the meantime, we carried on growing our crops, taking and developing photographs, collecting the eggs from Miss Parker's hens, taking her poor old dogs for increasingly long walks, taking in and looking after stray cats (which unaccountably abounded in the area) and doing the two-mile walk with Felix in the push-chair to the pub. We also brewed excellent and very strong beer, of which we often drank far too much.
	My mother came to stay for a week in the Summer of 1974 - a week at the end of which my nerves were in a terrible state. Unfortunately, her departure coincided with Angela's departure on one of her money-earning expeditions. Having put my mother on the London train, leaving Angela to hitch, I had to return to the cottage alone with Felix. I immediately hit a batch of experimental nettle beer. It was far stronger than I thought, and I became totally incapable - very ill, in fact. I managed to call in neighbour Rita Ridgewell to take charge of Felix, and when Angela made one of her scheduled 'phone calls from London, I had to ask her to cancel the rest of her bookings and return immediately. No doctor would come because I had never bothered to register with one there. Rita took me to her doctor in Hemyock, where I was very ill for a long time in the waiting room before he would see me. Probably, I should have gone to hospital, but the doctor just prescribed milk of magnesia. It took me a couple of weeks to recover. It was even longer before I started drinking again. Rita, though kind, was not discreet, therefore everyone about the place was soon familiar with all the details of the episode. Adults were content with snide comments, but the ten-year-old daughter of the people who used the old schoolhouse as a weekend cottage gave me a thorough dressing down for being drunk and incapable while in charge of a small child.
	I was prompted to include that dreadful episode by a recent (2005) nostalgia visit to Dunkeswell Abbey, during which I was astounded to see a familiar but very faded note pinned to the door of the church asking people to refrain from defacing the church. The note was put there by the vicar after I had scrawled some very drunken anti-religious message on the door (in pencil and barely visible) at the height of that nettle beer fiasco. The fact that the vicar's note was still there after 30 years says everything about the pace of change in those parts. See if you can spot it on your next visit to Dunkeswell Abbey!
	Angela's mother also stayed for a week, but her visit didn't have any such dreadful consequences as my mother's stay. Another visitor, probably in the following Summer, was Walter. I have not mentioned him since Chapter 44. In fact, following my disappearance of 1967 it was six years before I was in touch with him again. That was just prior to our move to Orchard Cottage, as he was by that time back in Barnet, living with his parents. He had taken up gliding and combined his stay with us in Devon with a gliding course at Dunkeswell airfield, two miles away. During our Orchard cottage era Walter and I exchanged about forty letters. Walter became very proud of what he saw as his ever-increasing abilities as a letter writer, but the epistles were in fact rambling, repetitive and very, very long. Some ran to twenty A4 sides of laboriously neat handwriting. From me in return, he would get one side of scrawl.
	By the age of three and a half, Felix had began to show signs of great promise. He was drawing astounding pictures in perspective, usually of cars, and Angela was making great headway in teaching him to read and write. He was soon running a lucrative business giving tourists guided tours of the abbey ruins. He had remembered an astonishing amount that he had been told about the history of the place. The tourists (several a day in the Summer) were usually so surprised and delighted that they gave him money. Unfortunately we eventually stole all the money he had accumulated from this enterprise. We certainly didn't want to do any such thing, but we were going through a very lean time by then. It was years before he forgave us for the theft.
The Conservatives failed to achieve an overall majority in the February election, and talks between PM Edward Heath and Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe about forming a coalition failed. Therefore a second election was held in October, which Labour, under Harold Wilson, won by 3 seats.	The backdrop to the first of our three years at Orchard Cottage was the Recession, when share prices collapsed almost to nothing, and there were two general elections and a hung parliament. Those politically turbulent days rekindled my own political fervour. But this time, it took a more peculiar form than ever. I joined a tiny little-known party called the Socialist Party of Great Britain (the SPGB), one of the most eccentric but also one of the most enduring (and endearing) entities of the political scene. They claimed to be the only true Marxists and had a fixed manifesto which had remained unchanged for seventy years. After all, they argued, Marx had the truth, and the truth is the truth, so how could the manifesto of the only real Marxist party be anything other than the unchanging truth of Marx? They believed in the abolition of money, the armed forces and the police, because all those things are there just to serve the capitalist system. However - and here was the real eccentricity - they believed that revolution could only come about through the ballot box, and even then only when the majority of people genuinely understood the SPGB manifesto and wanted every last comma of it to become reality. Anything else was not the Revolution. Therefore, during general elections, when the party contested two or three constituencies, their election leaflets always urged people NOT to vote for them unless they had read, understood and agreed with every word of the ancient manifesto. Needless to say, they never got more than a handful of votes! They also said that when elected to government, their first and last act would be to abolish the government. It was quite difficult to get a handle on how they differed from the more peaceful varieties of anarchists, but it could be done, with practice. They were absolutely against any kind of left-wing reformism, which they said merely softened the workers and made them less revolutionary. I attended a conference in London, followed by a party at the Clapham headquarters where good whisky flowed very freely ("true socialist spirit" as one comrade called it). I also wrote a couple of articles for the party magazine, the Socialist Standard, attacking religion.
