THE DESPERATE DIARY OF A COUNTRY HOUSEWIFE
A Cautionary Tale
Daisy Waugh
For My Husband
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
OCTOBER 2007
May 21st 2005 Shepherds Bush
June 2005 Shepherds Bush
2 a.m., July 10th Shepherds Bush
July 21st France
August 14th
September 1st
Monday September 3rd
September Paradise
September 20th
September 23rd
October 10th
Sunday night, October 21st
November 2nd
November 7th
November 8th
Tuesday November 20th
Thursday November 22nd
Monday November 26th
Friday November 30th
December 14th
December 15th
December 15th again
December 17th
COUNTRY MOLE
January 15th
January 18th
January 19th
January 20th
January 21st
COUNTRY MOLE
February 1st
February 5th
February 9th
February 10th
COUNTRY MOLE
February 14th
February 21st
February 22nd
February 24th
COUNTRY MOLE
Monday February 27th
Tuesday February 28th
Tuesday night
Wednesday
March 2nd
Friday 4th
March 7th
COUNTRY MOLE
March 14th
Friday March 18th
Saturday Very late Very very very late
Sunday Very very very early
Tuesday
Wednesday
COUNTRY MOLE
Friday
COUNTRY MOLE
Thursday April 12th
Sunday April 15th
April 16th
Friday
COUNTRY MOLE
Thursday
Monday
COUNTRY MOLE
Monday April 30th
Tuesday
May 7th
May 9th
Thursday May 10th Very late
May 11th
COUNTRY MOLE
May 18th
May 20th
May 21st
COUNTRY MOLE
May 28th
May 30th
June 1st
June 8th
COUNTRY MOLE
June 17th
June 21st
June 26th
June 28th
June 30th
COUNTRY MOLE
July 12th
COUNTRY MOLE
July 16th
July 18th
COUNTRY MOLE
July 22nd
July 24th
COUNTRY MOLE
August 1st
August 11th
August 12th
COUNTRY MOLE
August 17th
August 19th
COUNTRY MOLE
August 29th
September 3rd
COUNTRY MOLE
September 12th
COUNTRY MOLE
September 25th
October 4th
October 5th
COUNTRY MOLE
October 14th
October 17th
COUNTRY MOLE
October 25th
October 27th
COUNTRY MOLE
November 7th
COUNTRY MOLE
November 13th
November 15th
November 20th
COUNTRY MOLE
December 12th
COUNTRY MOLE
January 25th London
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
Two summers ago, Martha Mole and family moved from London to start a new life in the Country. It didn’t go as smoothly as planned.
She kept the following diary. It should be noted, however, that there may have been times when her imagination got the better of her.
OCTOBER 2007
About a year before our adventures began I dreamed of a house set in fields, with a moat round it. It was ramshackle and much too big, hidden away in a secret, sunny coomb that nobody but I knew about. I think it may have looked a little like a medieval castle, with tumbling ramparts and a drawbridge, and yet simultaneously like a large terraced house somewhere in Notting Hill Gate.
In any case, in my dream I knew it was the house we’d been searching for. Not only that, I knew that this beautiful dream house, though surrounded by rivers and fields, was also within walking distance of Hammersmith tube station. And it was for sale. And it was being snapped up—not by an annoying Russian oligarch, nor even by my brother-in-law, the amazingly successful banker. It was being snapped up by us. We—husband, the two children, myself, and a mysterious brown puppy calling itself Mabel—were trading it in for our ordinary terraced house in Shepherds Bush, with its views over three giant satellite dishes and a multistorey car park, and we were going to live there, a life of carefree rural bliss, happily and wholesomely, for ever after. I remember waking up feeling exhilarated. And the feeling lasted, as I waded hither and thither through the usual Shepherds Bush knife victims and sundry litter, pretty much for the rest of the day.
The quest to find a place more satisfactory than Shepherds Bush to raise our young children continued as it had before. The husband and I had bored ourselves to sleep sometimes, discussing the options: Los Angeles? Sri Lanka? Sydney? New York? Ealing Common?…Not all the suggestions were realistic of course, but because, like everyone else’s, the value of our ordinary terraced house seemed to quadruple each fortnight, almost every option we threw in, however absurd, felt vaguely, distantly possible.
And there was always one thing we seemed to agree upon—that pretty much anywhere would be preferable to Shepherds Bush.
So we talked and we talked. And we talked and we talked.
And we talked.
And then one day, suddenly, the talking finished. We had made a decision.
I wonder now, with the benefit of the awful year and a half behind me, whether we were simply defeated by the sheer boredom of it. There came a point, perhaps, where neither of us could endure the conversation a moment longer.
…New Orleans? Kirkbymoorside? Malibu? Pitlochry? Nassau? Switzerland? Isle of Man? Barbados? King’s Cross? Marylebone? Bordeaux? Lamu? Winchester? Westchester? Henley? Delhi?…
The South West.
