The Japanese Girl by Winston Graham

Author:Winston Graham [Graham, Winston]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

The Cornish Farm

We were looking for a farm.

It seems to me that a great many people have this ambition at some time in their lives, especially in years of tribulation. Their yeoman ancestry comes out; they want to own a few acres and see things grow.

Many no doubt give up after a while. But I was lucky enough to find one.

It was Philippa who suggested we should try the West Country. She’d a fancy for the milder side of England and had a few relatives scattered about who might help. I began in Wiltshire and worked my way zig-zag in a series of knight’s moves farther and farther west, gathering disillusionment.

I’m no stickler for absolute cleanliness and order, but it depressed me to discover the squalor in which so many people live. Or perhaps it is only people who want to sell their houses who live that way. It also depressed me to discover the wickedness of estate agents. After a time one gets tired of being shown into the ‘ well-equipped’ kitchen to find it dominated by an enormous stove installed about the year of Gladstone’s wedding and smoking from every crack; then, coughing heartily and with eyes smarting, to be led through a broken glass door into the ‘conservatory’ which in fact is a lean-to shed with a little stove of its own where all the real cooking is done and ventilation is by way of a sloping tin funnel. No more desirable is the ‘ desirable residence’ which turns out to be a paper-thin bungalow divided from the cowsheds by an hour-glass pool of liquid manure, while the sacks of chicken meal are piled in the lavatory and double carpeting in the hall fails to hide the dry rot.

And these, mind you, properties for which large sums of hard-earned money are asked, sums requiring sober visits to grey-faced bank managers, and swearing one’s life away, and the long yoke of mortgaging. When I reached Cornwall I was nearly giving up, because there was no farther to go unless one jumped into the sea.

And then a word over a glass of beer in a local pub sent me across country to the south coast looking for a farm called Pencarrion.

I found it, empty and for sale.

This wasn’t the sort of place I’d been looking for either. The farmhouse was really an old Elizabethan house come down in the world. In parts ‘ come down’ were the operative words. One room had a sycamore growing out of the roof. And there was no market town near. But it had 40 acres of pasture and 9 of woodland, some fruit trees in the ruins of a walled garden and a short drive bordered with blue hydrangeas. In the skirts of the woodland was the chimney of an old tin-mine. The place had been empty about a year, but a neighbouring farmer had used the land, so it came near to being in the ‘good heart’ that one reads so much about in the advertisements.

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