	The last of our three Summers there was in the year of the Great Drought of 1976. We heard about people queuing at standpipes in London, the Thames threatening to dry up and so on, but our well just kept going. The landscape, though, became very foreign - brown everywhere, with many trees dying and dead grass crunching underfoot. In the meadows, the only surviving plant was the gaunt, cactus-like black mustard, but there were many unusual insects, including butterflies from southern Europe. I spent many hours sunbathing naked in the seclusion of our orchard, blissfully unaware of the dangers of doing so with no sun cream. Getting as brown as possible all over become a complete (and ridiculous) obsession. The roasting hot days just went on and on for weeks. One or two scientists began to talk of climate change, but they were out on a limb. Very few people took them seriously, or if they did, it was all forgotten as soon as it started raining again.
	By that year Angela had had enough of hitching to and from London to do life modelling,and flatly refused to do any more of it. I still had a strong aversion to claiming Social Security (or whichever of its many names it had at that time). I can't really remember why this was, but it may have had something to do with a horror of dealing with the unlovely types who infested the service at that time. The only solution was to try to run some sort of business of our own. We put our interest in photography and our connections with nude modelling together, and came up with the idea of running a 'glamour' model agency for photographers. We placed some ads in photographic magazines and got a lot of replies from models. One man, who had no photos to send us actually turned up on the doorstep, having walked a very long way, and Angela took some nude pics of him there and then. We put together quite an impressive list of models, with descriptions. This being many years before the advent of home computers, we took our handwritten list to a typing agency in Honiton and got it typed and duplicated (remember duplicating?).
	Unfortunately, the response from photographers didn't match the response from models. After a few weeks, in which we had only managed to introduce one girl to one photographer, we decided to convert Angevic Models to Angevic Sales. We scoured Exchange & Mart for cheap rubbish being offered wholesale, then placed retail ads for the same stuff in the same magazine, at a big mark-up. One item of which we bought large quantities was a piece of junk that was supposed to increase the efficiency of your car if attached to the fuel pipe. We managed to sell a few by mail order, but these were mostly returned by people demanding their money back and saying their cars had been ruined. Of course, they never got their money back. We also sold 'telephone locks' and anti-burglar door viewers, both of poor quality. As well as the ads in Exchange & Mart, Angela travelled far and wide placing cards in shop windows advertising our wonderful wares. We may have sold quite a lot of stuff altogether, but no sooner were the cheques in the bank, than we had to draw the money out again to live on, so we were soon unable to do any more advertising, and the orders stopped coming in. I asked the manager of the tiny part-time bank in Hemyock for a loan, but he said I would need a "man of substance" to act as guarantor. I didn't know, and have never known, any substantial men.
	Angevic Sales having collapsed within weeks, we resorted to selling all our photographic equipment, something I have always looked back upon as an act of great stupidity, as we could almost certainly have got Social Security, and the money we got from selling the gear was never going to last more than a couple of weeks. The time came when we were so far behind with the rent that we could only think of escape - the old answer. Oddly enough, we gave the landlady notice, instead of just disappearing. As she had to visit her mother in Devon, she actually moved us back to London, as much as possible of our stuff having been crammed into her car, the rest abandoned. Of course, we had to promise to pay the considerable amount of rent we owed as soon as possible and we gave her our London address. It was, of course, fictitious. She tried to insist on taking us right to the door, but we made some excuse about having arranged for a friend to pick us up from a bus stop in Highgate. In fact this bus stop was very close to where Bill, an old drinking-companion of Angela, lived. We had arranged to stay in his tiny bedsit "for a few days" until we had sorted something out. What we didn't realize was that after saying goodbye the canny landlady followed us to Bill's place and made a note of the address.