Farewell to my perfect village idyll
After 30 years of love, loss and laughter, but most of all a magical sense of community, COLIN DUNNE bids . . .
TWO days after we moved into South View Cottage, I saw her. A smart, middle-aged woman who was walking her labrador on the village green and peeping through the nut-trees at the house.
What fascinated me was the look on her face. She looked absorbed: as though she was juggling emotions. Could I help her? She nodded her head towards the cottage. Her voice not much more than a murmur, she said: ‘That was my home for 30 years. My children were born in that bedroom.’
What do you say to that? I blurted out something about feeling that the house belonged more to her than to me. She managed a smile and said: ‘As long as it’s loved and cared for, that’s all that matters.’
And now it’s another 30 years since I had that conversation with Ruth, and I’m moving on, too. It’s happening everywhere. People who can remember elsie Tanner and Jimmy Greaves, and who are possibly the last generation to be able to do the seven times table and joined-up writing, are being urged to move aside for the phone-worshippers. That’s the younger generation, of course. The trouble is, it’s not as easy as that. Houses are not just places you go when it’s raining. They are homes where people laugh and cry, dream and pray, fear and hope.
We have love affairs with our homes. We see it celebrated on our TV screens in Downton and Brideshead, where the gently bred worship their ancient heaps of bricks and mortar.
But we untitled peasants share the same pride, the same joy, and ultimately the same sadness in our more modest homes.
After three decades living in South View Cottage, in Stedham, West Sussex, I’m leaving — and it’s heart-breaking. I have experienced divorce (my own) and death (so far, other people’s) and I don’t believe that either can be more distressing than this. Love at first sight? Is there any other sort? From across the green, I saw this lovely little house, pink brick and prettily patterned tiles, buttery stone, a porch where there was once a front door and, at the top, a proud gable.
A stately home? Hardly, with only two bedrooms and a bathroom off the kitchen — not the best arrangement. But it looked a happy little house, which beats stately hands-down.
Then, disaster. The sale fell through. I drove away not daring to look back.
A year later, I saw an advert in a London newspaper. ‘Ideal country cottage,’ it said.
I rang the number. The woman who answered said: ‘Is that Mr Dunne?’
It was South View. On the market again. And this time it didn’t fall through. It wasn’t as though this was my first house. I’d had about 20 addresses. Terrace houses — one in Giggleswick, north Yorkshire, which cost all of £800, one in Chelsea, which cost slightly more. Half a Victorian mansion near Tunbridge Wells, which had either a swimming pool or flooding in the basement, depending whether you’re buying or selling.
And I seem to remember a flat in Darlington which was called, with unflinching honesty, Gasworks View.
South View was different. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was buying into the life and history of Stedham and those who live here.
It’s an end house of a terrace of three built by the man who created much of the village.
At the turn of the last century, John Scrimgeour was lord of the manor and lived at Stedham Hall.
While other squires were out raping maidens and oppressing the poor, or so legend insists, Scrimgeour occupied himself with spreading cheer and happiness.
He put in the village’s water supply. He installed a bathhouse and reading room. He gave them an eight-acre playing field. He built three-bedroom houses for newlyweds.
And when he built the houses in South View for his parlour maids, he saw they were sited alongside the road in The Alley, facing east, and he had a brilliant idea.
He ordered them to build the row end-on to the road, so they faced south. Back-to-front houses, with day-long sunshine. From my bedroom, you look down the long garden, across the green, and over the sports field beyond.
In the distance, you can see a shadow of the South Downs.
WHen my grandson, Archie, was four, he would marvel that he could run down the garden and through the gate onto the green, where all the swings and roundabouts were waiting for him.
‘My grandpa,’ he was heard boasting to his pals, ‘has his own park at the bottom of the garden.’
The ghost of the great benefactor is still here. In May every year, the old walls of the village are bedecked with purple aubrietia — John Scrimgeour’s favourite flower.
Sadly, since Ruth had lived here, it had become a little unloved. The garden was simply a slice of field that ran right up to the house. Tiles were coming off the roof. The window frames were rotten.
That was when I felt myself slipping into the warmth of village life.
everyone, it seemed, had something to contribute. Chris — motorbike enthusiast, neighbour and esteemed builder — put up a small extension on the back, which gave us an upstairs bathroom and a third bedroom.
Trevor, sometime rock guitarist, pushed back the field and laid a paved terrace with squares for lavender. David, from the garden centre, designed and installed a lawn and flower-beds. Julian, artist in stonework, built a Mediterraneanstyle rock garden. Malcolm, demon fast bowler, painted the house inside and out. ‘Two Drinks’ Tim (he likes one in each hand) did the electrics. Jim, owner of border terriers, dogproofed it.
Then Derek Christmas, voted Best neighbour in the World, took over the garden. In the summer people looked over the gate and marvelled. (Who voted him Best neighbour? Me!) Sometimes we’d find a bag of vegetables — beans or shallots — dangling from the door handle. Or I’d come home and find a bag of kindling on the log piles. ‘Just being neighbourly,’ Derek would say.
The house even won praise from the man who would be mayor of Stedham, if such a title existed — eddie. He was born here more than 70 years ago and never left. Professionally, he was a surveyor and auctioneer in nearby Midhurst. There, he met his wife Janet, and the two of made their marital home in Stedham.
AT One time they used to cycle home for lunch at 1pm, then cycle back to work at 2pm. If there is any aspect of local life which has not featured eddie, no one can think of it. Cricket and football, church choir, school governor, parish council, he’s done the lot.
