| NOTES |
The cottage we had rented for six months without seeing it first was Orchard Cottage, at Dunkeswell Abbey in Devon. We somehow managed to take all our stuff, still mainly baby gear, on the Tube to Waterloo. We then crammed it all into a compartment of the Honiton train. The journey to Honiton took four hours (we later learned that there was a much quicker way of getting to the cottage, via Taunton). I've no idea how we got all the stuff, plus Felix in the push-chair, the eight miles from Honiton to Dunkeswell Abbey. I can't imagine that we hitched or walked. I suppose we got a taxi. |
| For the benefit of my readers outside the UK (and there are quite a lot of you) Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries began in 1538, but the subsequent reduction of the buildings to ruins was largely the result of plundering for building materials. | Dunkeswell Abbey turned out to be a pretty remote place - for people without cars at least - nestling in a hollow at the junction of several small dairy farms. The focal point was the ruin of a Cistercian Abbey, a victim, as usual, of Henry VIII. Set among the ruins was a Victorian church. There were just half a dozen houses, mostly farm houses, scattered quite widely apart. Orchard Cottage itself was a long narrow building, originally a cowshed built of stone plundered from the Abbey ruins, and converted into a dwelling sometime in the 1920s, probably. The orchard from which it took its name consisted of a few ancient fruit trees and a lot of wild grass. There was a small much-neglected vegetable patch to the rear. The orchard and its land were completely encircled by a high dyke with a hawthorn hedge along the top of it, so it was all very secluded. The nearest shop was two miles away in the village of Hemyock. |
| The cottage had electricity and a telephone. Water came from the communal well outside in the picturesque little square, which was bounded on one side by the dyke of Orchard Cottage, on the other side by the old schoolhouse, which was by now a weekend cottage, and at the closed end by the Abbey ruins and the church. The open end led eventually to the outside world. The ancient pump over the well was by now just an ornament, as each property had its own pump indoors, connected by an underground pipe to the well. Most of the pumps, even the Orchard Cottage one, were electric. There were two bedrooms, a living-room and a kitchen, but there was terrible rising damp in the living-room, and it was very dark, having only one very small window. It had a great inglenook fireplace, but our one and only attempt to get a fire going in it resulted in clouds of smoke belching into the room. The room was also run alive with harvestmen and the Victorian furniture was half consumed by woodworm. We therefore rarely used the living-room and spent most of out time in the kitchen. Cooking was by bottled gas, which was delivered once a month. |
| We had moved there shortly before Christmas. I can remember only two things about that Christmas. For one thing, we started the tradition, which has continued to this day, of making an enormous and elaborate cake that lasts for several weeks beyond Christmas, and for another thing, we certainly didn't go to my mother's. However, early in the New Year, my mother phoned to tell us that my grandmother had died, just short of her hundredth birthday. I left Angela with Felix, walked to Hemyock and got the newly discovered twice-weekly bus from there to Taunton, for the train to Paddington. |