The first time ever I saw your place
Falling in love - with a house
‘It’s Granny’s eightieth birthday next weekend. Will you come?’
My boyfriend is beaming, his lips twitching the way they do when he’s nervous.
‘You’re inviting me to Boskenna?’ I ask.
He nods. ‘It’s a long way for a weekend, I know, but I’d like you to be there.’
It is 1993. My boyfriend and I have been seeing one another for six months. It’s a relationship that has become intense very quickly as we have known each other for nearly five years already. Still, being invited to the house his grandfather bought in 1957 - a house which has so many stories attached to it and about which I have already heard so much… let’s just say, I’m aware of what a big deal this is. It’s one thing to be invited as ‘the girlfriend’ to meet Granny and the extended family - being introduced to Boskenna is quite another. The way the place is mentioned, it’s as though Boskenna IS his granny - an imperious matriarch to whom the whole family defers, à la Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess of Grantham.
It’s a new experience, knowing I’m going to be judged by a house.
‘It’ll be very cold,’ my boyfriend adds. ‘There’s no central heating.’
No central heating, no showers, only an oil-fired Aga to heat the water, and two ancient cast-iron baths which let the water go cold before you’ve finished running the taps. Oh, and a soak-away cesspit to deal with effluent. The plumbing is quite literally Victorian. Not that I know any of this at this point. In any case, who minds about plumbing when they’re young and in love?
‘God, your family are tough!’ I laugh.
My boyfriend’s parents live in a thatched house in Devon that is also unheated, unless you count the open fires. And hot water bottles. The first time I visited it was a gloriously hot May day. I skipped off to Paddington station in jeans and a T-shirt, a small rucksack slung over my shoulder, containing only what I needed for a couple of nights. On meeting me at Exeter, my boyfriend had frowned. ‘Haven’t you brought a jumper?’ he asked. ‘You’ll freeze in our house.’ He’d been right about that.
This time I am prepared. It is January, after all. I pack layers of appropriate clothes for my visit to Boskenna, and my recent purchase: a pair of wellies. I even pack a hot water bottle. Over the past six months I have taken to the idea of country living. I have fallen in love with rolling green hills, narrow country lanes and roaring open fires, and coming in from wind-blasted walks on the moor, my cheeks stinging and my muscles aching. It’s all a far cry from my childhood in suburban Kent where paradise was made into a parking lot long before I was born.
But Cornwall – or more specifically, Boskenna – proves to be an entirely more ardent seducer than Devon. Edgar Linton move over, Heathcliff has arrived.
We take the train down to Penzance. All the way to the end of England. There is something exciting in that alone. The grey, unprepossessing station is what my mother might have called ‘nothing to write home about’ – except that it is, because it is right next to the sea, and who wouldn’t want to write home about that? I’ve stepped into the setting for a Famous Five book, surely…
I am not yet writing children’s books at this point in my life, but I am editing them. I am a Junior Editor at Macmillan Children’s Books, a couple of years out of university with that hunger and expectation that only someone in their early twenties can have. I have a secret burning desire to write and be published myself, but I don’t have enough to say yet. I keep a journal every day, and am already writing in my head what will go down on the page later about this place. Cornwall. Boskenna. Thoughts that will turn, years later, into my first book for teens, Summer’s Shadow, once I have consumed all the family folklore and ghost stories and local gossip about the place. I have been writing about the place one way or another ever since.
The railway line runs right along the sea front from Marazion into Penzance. St Michael’s Mount appears on its rocky island. My boyfriend has told me about it, this monastery and coastal fortress looking out across the water to its French cousin, Mont Saint Michel. He repeats the stories now as the train pulls into the station, telling me about the walk over the causeway at low tide, the storms that cut the islanders off from the mainland, the beautiful gardens tucked away behind high walls. I am giddy with the romance of it all.
But it’s the sea that most beguiles me.
My boyfriend nudges me as I peel myself away from the view. ‘You can walk to the sea from Boskenna.’
I smile. ‘You said.’
‘Sorry.’ He looks bashful. ‘I know I’m repeating myself. I just can’t wait to show you everything. I wish it was summer though.’
I glance away. ‘We’ll just have to come back then.’
Mentioning a summer holiday in January feels too daring at this stage of our relationship. Although I already know I want to stay with this man forever. I have known it for a long time, even while I was recklessly dating other people. I haven’t told him this though. And I’m not about to ruin the magic of this weekend by getting heavy.
As we hurtle along high-hedged narrow lanes my boyfriend slips back into tour-guide mode, pointing out the Merry Maidens, telling me the story of how nineteen maids were caught dancing on the Sabbath and were turned to stone by a witch. He shows me Celtic crosses and the ancient burial chamber that sits on the edge of the road - all proudly oblivious to the march of time. Stories, stories everywhere!
‘Here. We’re here.’ My boyfriend sits up, as alert as his family’s Labrador.
Two granite pillars stand before us, simple and unadorned. There is no grand sign announcing our destination. No large gate. And yet the minute the taxi passes through I feel I am entering a portal (my children’s book brain working overtime)… Dark green bushes bow over a long, rubbly track. I feel the past pressing in.
‘Where’s Boskenna?’ I ask.
‘This is it – this is the drive.’
‘The drive?’
It’s a bumpy track. It goes on. And on. Lined by (l learn later) camellia and hydrangea bushes and pine trees and beech and ilex oak - and daffodils and bluebells in the spring. And ghosts.
‘It’s like Du Maurier’s Manderley,’ I say as the house comes into view. ‘Bloody hell. It IS Manderley.’
The house is a rambling granite hotch-potch of pitched roofs and chimneys and large Victorian mullioned windows. I feel it looking down on me, sizing me up. This girl from the suburbs.
The family do not look down on me. Granny - Jean - is a tiny bird-like woman who smiles constantly. She has a low, quiet voice. She has had a couple of strokes in recent months and walks with a stick. She has moved out of ‘the big house’, as I will come to know it, into the cottage next door. Her daughter, my mother-in-law’s twin sister, has taken on the house with her husband and their daughter. Everyone is generous and warm and welcoming and immediately puts me at ease. That weekend is the weekend that cements my relationship with my boyfriend.
For yes, reader, I did marry him. I also effectively married Boskenna. The place wound its way into my soul, and from that very first weekend it began planting the seeds for the novel that I have just finished - a novel that contains the well-worn stories about this place that has seen famous artists and writers come and go through its walls, has endured house fires, world wars and bankruptcy, and which has been pulled (at times somewhat reluctantly) into the twenty-first century by me and my husband, as we are now the ones who live here. With, I’m happy to say, central heating.
That picture of the path captured my heart completely. What a magical place. I look forward to your novel.
ahh so brilliant! I feel like I fell in love with the house too. Looking forward to the novel too...