Alma Cogan (8 page)

In all these years, only one of them – mail-order trail boots, duvet jacket, lovat tweed headgear, a classic example of the breed – has given me any reason to believe that she might be
anything other than she seemed. ‘They try to mount her and she doesn’t like it,’ she said when she saw my miniature Pinscher worrying the business end of her Sheltie. ‘Not unless they buy her a drink first.’ Said with the kind of pale smile that contains an entire history.

At the beginning, I held out against being the shapeless ragbag I am when I go out these days. I wore obviously unsuitable things on purpose, as a way of billboarding the fact that I didn’t want to join the club. Being slapped around by the weather a few times quickly brought me to my senses.

Now when I think of my clothes I tend to think of them in the terms in which, in his published diary, Alan Bennett says his mother thought of hers:

I made a note of that at around the same time I made the following note, which seemed a perfect encapsulation of the person I was trying to get away from.

There was a time when I couldn’t let anything go. I used to have three or four sizes in everything because I never knew what I was going to fit into; I had to rent rooms in the flat of the woman downstairs to store the overflow in.

Now I enjoy living in this temporary way: unanchored; unburdened, often not even able to call the clothes I stand up in my own.

Some days the cliff path is buzzed by military planes from the
base along the coast. They scream in over the fields, follow the line of the cliffs for a couple of miles, then wheel away over the Channel, leaving behind a low rumble followed by silence, and the dog pressed against my leg, cowering, and the wind thrumming and the sheep unconcernedly cropping round tough plants with pink and mauve and yellow flowers which are called campion, ragged robin, thrift, sedum and veronica, but which is which I don’t know.

From above, and at speed, and thrown at a panoramic angle, it all must appear pleasingly unified and inevitable – the picture elements, although discrete, psychologically understood as composing one continuous picture.

Everything in Kiln Cottage – books and furniture, cutlery, crockery, all the household bits and pieces – was from the people who had been there before.

This was Mr and Mrs E, Staff’s parents.

Staff was a London show-business lawyer whom I felt I liked, although I knew him only vaguely. He belonged to that group of people, and it was a large one, whom I had only ever met when either one or both of us was three sheets to the wind; half-seas over, at some party or other.

Staff was born at Kiln Cottage. He grew up here and his parents lived here until their deaths.

Through the clusters of pictures in the downstairs rooms it’s possible to trace his development from toothy schoolboy to public schoolboy to his Moroccan-sandal and tie-dye phase. The pictures stop some years short of his present bi-continental, sherbing-and-jogging, prinked and polka-dotted urbanity.

Mr and Mrs Ε had three children, whose faces are now all as familiar to me as my own from their pictures. Susie (‘Sookie’), the younger daughter, obviously had theatrical ambitions at one point. There’s a grainy
Spotlight
-style portrait of her wearing the copper ring, Juliette Greco hair and exaggerated cow lashes which were de rigueur in certain circles when she was young. She is gazing heavenwards out of the left of the picture in
response to the lensman’s no doubt husky request for ‘misty eyes’.
Make
magic
with
that
face
.

Ruth, the elder daughter, is the breeder. Pictures of Ruth’s compliant, button-nosed children hang in velvet frames in several of the rooms. If I think of the children as being – how shall I put this? – dead, of having retreated from, rather than moved forward into their lives, that is partly the effect of the Polaroids, which have become sun-bleached (the light here most of the time is hallucinogenically bright), giving the young flesh a green, loose-on-the-bone, sickeningly disinterred look.

But it is also partly the fault of the faded burgundy velvet which surrounds these snaps and the grime-stiffened pieces of ribbon to which they are attached.

In the days when I was still noticing them – still noticing everything that I now accept as just everyday domestic clutter, mere atmospheric fill – I was tempted several times to remove the pictures or turn them face to the wall. What stopped me is the thing that has always stopped me making any kind of even minor change in the years I’ve been dug-in here.

