Roses Round the Door

By GERARD FAY

Wum- makes city people, comfortably and sometimes luxuriously housed, rush down to the country at weekends to stay in cottages that most country folk would think dilapidated. What is the lure of roses round the door?

Only a few years ago I could not have an- swered or would have given the wrong answer. Once, before the war, I stayed a few days in a cottage in Derbyshire but otherwise—apart from living in some rather rum spots during the war— I have remained bound to cities. I was brought up largely in Dublin but my favourite cities at that time were Manchester and Liverpool which, just in terms of size, made Dublin seem like a small town, and although the Manchester Ship

. Canal was unconvincing the Mersey made the Liffey seem like a trickling stream.

Since then I have lived for almost twenty years

:.. in what I still stubbornly regard as the greatest if not the biggest city in the world and during -shat time I have had frequent cottage experience.

. Now 1 spend every possible weekend in the country and sometimes ask myself, am I one of ..the People who feel under Samuel Johnson's famous rebuke, 'When a man is tired of London

e-ahe is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford'? I think this -roses round the door' business is something deeply cyclical like the conduct of salmon or swallows. Young men, -especially in the professions, make up their minds early in their careers that London is the only ‘• Place worth working in and they are, generally --speaking, strongly supported by their wives. They get to London and a fair proportion of them do Well, acquire houses and cars, books and paint- ings and children. They go to theatres and art galleries and cocktail parties and concerts and - operas and ballets. They see as part of their daily -surroundings the sort of pageantry which is unique to London. If they work in government or POlities or journalism they rub shoulders with famous people. Great • names become almost commonplace to them. Some of them even get titles. But there comes a point when the idea of visiting the country regularly grows into almost a. obsession. A lot of them make a complete break by moving into country houses and sur- rendering a proportion of their lives to travelling to and fro by train or car. Others take a middle course by continuing to live in town and finding ome little weekend cottage not too far away. Like me.

Some of the advantages are immediately' obvious: at home and in their offices every breath they take is centrally-heated air and in the i..reets they inhale great gulps of diesel fumes and other filth. In the country they breathe God's 1air, hardly polluted at all and often per- _7.ed with wood-smoke. They cannot help fm ling h into country ways of moving and thinking more slowly, which is a great relaxation. ,YVe hear a lot about the 'tensions' of modern life. in'cities some of which

'body 11,11 has I 's exaggerated. But any- as spent a few years travelling on the Underground or by bus in the rush-hour cannot fail to notice how much pleasanter it is to start and finish the day without ever involuntarily becoming part of a crowd.

Of course cottage life is not always perfection. I do know one which has electricity, partial central heating, constant hot water, and even a telephone (which is not really a plus for a week- ender seeking relaxation). It looks like a theatrical designer's idea of a fairy-tale cottage in the Hansel and Gretel tradition. It stands in a clearing of a wood overlooking a beautiful stretch of the West Country and it is so isolated that if three people pass by in a day the occupant begins to feel that the place is getting like Picca- dilly Circus. That is my idea. of the perfect cottage, but it is too far from London to be often used. The distance which lends enchantment to the view makes the going to and fro quite a chore and in bad weather a bit chancy because of deep mud and soft tracks.

Then I learned of a cottage to let which looks even more Hansel and Gretel-ish but is only a mile off one of the busiest main roads thirty miles outside London. When I show friends photographs they drool--or the women do any- way—and swoon and give out cries of delight. Of course I agree with them, because although there are two sides to the balance sheet the credit much exceeds the debit, thUS:

Dr. Cr.

No loo Nee note below No telephone.

on Elsans)*. No central heating.

No inside slater. No letter box.

No bath. No traffic worth speak- ing of.

Lots of neighbours. Pub ten yards away. Two Gozunders (see note below on El- sans)*.

Electric cooker, light, fire and blanket.

No television. No cinema for miles. No bingo.

But life in a cottage does not consist simply of . . . or let me put it more positively. Life in a cottage is full of incident. For instance there is a fire to be tended, and this, to the man softened by central heating, can be almost a full-time occupation. It must be lit and fed, preferably * It comes a bit hard in middle age when army service is twenty years back to get into the latrine routine. The Elsan is a great device by which the intentions of nature are encouraged and accelerated. But it can be cold out there and it has to be emptied. Without manure we cottage dwellers and horticul- turists could not . . . but let us not go into ;•tich country matters too closely. The city slicker's stomach can be, quickly adjusted to facing (though that is not quite the nun jam.) the Elsan or the earth closet. Devotees of Chick Sale's masterpiece The Specialisr are well aware of the splendours and miseries of the well-designed outhouse, backhouse or thunder box. Nevertheless there are the long watches of the night when the possession of the gozanders becomes important. The word, I find, is not in the otherwise comprehensive Dictionary of American Slake by Wentworth and Flexner, nor does the great Mencken fake cognisance of it. If you ask 'what is a gozunder,'. the answer is simple: it goes under the bed, with wood and my calculation is that to cut suffi- cient wood to keep a good fire going for six hours- takes approximately three hours. The chopping, sawing and above all the splitting of logs with an axe are occupations which satisfy some of the deepest longings of mankind. The drawing of water is another of these fundamentals akin to the hew ing of wood (see Joshua ix. 21) and one quickly re-learns the lesson which logistics- taught us during the war—that a human being requires for consumption, for washing, for washing up, and even for pouring on the wall- flowers about twice his own weight in water per day. Getting it from a small tap outside the back door in large earthenware jugs is excellent exer- cise and can inspire various thoughts about the brilliant way in. which urban civilisation deals. with the question, of plumbing. Indeed the basic fact of temporary (i.e., weekends only) rural life is that you see domestic economy stripped down and untrimmed. You must re-apply yourself to the simplest technique of housekeeping; the blacklead brush reappears, and the consumption of Brasso suddenly doubles. This is because one of the strongest rules of the two-day.week in the country is that you must not buy anything new if it can be acquired second-hand, and second- hand things need a lot of cleaning up. Nor do you employ people to perform paid services if you can help it. Do it yourself is the- rule and in my present cottage I apply this so, rigidly that I even bought a second-hand clock (eighty years old, built in Massachusetts) dismantled it, made it work and then in- search of perfection decided to make it stop gaining ten minuteseach hour. In this process I 'broke' the most vital part of the escapement and have not yet been able to re- place it: but here again the tempo of country life makes the loss of a clock less.of a disaster than it would be in the city. What does it matter what time it is so long as there 'Is light enough, heat enough, water, food, a spade (which must be called a spade), the Elsan and the Gozunder? All this and roses round the door, too! So when people say to me, `You live in London?' I say, 'Yes. But never on Saturdays.'