‘Why’ we are sometimes asked ‘Lincolnshire?’ Well apart from being a bit rude about a beautiful and largely timeless part of the country, that’s a very good question, and we’re asked it – or a variation on the theme – quite often. So dear Reader, in the first of a series of occasional instalments, I’ll take you back some 21 years to the very beginning …..
As mid-life crises go, this was a corker. After 14 years of marriage Eeyore turned 40 and decided life didn’t amount to a hill of beans. I knew I needn’t worry: we’d talked about The Move for years without actually doing it, so I decided to humour the dear boy. Knowing full well this was a passing phase I smiled indulgently and we started the process again.
We did it all exactly as Phil and Kirsty said we should: we took into consideration commutability (7am at the desk, all that), schools, direction from London, proximity to our families, where our friends lived, my need to be near water, his need for somewhere seriously rural, etc etc, and drew a triangle on the map. Next we rang agents, scoured the internet, leafed through Country Life and started tearing open exciting A4 envelopes with glossy brochures and thrilling names on them like ‘Strutt & Parker’ and ‘Savills’. Then we saw every single benighted hovel within a 200 mile radius of London and waited until I was very old and five months pregnant with child number three before we found what was clearly, according to the details, The Home of our Dreams. Were it not too far from London and 50 miles from the sea - but hey, that Saturday we found ourselves at a loose end and set off for a look, on the basis that it was easier than trying to occupy a truculent two year old in Shepherd’s Bush. Again.
3 long hours later we were driving up a hill towards a very austere, remote and clearly exhausted house too far from London, miles from anyone we knew, in a part of the world we’d only ever shot through on the way to somewhere else. But I know exactly when it was that Eeyore decided this was where he wanted to spend the rest of his life. (Preferably with me but frankly, that was negotiable.) It wasn’t when we went round the far too big, cold, dirty and un-commutable house, which was patently in need of the kind of money of which Mr Musk could only dream. It was in the garden, when Eeyore lovingly put his arm nearly round my elephantine waist and said ‘Damn. NOW what do we do?’ that I realised it had happened. Eeyore was hooked.
There followed a ludicrous bidding war (for a wreck?!) during which Part II of the crisis became apparent and Eeyore threw all his natural, northern caution to the winds and chucked figures around in a way I thought only I could. The children and I carried on with our London lives, secure in the knowledge that this wouldn’t come to anything: I put the unborn baby on all the school lists, did the obligatory ante-natal yoga, booked in at Queen Charlottes – you know the routine. And then we moved house. Five weeks before the baby was due, two weeks before he was born, and in the middle of the summer when the train lines buckled in the heat. So Eeyore missed the whole thing and I drove myself 40 miles into the nearest big hospital in advanced labour, pulling over for the really big contractions and screeching down the A1 at … well, quite quickly …. for once desperately hoping for a police car.
A week later, I surveyed the newly painted over picture hooks in Boy’s bedroom and tried to like the colour the first (as it turned out) set of builders had chosen to repaint the long, high, narrow kitchen on the dark side of the house. W12 felt a very long way away.
Polly Irvine - Life on the Edge (of the Fens)