It pleases me that, with the exception of a couple of personal eccentricities which we will no doubt take a turn around later, there is hardly any more evidence of my existence in the cottage today than on the day I arrived.

The names and numbers in the book that lies by the telephone are in Mrs E’s hand. It is Mrs E’s recipes that are written on plain four-by-five cards in the tin box in the kitchen. I sit in Mr and Mrs E’s chairs, sleep in their bed and eat my meals from their plates with their knives and forks. My clothes hang next to the few items of clothing of theirs that their children, for whatever reason, have decided not to let go.

I lie in their bath at nights listening to the riotous knocking and screaming in the pipes which, on the rare occasions they were away from it, must have formed a part of their memory of the house. Lying in bed in the dark, you can still hear mouse claws clicking in the rafters and the reassuring noises of the house settling around itself.

They have laid claim to it in so powerful, apparently permanent, a way that, although in many respects it was blindingly obvious, it came as a shock the first time I realised that other people had lived in Kiln Cottage before Mr and Mrs E.

‘Know what this is?’ Bob Brotherhood asked when he broke off from pottering in the garden and came in for a cup of tea one day. He was sitting in his favourite ‘elbow chair’ with his cap flattened across his knee. His country colour as usual was alarmingly high. He was rotating the tiny leather clog off the bureau in his chipped and worn old fingers.

(My thoughts immediately flew to the clog-shaped hole it would have left in the collected dust, and the bad report he’d put in to Mrs Brotherhood when he got home. He has an unusual attachment to the cottage and misses nothing to do with its well-being and maintenance.)

‘Found it in the wall, I did, when I was helping knock through here, time I was a boy. Put there years sin’, so they say, to ward off evil spirits.’

The cottage was originally three workers’ cottages. The original tenants were apparently jobbing gardeners and journeymen carpenters, masons and tailors, washer-women and domestic servant girls, all topped-and-tailed, incestuously shoe-horned in together.

The conversion to a single dwelling accounts for the surprising changes of level you now find between rooms; going upstairs, in some instances, can leave you standing no further from the ground than where you’ve started.

The cottage is wedge-shaped and built sideways into the foot of a hill that starts off as a sheep field so perpendicular the sheep look like fridge magnets stuck to it As the hill descends, it becomes a combination of ploughed red earth and grazing pasture, and ends up at the quay and the river.

Kiln Cottage is named after the lime kiln which now makes a picturesque ruin at the foot of the garden. The cottage stands alone between the quay and the lane which takes traffic down and round into the village. This is so narrow it’s possible to look
into cars and see what brand of cigarette the driver is smoking while washing dishes at the sink. Or, alternatively, watch the flies gorging themselves in the mucus draining from cows’ nostrils when they’re lumbering past. (You can see how easily I have adapted to not having a television.)

‘The foetor there must’ve been them days,’ Mr Brotherhood said, absently polishing the child’s clog on his cap now. ‘Days before the invention of sanitary science. Open drains. I remember when the families what lived here had earth-closets. Wasn’t so long past neither. Slop-pails in the kitchen that smelled to beat the band. Smelt it when you were passin’, you could. But those days evbody roun’ these ways was the same.’

‘More tea?’

‘Often occurs to me to wonder who that little girl might have been,’ he said, peering into the shoe now as if something on the inside could give him his answer.

‘Would you like your tea heated?’

‘Just half a cup,’ he said, setting the mug down between his boots, which was the cue for the dog to make a dive for it from the other side of the room. (All my dogs have been tea drinkers.) ‘I’ll have to let some out first.’

There is a set of photograph albums stored in one of the cupboards. I didn’t look at them for a long time. But when I did, less out of any sense of genuine curiosity than as a way of filling an empty hour (there are some things you don’t want to know, and will put off knowing), a number of things became apparent.

