Everyone should do something crazy during their life.
For me, it was persuading my best friend that we should buy a semi-derelict 17th-century house and restore it to life.
Whilst I was working full-time in a responsible job.
The house in question was undoubtedly if not magically calling to me, if not then somehow waiting just to be my nemesis.
I didn't want to live in the town in which I was working, perhaps because my job was concerned with its regeneration, and I wanted to live somewhere that didn't have the kind of problems that had drawn me to work in this fashion, using the creative arts as a means of contributing to significant changes, starting at the heart of the community, and in the process equipping some of its people with new skills.
And so the house. We found it one day when looking for somewhere within daily commuting distance, and at 20 miles away, it was just about ideal.
It was in a small and attractive town in the Waveney Valley, just a couple of miles from a mainline station which gave direct access to London by a fast train.
This was essential for my best friend, who was a freelance theatre and opera director. Thus her work could be anywhere in the country, and even in Scotland. In other words, abroad.
She was successful in what she did, although success was never really recognized financially. And that I suppose is the nature of working in the creative arts in Britain.
It doesn't necessarily bring financial reward, although in the course of her work, we both met and worked with some of the most incredibly skilled people both in theatre and opera.
Because of my work, I could occasionally take advantage of my best friends’ skills and contacts in fulfilling some of my priorities, and I suppose I was more of a producer and was able to achieve whatever I could raise the money for.
My job had the advantage of stability, and was relatively well paid, perhaps because it had lots of problems to overcome.
I would often not be home before nine or 10 o'clock, simply because I had things to do and people to see, and problems to sort out.
Which is perhaps why restoring a house without a roof was such a crazy idea. Although for the first several months we rented the house next door, behind it, a small cottage that we soon discovered had more problems than the house we were restoring, thanks to inappropriate repairs to a period building.
We did eventually buy this second house, and added it to the first, principally because it had a private garden, which our Town House on the street didn't.
This was half-way into the five-year restoration of our project, and really made sense of the overall scheme, adding two further bedrooms to our three-bedroom Townhouse, and that most important thing, a private garden.
My nemesis had been built in 1690, after a great fire that had destroyed most of the houses in the town because they were made of wood. It was in miniature like the Great Fire of London.
The street in which we lived had always been historically the commercial heart of the town, when the river that passed just 100 metres from us had been navigable to the sea by the shallow bottomed Norfolk Wherries.
Sluices had been introduced to the river in 1932, cutting off this river traffic, which accounted for the fact that our house was built from Dutch bricks, with Pantiles that would have been brought over from Holland as ballast, and that its rooms were divided using Baltic Pine timbers of the finest quality, which we discovered were still in place underneath plasterboard that had simply been tacked over it.
In places, we retained 300 years of wallpaper that had been preserved in this fashion. In other parts, there was evidence of the way in which these beautiful timbers had simply been limewashed, which had the side effect of preserving the timbers from insect infestation.
When we purchased the house next door, we didn't have too get planning permission to make them one, because we had doorways between them which had simply been bricked up, or downstairs almost simply papered over.
When we took down the bricks on our side of the door upstairs, we found a newspaper stuffed in the brickwork which we could date to 1851. The house next door had been built in about 1740, and probably replaced a wooden building that had perhaps been the warehouse for our building, in which we fancied a merchant trader might have lived. The bricks had been sourced locally, because of the recognizable imprint in the frog of the brick, and when we first reopened it we found a ledge and brace door which we kept and since it was 2001, it must have been almost exactly 150 years since anyone had passed through that door. Spooky.
The levels were different in the house behind, simply because the height of the ceilings was less than our own. Which also made us think that our house had been lived in by someone with ambitions.
Which perhaps accounted for the fine staircase in the front house, which must have been rescued from perhaps one of the other houses destroyed in the fire, but it was certainly a fine staircase.
In the second house we had a typical steep staircase accessed by what appeared to be a cupboard door, but this staircase rose three storeys to the attic, and it was a floating staircase, built so that the wide steps seemed to have no obvious support. And the fine balusters, datable almost precisely to 1690, were made from American Cedar.
This would have been an expensive luxury in its day, and as it had been virtually untouched, it was simply blackened with age, and worn in places by hands that had supported themselves on it.
I always said it was the staircase that had made me fall in love with the house, and want to rescue it.
And rescue it we did. Every hour we spent lovingly restoring this unique survival, unique because it had been abandoned by its owner, and therefore squatted and thereby saved from inappropriate restoration until we came along.
My best friend had been a member of The Society For The Protection Of Ancient Buildings since she had been 18 or so, and we certainly adopted their principles of sensitive repair and restoration, respecting each change that had been made over the course of the buildings’ life.
We both learned how to work with lime instead of cement, because a building of this age needed the flexibility of soft mortar. And we sourced the sharp sand needed from probably the same source that had been used in its construction. A local quarry which was a source of sand we could purchase by the bag.
Most of the work we undertook ourselves, but when necessary we brought in appropriate professional help. Such as the finest company of church restorers to help us replace a section of wall plate, 4 feet of oak beam 6 inches square supporting the roof, which needed replacing.
It became a fine house once again, and in the course of our restoration we soon got to know most of the people in our street, and those that we didn't know we got to meet when we arranged for the closure of the street one Easter, which coincided with the completion of a European tour on one of my best friends theatre productions that had brought Chaucer to the more cultural parts of the continent.
Her production of the Canterbury Tales was performed by four actor-musicians, and was designed so that everything could be transported in a large van, and be set up quickly whatever the facilities available.
The completion of the tour coincided with Easter, and the players readily agreed to add a performance to their schedule, gratis, in return for accommodation and fine dining in our now almost presentable restoration project.
It was late April, and in spite of intermittent rain storms, the weather held off so that the performance could take place with the set built in the street closed for the performance, and with most of the audience bringing their own chairs to be seated in the entrance way to the pub car park directly opposite.
It was a Sunday, I remember, Easter Sunday, and about an hour into the performance I remember how the Catholics in the audience simply packed away their chairs to attend evening mass.
The contrast could not have been greater, from The Wife Of Bath's tale to mass at church.
But those that stayed loved the climax to the performance, which played outrageously as Chaucer himself might have approved.
The show had been written specially for its tour by a good friend of ours, with whom my best friend worked several times.
The entire day had been preceded by lots of Easter activities, including egg rolling, the pub providing about 100 hard boiled eggs for the purpose.
I suppose a theatre performance in the street was the highlight, although a close second would be a tug of war across the border between Norfolk and Suffolk, using a proper tug of war rope.
Everyone took part, young and old, although to be fair we did have a special event for the children as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment