NOTES
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The day after my grandmother's funeral I returned to Orchard Cottage. We soon got to know the neighbours. The three farming families were the Middletons, the Ralphs and the Talbots. They were down-to-earth country folk, living a couple of decades in the past and therefore probably a little scandalized by my appearance and the obvious fact that I didn't have a job. We had a rather spiky relationship with these families throughout our time there. |
| There were two other neighbours, the Ridgwells and Miss Parker. John Ridgwell was an accountant and his wife Rita stayed at home looking after their two young sons. They lived in the largest house. We soon became quite friendly with them and Rita occasionally gave us lifts to Honiton or even to Sidmouth, on the coast, in the Summer. |
| Miss Parker was in her nineties and lived alone in a dark, dank little thatched cottage attached to the original abbey gatehouse. Like Orchard cottage, it had been built using stones from the ruins. It had extensive gardens, originally part of the abbey grounds. They were tended (as indeed was Miss Parker herself, to some extent) by a crusty old cider addict called Hitchcock. Miss Parker always addressed him and referred to him by his surname only. She was evidently someone who had been used to having servants. |
| There were certain things that Hitchcock didn't do, for some reason. One was walking her three ancient dogs, the other was feeding her many free-ranging hens. We were soon recruited for these daily tasks, in exchange for as many eggs as we could find. The hens laid them anywhere at all, so egg-hunting became quite a feature of daily life. Sometimes we found eggs that had been lying under bushes or in the wilder corners of the gardens for so long that they had moss growing on them, yet they had never gone bad. |
| Each of the three dogs had a very distinctive character. Sally was the easiest to cope with, but was in the habit of twisting herself into alarming contortions. Rex was almost too old and fat to move. He couldn't possibly keep up with the walking-pace of humans, so had to be allowed to lag a long way behind and meet us on the way back. Dennis was plain round the bend - full of manic energy, despite his age, and very difficult to control. All three were very flea-ridden. I've taken the time to give these little descriptions of Miss Parker's dogs, because the challenging task of taking them for long daily walks along the narrow lanes in all weathers became an important part of our daily routine. We also became fond of the poor brutes. |
| Miss Parker allotted a small part of her gardens to us, rather to Hitchcock's disapproval. I used both this and the small plot behind our own cottage to grow vegetables. I managed to pack a wide variety of Summer and Winter vegetables into a relatively small total amount of land, and spent much of my time gardening. With the eggs and the home-grown vegetables, the only food items we needed to buy on a regular basis (being vegetarians) were milk, bread and margarine. The Middletons provided daily milk from their very small herd of cattle, and bread and margarine were delivered. We made our own cottage cheese from some of the milk. For other items, we had to walk the two miles to Hemyock and use the little village store, or catch the once-a-week bus from there to Taunton. |
| Of course, we soon had to turn our thoughts to getting money from somewhere. In the end, the only thing we could think of was that Angela should go on prolonged life-modelling expeditions to London, two or three weeks at a time, working for her usual clients - colleges and individual artists. What helped was that all life modelling work in those days was done on a cash-in-hand basis. You simply got paid in cash at the end of each session, something that Inland Revenue has long since stamped out. Fortunately, an old acquaintance in London was able to put her up for these periods of concentrated work. She got her bookings in advance by telephone and made sure of packing as much work as possible into each period away. |
| As a result of Angela's very hard work during those expeditions, and the free accommodation and travel (she always hitched there and back, 150 miles each way) we were able to get by, with money to spare for the occasional few pints in the garden of the Royal Oak in Dunkeswell or the Windmill in Hemyock. In fact, we even began to save a little, despite the atrocious hourly rate for the job in those days. One day, we saw an advertisement in a newspaper for the new Olympus OM1, a state-of-the-art SLR camera, and we actually managed to buy it, together with an enlarger and other darkroom equipment. At the same time a client gave Angela an old but good folding camera on long-term loan. I converted the garden shed into a darkroom, fixing it up with electricity, and we became avid photographers and darkroom processors, often working all night, developing and printing photographs. However, I found the long bits in-between, when Angela was away, and I was left alone with Felix, who was not yet two years old, a considerable strain. |