Staff’s parents had moved into Kiln Cottage as young marrieds, when this place obviously represented what I recently saw described as ‘one of those Shangri-la-type concepts’. (Their well-bred young English faces – the eyes shy yet determined; the skin drawn tight across the bones – weren’t blurred with the inevitable loneliness apparent in the later pictures.)

They had also changed the cottage over time to suit their needs. A second bathroom, for example, had been added off the kitchen. (‘This sink leaks’ a notice posted here used to say when
I arrived; still there but illegible, like all the other notices around the cottage – ‘The kettle sometimes switches itself on, so after use please switch off at socket’; ‘DANGER: the water from this tap can be
VERY
hot’, etcetera – it adds to the sense of layers; it forms the newest layer of secret surface information.)

There had been several other modifications. The original thatched roof had been replaced with slate at some stage. An asparagus patch, which was fertilised with seaweed and lay between the cottage and the kiln, had been turned into a tufted sloping lawn with a clear view over the water.

Most disconcertingly, what I still think of as the front of the house – the part of it which opens on to a small plot of garden and then the quay – used to be the back. As some of the earliest pictures in the albums make clear, the large cupboard on the lane-side of the living-room is built into a hole where the old front door used to be.

These discoveries about what had seemed such a rock-solid, unchanged and unchanging set of circumstances left me feeling oddly skewed for a while. I felt the way I felt when I learned (more recently than I care to own up to) that all matter is perpetually in a state of vibration.

I was still at the stage then when I believed that, simply by quitting London, I had entered a world in which all contradiction and complication had been swept away. In their literal matter-of-factness, the names of the cottages I passed every day walking through Cleve seemed to confirm that this was the case.

Rose Cottage (roses round the rustic gate, roses round the door). Plum Tree Cottage. White Cottage. Blue Shutters. Round House. Greystones. Court View Cottage (overlooking the municipal tennis courts). Smithy Cottage (opposite the old smithy). East Wood. West View. Churchunder. Steps End. End of the Strand. Slipway Cottage. The Slope.

They were the very embodiment of the life of certainties and ‘real values’ that all town-dwellers are supposed to aspire to as some kind of earthly nirvana. And for a long time, as I say, I bought it.

As the in-comer from a world I had no doubt they all regarded as ugly and tawdry and meretricious, violent and distasteful (I could hear them mouthing off at choir practice in the village hall, over whist, at the Young Wives’ Thursday Afternoon Club and the W. I., righteous eyes blazing, lips pursed in distaste), I kept myself scarce.

It took me a long time to get my eye in; to find out who the madmen are.

‘You can tell by their gardens which class they’re from,’I overheard one woman saying to another shortly after I arrived. Well I couldn’t. Not at first. (And, if I’m honest, still really can’t. Not the way I can tell at fifty paces genuine Rolex or Chanel from the Hong Kong bootleg. Short of match-practice as I am, I could still walk into most clubs and tell you what the bar take is to a penny.)

Cleve is really two villages, Cleve and Coombe, one on each side of a steep valley. The oldest parts of the two villages are down on the waterside, where a rough causeway connects them at low-tide.

The causeway is made of cement which must have been of some special fast-setting kind to resist being washed away by the current. In fact, impressions of water-movement are visible at certain points along its length – smooth, swirled areas fixed into the surface, which remind me of those time-stop shots of dandelions releasing their clocks, and the technically enhanced pictures of the motorcade in Dallas that purport to show a section of President Kennedy’s scalp being blown away.

Near the water is where you find the traditional whitewashed cottages, black-tarred at their bases, which in the early days I fondly imagined housing unruly families of honest-to-God shit-kickers and decent, atmospherically stinking fisher-folk;

The name-plates attached to the cottages – hand-decorated and-fired tiles, and loftily inscribed lozenges of local slate (both styles no doubt the work of rat-race drop-outs and hairy back-to-the-earthers) – should have alerted me to the fact that these were
all now either holiday homes or the homes of young commuter professionals and comfortably-off retirees.