The following diary has been edited slightly—I’ve obscured a few names (or changed them) and for obvious reasons I’ve removed any give-away clues to our precise location. Otherwise it stands pretty much as I wrote it, a fairly accurate record of one very urban woman’s foolhardy—idealistic—attempts to adapt to family life in the English countryside.
I’d seen the property programmes. I’d read the lifestyle magazines. I’d looked in awe—and guilt—at the happy, healthy faces of those young families who dared to leave the Big Smoke behind them. They always make it look so easy. Don’t they.
The following should be looked upon as a cautionary tale.
May 21st 2005
Shepherds Bush
We’ve found it. Finley and I have just got back from a day trip to Para
dise, and the long, long search is over. At last.
This one may not have a moat around it, or any ramparts, and it’s probably a four-hour drive from London. But it has the same magical, forgotten feeling as the house from the dream that I had, and when I saw it—when I turned the final corner of that winding path and looked up, and saw it properly for the first time—I swear it was so lovely it took my breath away.
The house is in the middle of a small village and just three miles up the road from a beautiful, old-fashioned market town. It perches alone, big and solid and perfectly symmetrical, on a hill so steep and so high above the village road that when you look up towards it all the proportions seem distorted. Actually it reminds me of an Addams Family cartoon: quite grand, in a way, though clearly dilapidated; with a stone porch, and in front of the porch a stone terrace, and in front of that a stone carved balustrade, drowning in jasmine and honeysuckle and ivy.
It has more bedrooms than we need, and more sitting rooms, and more cellars and underground vaults and cupboards and attics and cubbyholes than we’ll ever know what to do with. But the children can build camps in them. That’s the whole point. Or they can attach a rope ladder to the wall at the top of the back garden, and escape into the fields on the other side.
Not only that; it’s only a few miles—almost bicycling distance—from the train station, which means, on a more practical note, that Fin can travel up and down to his office in Soho almost as easily as if he were taking the tube from Shepherds Bush. In fact everything about the house is so perfect, so romantic and so good for the trains, it seems quite peculiar that we can even afford it. Houses in this corner of the world are far from cheap. What with one thing and another—the beautiful, protected countryside, the trains that carry people so easily back and forth to Soho and the City—this is probably one of the most expensive corners of rustic paradise in England.
Maybe the fact that you can’t get a car to the door might put a few people off. We both positively like that. It makes the place feel more secluded. In any case, with or without the access, this house could hardly be described as a cheapie and we are fully prepared to encumber ourselves with a monumental mortgage.
God knows, of all the options we’ve considered, the South West of England is hardly the most adventurous…but. But. But. But. It works. The schools are good. The house—I think I dreamed of. And in any case, whatever happens, however it turns out, we’ve been festering in London for far too long. It’s about time we had an adventure.
We put our London house up for sale within the week, and made an offer for the Dream House that afternoon. It was rejected out of hand. So we upped the bid. They didn’t even bother to respond. Two days later we saw the house advertised in the Sunday Times. So we sulked for a few days and then upped the bid again. And again.
June 2005
Shepherds Bush
The horrible ‘vendors’—him with his self-important beard; her with her sour mouth and her chignon—have finally accepted our offer. Bastards. Their obstinate refusal to sell us the house for anything less than it’s actually worth has led me to develop a searing hatred for them both, and especially for the woman—whose chignon, by the way, isn’t elegant, as she thinks it is, but actually quite embarrassing. Never mind, though. In my new country persona I’ve definitely decided I’m going to try to stop being such a bitch. I’m going to focus on people’s positive sides. So.
On a more positive note, we’ve pretty much sold in Shepherds Bush. It was all very quick and easy. Slightly too quick, in fact. Unlike Beardie and the Chignon, we didn’t insist on getting the highest price. So now we’re about to exchange contracts, and we have to be out of this house by the first week of July…which leaves us homeless for about two months. Too long, really, to invite ourselves to stay with parents or friends. So we’ll have to rent somewhere. Maybe we’ll rent abroad, since the children are on holiday. Why not? I have the next novel due in before too long and I can write it wherever I like. In fact that’s one of the reasons we can move out of London. And Fin will be away filming anyway.
In any case, if all goes according to plan the Dream House will be ours some time at the end of August.
2 a.m., July 10th
Shepherds Bush
Will I wind up wearing a chignon and having a mouth like an old cat’s arse? Or will it be worse than that? Will I turn fat and mousey, and never get out of my anorak? Or will I hit the bottle and never get out of bed? Will my friends keep in touch with me? Will I keep in touch with them? Will Fin get a lover in London and never come home? Will I—
I’ve been lying here worrying for hours, thinking maybe we’re making a terrible mistake, thinking maybe we’d be better off staying in London after all—and then I heard it, the old muffled smash, the panicky boot-shuffle, the ruffle-ruffle-slam: a series of sounds so familiar to Shepherds Bush night life I could probably recognise them from my sleep, integrate them seamlessly into any one of my dreams.
