Another Country?

Th, but it isn't that far away. In fact, it is all around us, if we care to look. Or even simply talk to our older family members, who possess a wealth of information about how things used to be, good and bad.

Until I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, I lived in a 17th-century house on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, in a small town that might be described as "left behind in the 1950s". This phrase was actually used in a Sunday supplement article, in The Telegraph magazine. It wasn't intended to be derogatory, in fact it was intended to be some kind of compliment.

I certainly found living in this left-behind place rather fascinating, because there were old houses waiting to be lovingly restored that had hardly been touched by the hand of modernism. such as our old house, that had been squatted and therefore had been abandoned for about 30 years. And thereby avoided much of the excesses of the 60s and 70s for making old houses modern.

And the town itself still had its wonderful selection of local shops, including one of those old-fashioned sweet shops, and for the first couple of years that we lived there a small wet-fish shop. which sadly closed, when the owners retired and could find nobody to take it on as a going concern. Probably because it wasn't.

It was a small town with no more than 5000 inhabitants, and divided into the old and the new. We lived in the old part, just yards away from the 16th century Butter Cross and the ruins of the mediaeval castle.

It had never been a particularly significant place, although it had its legends and many fascinating stories of old times.

So for the example, the author Henry Rider Haggard had lived just outside in an old house now flats and apartments, and his house had been the location of numerous seances. It was rumored to be one of the most haunted houses in England.

His granddaughter, also a writer, ghost-wrote the memoirs of her gamekeeper, in several volumes that captured the memories of an old countryman and of the places he inhabited from Victorian times.

These biographical writings, the first of which was The Rabbit Skin Cap, made something of a success of the originator of the memoirs, but he had entered up committing suicide in a house just opposite to the one that we work restoring. Something about the shame of his assaulting some young child.

Lilias Rider-Haggard wrote for the local newspaper a country column before she wrote the books, and one of her writerly friends, Henry Williamson, was the author of Tarka The Otter, had lived in Devon, and moved to Norfolk where he pursued his fascistic tendencies by working on the land.

In the late 16th century, Bungay is remembered for an appearance of the devil in the form of a black dog, that entered the parish church and caused the death of two parishioners on the spot. the scratch marks left on the door are apparently still visible.

We discovered our own version of history through the restoration of our strange survival of a house, which was built from Dutch bricks, with a pantiled roof, and with Baltic pine wall boarding that when we removed the plaster-board hiding it, revealed in places 300 years of wallpaper, and the extraordinary beauty of this vernacular form of room division.

When we bought the cottage adjacent, and opened up an already existing doorway between the two buildings, we discovered that the bricks used to wall up the doorway had been made locally at the St Cross brickworks, identified by the cross-mark in the frog of the brick. Some paper stuffed into the brickwork could be identified to 1851 from an article about the Great Exhibition, and so, 150 years from its being bricked up, we walked through this door into our expanded house, which now boasted four bedrooms, two full-sized bathrooms, and two kitchens. One of which became a utility room and led to the private garden for which we had purchased this property, as most of our land with the squatted house provided access over it for the neighboring houses.

Our neighbour from the garden, two doors away on the street, had purchased his property from the Haggard Estate, when he returned from imprisonment by the Japanese in Burma after the Second World War. He had a house and several outbuildings in a disorderly yard, where he hoarded historical artefacts and assorted building materials that local builders often purchased for their projects locally.

Mr Buck was well known locally to be eccentric, and his house contained on the ground floor the old butcher shop, which was filled with small bric-a-brac, but was never open as a shop. Visitors would often stand looking in at the shop with its inviting contents, but Mr Buck would never sell anything, rather he would give things away to people that he liked. who were few and far between.

As our neighbour over the garden at the rear, we got on well, and Mr Buck would leave vegetables grown in his own garden and flowers for my wife, often in old receptacles from his never opened shop. We were honoured indeed.

There was a public house opposite our house which guaranteed our security, as it never seemed to close. It was the only pub in the street, but there had been at least six in times past, as well as numerous places will you could simply knock and get a beer. In the days before water was piped to every home, and when drinking water that was not brewed into beer might not be safe.

There was a tannery at the end of the street, long since closed, and Shakespeare makes mention of the town at least twice, as the place where you would get your breeches bottomed.

At the end of the street, the small river was once navigable to the sea, 20 miles away, and the shallow bottomed Norfolk Wherries would once have been the source of the Dutch bricks and the Baltic pine. Almost to the door.

One of the buildings in Mr Bucks yard had once been the local slaughterhouse, hence the butchers shop, and there was much fruitless negotiation over the restoration of this relic of the town, which failed over access problems to the potential restored slaughterhouse and vets combined.

We didn't require planning consent to combine the two houses, because they had connecting doors. Which we reopened. And we had two staircases, the one in the cottage to the rear a small typically vernacular staircase, steep and accessed by what seemed to be a cupboard door.

The staircase in the house on the street was a rather different affair, it was very grand for a small townhouse, with balusters made of American cedar, and floating stair treads, seemingly unsupported as they thrust from the walls.

It rose all the way to the attic, three floors in total, and when we removed the old floorboards from the attic floor, underneath we found the original random width elm floorboards, badly worm-eaten but in remarkable condition, onto which a 1940s wooden floor had been built simply to straighten the original elm floor. We simply scrubbed and varnished with diamond-hard varnish this beautiful flooring, cannibalising a small section which we made into an ensuite bathroom where the floor had been damaged when the house was electrified.

We use this room as our main bedroom, 28 feet long, under newly installed old oak trusses which we had purchased locally from an architectural salvage yard. They were 15th century, and so much older than the house itself, which had been rebuilt (as had an much of old Bungay) after the great Fire of 1688, which had destroyed most of the old wooden buildings in the town.

It was one of my proudest moments when the local historic buildings officer visited and exclaimed at the fact that the house was older than he thought, and it was left to me to tell him that I had simply replaced rotten Victorian roof trusses with what I had purchased locally.

And because of the staircase, we felt that the house owner in 1688 that had rebuilt it must have had pretensions, not to say a little money. The upstairs door to next door was at least 2 feet higher than the floor of the cottage that had been built in about 1740, and we surmised that a wooden building that had served as his warehouse, built close by so that he could keep an eye on his property, meant that he had been a merchant of some kind, and so we called our house merchant house. After all, until the sluices were built into the river in 1932, the river was navigable to the sea. and the whole of our street had been the commercial quarter of the town.