90. Leaving Living In Boxes
89. Living In A Box
September 5, 2024
91. Purbeck Marble
November 8, 2024
S o, my home was condemned. I moved out all the oddments I’d stored beneath it ready for Bunny, a friend from school days, to make room for the replacement. Surprisingly, the tyres of this 1958 van were still sufficiently intact to inflate and carry it.
So, in early May 1994, a “new” blue and white van arrived on a transporter from Richard’s Ulwell site several miles away. Perched on the transporter, it proved too high to pass under some Dunshay trees. After trimming the lowest branches, four of us manouevred it by hand halfway through the gate into Mary’s field; shifting it into my meadow posed more problems. To make way for this 28ft van, Bunny and I dug away an offending bank while talking of our separate boyhoods ‘up cliff’. Then, he was ‘opposition’, climbing with boys who collected birds’ eggs. Both remembered a man with a partiality for young teenage boys. He was nice enough, but we carefully, politely evaded his wandering hands. Some boys encouraged him. He was part of a youthful learning curve. The world is endlessly variable. We would never have sneaked on him. Like most kids, we evaded adult interference in the hazards of advancing sexuality. Today, labelled a paedophile, he would be imprisoned or hounded to suicide.
As for the caravan, a wheel became stuck, so I returned to the old one for the night. Despite its rough condition, I was sad to quit that one with all its woodwork and a little stove for the plasticity of modernity. In cool twilight, I fired up the stove for the last time, using some of that woodwork as fuel. It began to rain, setting the roof leaks dribbling, but the fire crackled and the gaslights hissed, cheering the ruin.
Once the new van was established, Richard fitted the gas cylinder and soon the lights were glowing. It lacked a stove: I hadn’t thought to keep the previous one but winter was mostly spent in India so that drawback was not immediately apparent. Later, a friend provided a small one he had saved. I painted the ‘new’ van that dark green which became the uniform for its successors.
Even while moving the van, I wondered what would happen if Mary, already 81, should suddenly die. Would I be out on the street? But I would manage, always had, hard up but never actually noticing it. Always working, too: in the evenings I was at the quarry, cutting Downsvein paving, some in awkward kite shapes, for a Sevenoaks church. Was it St Nicholas? Soon there were occasional neighbours. Some years earlier an elderly couple had parked a small, green van in the next little meadow but never used it. Jed, a local photographer settled in London, and his teacher wife bought it and, with their two children, made it their pied a terre. That meadow proved rich in butterflies, one of Jed’s interests.
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That van lasted till 2001. A weak spot in all of them was the entrance floor. Something rigid, perhaps a metal sheet, could delay the collapse for a few months but doom was inevitable. Luckily, Richard had a cream and brown van in need of a home. It was August, Purbeck at its touristic busiest, but a local farmer volunteered to tow the unwieldy van, on its pathetic little wheels, along the main road. He said ‘If the police stop us, we just tell them it is for housing chickens.’ Farmers can get away with most agricultural tricks! We left at 6am, meeting almost no one, and he made a fine job of getting it down the drive to Dunshay. Its Waterloo nearly came at the final gateway. There, it slipped till the glass door leaned with all its weight against a metal bracket from which the gate had been removed. Disaster seemed inevitable, but, with two of us pushing it away from the gatepost, and him driving very carefully, we made it. Ian and Peter used a tractor to move the old one away and replace it with another, smarter and approximately the same size.
I had asked Mary whether I could dig part of the kitchen garden behind the house to grow some vegetables. ‘Why do that? Just dig a patch of your meadow and use that.’ ‘How much?’ ‘Oh, about the size of a big billiard table.’ So that’s how it began. I put in leeks, potatoes and beans around wigwams of poles. All flourished. Mary enjoyed the crop and, the following year, suggested I enlarge the bed. Meanwhile, the ugly brown paintwork disappeared under dark green. After that, like Israelis devouring Arab lands, each year the frontier advanced, the massacres and assassinations confined to slugs. By late April the bean wigwams were back and the planted rows had increased.
When Mary died in 2006, she left the estate and me to The Landmark Trust. They had already agreed to the deal. Gradually, the other tenants moved out. When Peter and Frances left, I bought their little greenhouse. Three of us removed the glass and, between us, carried the framework intact down to my plot, where it would yield tomatoes, chillis and a poor crop of aubergines (I was too mean with feeding them).
In September 2011 Richard phoned. A caravan owner had left his widow a 30ft caravan. Proving a liability as it approached its sell-by date, she just wanted shot of it. I suggested she take some sort of payment – there was a litre of gin in the fridge – but she was adamant. Under duress, she agreed that I send her a cheque, but won, never cashing it. A skilled local man replaced the old van with the new; its décor was fine for a holiday pad, no good to live in. We tore most of it out. Having survived with a series of poor stoves, it was time for a new one: I bought a ‘Wimborne’ made in China, never asking after the Chinese Wimborne.
No professional would consider putting a wood-burner in a caravan, but a skilled friend said he’d do it – and did. He also fitted up the gas and electricity. Since I am writing thirteen years later, we can assume his work was passable. My inheritance had just come through so I suggested he over-charge me. He did, and left the stove burning. It was the best I ever had.
That was the last van, the only one that wasn’t repainted green. The Landmark Trust, seeing that my long residence on the plot made it viable for a permanent dwelling, put the idea to me. The deal was that we share the cost (mine the smaller portion), but that it pass wholly to the Trust on my demise. That seemed fair. After all, dying just after moving in, I’d never know that I lost out. Surviving a decade, I would be aware that I’d won! In May 2022 the van was moved away and the plot I’d occupied for 25 years cleared. On the first night at the new site low-hanging branches kept me awake, noisily brushing the roof. Building took some months until, on 9th December, we shifted my bed, bedding and furniture into a new, well-insulated wooden cabin and my caravanning years ended. Dave demolished the final van.
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