It is the musical sound of yet another car windscreen biting the dust. Not ours, though, on this occasion. It can’t be, unfortunately, because we still haven’t fixed ours from the week before last.
Maybe I should call the police?
Shall I call the police? Can I be bothered? It means getting out of bed, and then they probably won’t even pick up the telephone…Or if they do, they’ll get here too late to do anything about it. And I’ll have to give them my name and address and possibly even a cup of tea, and it’ll wake up the entire house and the children will never go back to sleep and the whole thing will be a waste of time. I can’t be bothered.
Maybe I should just knock on the window and give the little sods a jolt by shaking my fist at them? Or maybe I shouldn’t. Not much to be gained from being a have-a-go hero in this dark corner of the woods. A couple of boys kicked through the front door of Number 35 last week, with the owners inside and screaming. I certainly wouldn’t want to encourage that.
What shall I do then? Switch on the telly and pretend I can’t hear them? Except the remote’s broken. No, I think I’ll just lie here until it goes quiet out there and then, er, put down the diary and go to sleep. Next time they come, maybe I’ll call the police.
Except I won’t, of course, because there won’t be a next time. We’ll be gone. We’ll have left it all behind: street crime, parking fines, Ken Livingstone, London…We’ve had enough of it all.
I think we have.
At any rate I hope we have, because most of our belongings are already in storage half way up the M5. Finley, the two children and I—and the new puppy (called Mabel, after the dream)—we’re moving on. To a new and fragrant life in the slow lane. We will be joining that peculiar section of the human race that doesn’t get baity when queuing. Somehow. And there’s clearly not a single reason to be feeling nervous about it.
In any case the children and I—and Finley and his mobile, intermittently—have a good long break in France ahead of us, to mull the thing over.
It’s a rough old life.
July 21st
France
Things have gone a bit crazy in London since we left. According to my radio there’s a suicide bomber hiding out on our old street, and the whole area’s been evacuated. Nobody’s dead. I don’t think the bomb even went off. But the terrorist is still very much at large. And in our street!
Should I call some of our old neighbours to commiserate, or would it seem like gloating? Don’t know. Would dearly love to discover whose garden he’s hiding in, though. Because if he leapt over the wall from the tube station, as they’re saying he did, he must be on our side of the road, which means he might even be in our garden. Ex-garden, that is.
In any case, it’s all very…exciting’s the wrong word, of course. Shocking. Shocking. Poor old London. I suddenly feel a bit like a rat deserting a sinking ship. Awful. On the other hand it is slightly annoying, after ten years putting up with all those boring, unsolved low-level mini-crimes, to be missing out on the big one. Our old house
might even be on the news.
Ripley and Dora found a drowned hedgehog in the swimming pool earlier this morning. Their obsession with all aspects of the ongoing—and apparently endless—embalming-and-burial ceremony is teetering on fetishistic, I think. Dora claims she’s been studying the Egyptians at school but it’s the first time she’s mentioned it, and I don’t know what R’s excuse is. Last I saw, he had covered the wretched animal in yoghurt and very small lumps of Playdough; and Dora, in mystical monotone, was invoking ‘voodoo and death spirits’ over the body. Is that what people did to the Pharaohs? I think not. In any case I’m finding it faintly disturbing. Also wasteful of yoghurt and needlessly untidy. Perhaps this news from home might distract them a bit.
August 14th
Still in France. Lovely. Bad economics, perhaps. But we had to go somewhere. The Dream House is due to become officially ours exactly two days after we get back. We exchange and complete simultaneously. Which means—as Fin so wittily insists on pointing out—we could still duck out if we wanted to. We could still change our minds.
Except we don’t want to. Everything’s going to be wonderful.
Also, Hatty called this morning. Took a break from her very important job looking after other people’s billions to tell me she had read somewhere, possibly in Heat, that Johnny Depp had just bought a small stately home in the same area as our Dream House. The article didn’t say exactly where it was, but apparently JD and the wife, who I know is famous but can’t remember her name, have been touring all the schools in what is about to be our local town. Which means they’ll have done a tour of Ripley and Dora’s school. Which means—perhaps—that Ripley and Dora and the little Deppies could wind up being in the same classes together, which means they could wind up being friends! Which means we could be friends!
I picture us now: JD—and the wife—and all the other new friends we’re going to make…I can see us relaxing on our beautiful terrace. The children are upstairs, snoozing. (Perhaps the little Deppies are upstairs with them, having a sleepover.) And we’re drinking wine, we’re talking films and novels, we’re basking in the warmth of our outdoor heaters, watching the stars in the big, open sky and then maybe…God, I dunno. Perhaps Johnny produces a couple of grams of—