Fern Cottage

It’s been snowing for three or four days now. Today it’s been melting. The river beside us will rise inevitably, but the flood defences are good these days. There was nearly a flood in the early nineties, the water was only inches from the top of the loch gate, but our cottage hasn’t been flooded since the sixties.

We ate at Riber Hall last night, a good meal, beside a crackling fire. I ate too much and drank too much, indulged in a jelly dessert, so it’s my fault I slept lightly last night.

Along with farm animals, we see pheasants in the fields. I was surprised to see lambs in the snow. Bakewell is just down the road; I go there on my driving lessons. So is Chatsworth. Stags haunt the Chatsworth grounds.

I’m very sleepy. The cottage is warm and the smallest bedroom, our office, is the warmest room. We’ve been in for a month, but it feels like more, much more. It’s so peaceful here. A thrush is always singing outside. Blackbirds cluck the twilight home. Fat squirrels steal the peanuts I put out for the birds. The cottage has a good garden with herbs. The previous owner, a biker chick and tattooist, seems to have been a clematis freak.

We’re just inside the walls of a park, opposite a stream that flows into the river. The cottage was built around 1700, and the surviving internal wood is pink, a hard softwood with few knots, probably yew like the trees that grow nearby in the park and in the church at the top of the cliff. Yew is an ancient, pagan tree, a symbol of life, and a protector against evil spirits. Yew is always found in graveyards. Yew is poisonous. Sitting under a yew tree on a hot summer’s day is enough to give you hallucinations, that’s why it was used in pagan rites. Apparently it’s a lucky tree for Capricorns too, so good for me if I was ever mystically inclined.

For the last couple of days I’ve been trying to muster the guts to start writing again. Moving house curtailed my novel a third of the way through. Coming back I can now see what I’ve overdone and underdone, and all the clichés are leaping out of the page. There are gaps, but not enough room to fill them if I want to stick to my word count. I’m having trouble constructing sentences. They seem to get tangled up, too flowery with too many branches, like clematis. My latest displacement activity is cooking. My repertoire of stews is broadening.

People keep contacting me out of the blue, mostly writers. First it was Andy Oldfield. I was inspired to get in touch with Paul Lathrope, who I’m working around to seeing again. Then Graham Joyce wrote me an email. I thought it must have been jungle drums from Paul, but no, he was surfing the web for fairies and out I popped in the results, pure coincidence, especially as I had just started reading his latest two books. On the other hand, Clare Littleford is proving elusive, and Kim Lakin and I are enjoying a mutual embarrassed silence whilst we struggle with our mutual house moving and mutual writer’s block. London is a long way away.

People I don’t know keep stopping me in the street. “Have you settled in now?” they ask. New neighbours make me flustered. I’m concerned about being judged for not being local. In fact, I imagine Tubbs and Edward from The League of Gentleman peering at me in the local shop with the interrogation “Are you local?” Parts were filmed not far from here at High Peak, to our amusement. Sometimes, self-mocking, the local radio station uses the catchphrase. I giggle my way through these encounters on the street, embarrassed, and I’m sure the neighbourhood must have come to the collective conclusion that I’m mentally impaired.

The cottage is on a hiker’s and dog walker’s route. Everyone who goes past glances up at the cottage and gapes. I’ve hung lace curtains to ease the goldfish-bowl feeling. I’ve done some gardening and a lot of DIY. I counted nine individual clematis in the garden, and spent last Sunday trying to cut them back to knee height as you are supposed to do. Sometimes I think the cottage belongs to everyone else, and they will be annoyed if I take out a plant or decide to move the greenhouse. What if the bikers come back and don’t like our changes? New boiler, new wiring, new bathroom, new kitchen, new floors, new carpets… so much work to do that I don’t want to think about it.

It’s so quiet here. Most mornings I’m woken by birdsong that lulls me throughout the day. I woke this morning to find a thick white layer of hoarfrost cloaking the front garden. Perhaps it’s just a tiny bit lonesome sometimes, something missing. All the neighbours are in their fifties and I imagine them popping round to one another’s houses for tea and cakes. I like to imagine that somewhere around here there’s another girl my age struggling to write a similarly Gothic novel. I imagine her popping around for a cup of tea and exchanging notes and sisterly advice. Then I remember she lives in London.