of this place?’ he says as we negotiate the path.
I’m used to thinking of Mead’s story as Jake told it to me in our early days together. Now, unsettlingly but intriguingly, it has acquired an Iron-Age dimension. The past five hundred years once seemed time and depth enough, yet now they are foreshortened. I wonder if this is a diminishment, but what has been disinterred can’t be buried and forgotten all over again. I begin the story anyway, with the part I know.
Jake’s ancestors were farmers in this part of the county, in a small way, from the time when records began. At the beginning of the fifteenth century we know there was a house on the site of this present one, probably no more than a huddle of stone walls and a couple of barns, because parish records detail the modest holding of land and the number of individuals who lived and worked there. A hundred years later, a record from the county assizes showed that one of the sons of the family had been imprisoned for thieving from travellers passing along the highway to Norwich.
Jake was always greatly pleased with this detail of his ancestry.
‘I am descended from highwayman’s stock,’ he boasted.
The upturn in the family fortunes came a hundred years later, when the wife and children of a wealthy London silk importer moved out of the city to escape the plague, arriving to stay with a sister who had married into a local landowning family. The silk merchant had no sons, and the current heir to Mead wooed and married the eldest daughter, a Miss Howe. With Miss Howe’s fortune, Jake’s ancestor bought hundreds of acres of adjoining land and began the informal enlargement of his farmhouse. The family name became Mead Howe, and eventually Meadowe.
Over the next hundred years there was a slow ascent into the ranks of the gentry. The family acquired indoor servants, a coach was kept, and the horses stabled where Selwyn is now busy mixing concrete. Then came a pair of Victorian gamblers, father and son, who accelerated the decline of the family fortunes as much of the land was lost or sold to settle debts. By the time Jake’s amusing, cynical and profoundly lazy father died, there was nothing left but the house itself, the outbuildings and a modest acreage.
Jake was the last of the Meadowes, and I inherited the estate from him. The remaining acres of land, apart from the portion I sold to Amos, are rented to a local farmer.
Seeing the house and its setting, the more unworldly of my theatrical friends who came to stay assumed that I had married money, but that really was not the case. Jake made a modest income from farming and writing on country topics for rural interest magazines. I contributed a small amount from converting a couple of barns to make the holiday cottages where Amos and Katherine are now staying, and we were deeply content together. What I did marry was a much more primitive connection to the land and to a place that became unexpectedly important to me.
Jake’s uncomplicated theory was that it was that much more important to me partly because I had so determinedly sidestepped the connection to my own history – if you can use the term to relate to a Midlands semi that my mother unsentimentally got rid of when I was in my early twenties. I was always welcome in her various flats after that, but none of them had any pretensions to being home, the way Mead became almost from the moment I set eyes on it.
Jake wasn’t implying that I was an arriviste (although in Meddlett terms I most certainly am); he was just pleased and interested that I fell so much in love with his life and background, as well as with him. I didn’t have the outward appearance of a country wife and I don’t think he had been expecting anything of the kind.
Colin walks with his shoulders slightly hunched, his hands in his pockets, listening.
‘Roulette, or cards? Or the horses?’ he asks when I come to the bit about the gamblers.
‘I’m not sure. All three, perhaps.’
He says wonderingly, ‘You know, I never really asked Jake about his family history. He wouldn’t have volunteered it, would he? It’s a major trajectory, over six centuries. That’s a long time to be able to trace your forebears.’
‘Jake took it for granted. It’s the likes of you and me who find it so remarkable.’
‘Two generations, that’s how far back my family acquaintanceship goes.’
Colin’s parents were Yorkshire schoolteachers, very proud and slightly respectful of their talented son. I remember them coming to see Colin receive his degree, and him posing afterwards in his gown and mortarboard, flanked by his smiling mother and father. I took the photograph with the camera his father handed to me.
They acknowledged but never fully accepted that Colin was gay, and they died within a year of each other when he was still in his thirties.
‘Mine too,’ I say.
I never saw my father after he left home.
‘That useless bugger? Don’t waste your wishing on him, love. He doesn’t deserve it,’ was my mother’s usual response to my questions.
In the end, since he never tried to contact her or me, I took her advice.
I knew her parents, my Nanny and Gamps, as tidy old people who sometimes looked after me for weekends, or whole weeks of the school holidays, in their miniature and sepulchrally quiet house in a village in Warwickshire. They liked Sunday Night at the London Palladium, and sitting in deckchairs in their back garden on fine afternoons. I loved them, in the undemonstrative way they favoured (they didn’t hold with kissing and hugging. That was for other folk, the sort who liked to make a show of things), but staying with them was boring.
At home with my working mother I got fish fingers and tinned spaghetti on toast, which was what I liked to eat, but at Nanny and Gamps’s there was bright yellow haddock disgustingly cooked in milk, complete with skin and brackish foam, and mystifying lemon curd tart instead of Wagon Wheels or mini swiss rolls in red and silver foil.
At my grandparents’ I coiled myself up and concentrated even harder on growing up as quickly as possible, in order to make my escape into a more glamorous world. I never doubted that I would do it. I must have been an unrewarding grandchild for them.
Colin says, ‘We find Jake’s pedigree remarkable now. We didn’t back then, did we? Who cared about Amos’s background except as a good joke, or anything about that etiolated guy who lived on his staircase who was the grandson of a duke? None of us was interested in what had been or what had made us, except maybe in working out how to overthrow it. What was important was what we were going to make happen. That was the gift of our generation. The absolute conviction that we could change the world.’
‘Yes. It’s only since we failed to do that and then discovered that we were going to get old as well that we’ve started to be hungry for history.’
‘And that’ll be a tenner in the box, please,’ Colin says.
‘Damn.’
What started out as a joke between Selwyn and Amos has gathered momentum at the New Mead (spoken within the same quotation marks that we now employ for New Labour).
Whenever any of us remarks that we are old, or mentions something that we did when we were young but can no longer enjoy or endorse, a fine is levied. It started at a pound, but that turned out not to be a sufficiently serious deterrent. There are plans to use the accumulated fund for the most unlikely group outing any of us can come up with. The current front-runner is a weekend’s extreme snowboarding