An amateur actor, he was so accomplished he was tempted to go professional. He even asked his daughter, herself an actor, if he could have made it as a pro.
‘Yes, Dad, you could,’ she replied. ‘But you would never have made it as a waiter,’ which is what actors do most of the time.
I heard him say once that he thought perhaps he could have been more adventurous. now over 70, liked and admired, he’s lived a life of professional, cultural and personal achievement, without ever leaving the village. He’s never needed to.
His verdict on the house? ‘It’s a little jewel,’ he said.
By this time we were immersed in village life. Brian the taxi driver, who ran me home one night, came in to admire the changes. He was Ruth’s son, and had been born here. ‘My dad put that window in,’ he said.
His sister, Sue, also born in my house, coached the girls’ stoolball team (a quirky game that’s rather like cricket). edie was a star player, too, and she’s married to Trevor, who did the paving . . .
And so it goes on, an endless entanglement of good people.
Slowly, I became enmeshed in their lives and history. My neighbour, Derek, who played the tea-chest double-bass in the local skiffle group halfa-century ago, had lived there almost all his life with his Auntie Flo.
When he leaves, he says, it will be in a box. He’s the last Christmas in Stedham. At one time, there were so many who worked on lord of the manor John Scrimgeor’s houses up School Lane, that they are still known as Christmas Cottages.
All their lives are interlinked. After Flo died, Derek bought the house from George Stephens, who ran the garage and owned the entire row.
George’s son, Andy, who died a little while ago, came out to me when I had a puncture. He changed the wheel, took the other wheel back to his garage, traced the puncture by sinking it in a bath of water on the forecourt, replaced the wheel, and said: ‘Call it a tenner.’ Andy’s two sons run the garage now. Their financial policy may have changed a little, but they’re just as helpful.
When I asked another of the original villagers, Jean, if it had changed much, she replied with admirable honesty: ‘Only when people like you came to live here.’
It’s true, and true for most villages, that old families can no longer afford the prices for the old parlour-maid’s cottages, and tend to live up on the council estate. new people, sort of middle-class gipsies (like me), have moved in. We have our uses. When the old villagers wanted to sell off the club (yet another gift, of course, from Mr Scrimgeour), they were
helped by an international lawyer, who had last worked in Moscow and Paris, and the retired head of the National Trust.
Changes which rock nations seem to cause only mild turbulence here. I bought a beautiful painting of the River Rother from Lee, the talented artist who lived on the riverbank. He was gay.
It did not need a major effort of deduction to know this, because he told you. But he did surprise me one evening when he came for supper and confessed he’d been married for years. Of course, I had to ask him what had happened. He rolled his eyes. ‘I met a naughty man in Brighton,’ he said, twinkling at the memory.
I still have his painting of the river on the stairs. And when Kerry Packer, the Australian zillionaire, brought polo to the fields just behind Lavender Row, there was some resistance. Whenever the teams assembled to play, two Stedham ladies walked their dogs on the footpath, which just happened to cross the polo fields. It does the rich and powerful no harm to be made to wait now and again. Certainly, Prince Charles was patience itself, and, I like to think, a better man for it.
Later, Packer endeared himself to the village sportsmen by offering to bring a team of well-known cricketers to play the local team.
What do you mean by wellknown, they asked?
Oh, David Gower, Clive Lloyd, Imran Khan, with Richie Benaud as umpire.
They all came. Who won? Would it matter? Malcolm, the fast-bowling painter, is still talking about that match.
Whenever funds are needed, Juliet is always there. ‘I’m a very bossy lady,’ she says, and thank goodness she is. She organises hog-roasts on the green, or safari suppers where we wander from house to house.
It was at one of these that I found myself being wined and dined by a quietly charming couple, Hugh Williams and his wife, Lulu. Then, they lived in a modest terrace house in the village. Later on, when Hugh began to enjoy a little success at his chosen trade, they moved to a much bigger house tucked away in the hills.
I say Hugh Williams, although most people will know him better as Hugh Bonneville, or even as Lord Grantham. Nice chap.
Not that it would matter. These Sussex folk are not easily impressed by celebrity.
When the bossy lady put the local talent on show in the village hall, she found a marvellous female jazz singer who had a brother who could also sing a bit.
When he rang to book a ticket, he was told that there was none left. ‘I can get a table at The Ivy, but I can’t get a seat at Stedham village hall,’ he complained.
Juliet, of course, found him one. You can’t leave Michael Ball hanging around, can you?
But Stedham isn’t about famous people. It’s about Ruth and Eddie and Derek and the Stephens boys, and for quite a few years, I was lucky enough to be a part of it.
I’m not at all sure that I’ve left much of a mark on Stedham, but it’s left its mark on me.
I’m leaving now because I need to be in a town, near to shops, the doctor’s, and a few handy take-away restaurants.
The good news is I’m being replaced by a young family. These days, this end of the village is beginning to look a little geriatric, and I seem to attend more funerals than christenings.
The new people are a couple in their 30s, Edward and Rose, with two young girls. It’s good for the village because it means the swings and roundabouts at the bottom of the garden will be spinning again.
‘It’s so lovely,’ said Rose, after looking around. ‘I wouldn’t change a thing.’ Then she added: ‘You must be sad to be leaving it.’
I couldn’t improve on dear old Ruth’s reaction 30 years earlier.
‘As long as it’s loved and cared for,’ I said. It will be.