Book Review: A Horse in the Bathroom by Derek J Taylor
Self-builder’s chronicle tells an affectionate tale of village England
It's not easy building your own home but it can certainly be a colourful experience, as Mark Cantrell discovers in this fascinating and throughly readable chronicle of how one couple's dream home became a reality
WHEN former ITN journalist Derek J Taylor
and his wife Maggie decided to build their own dream home in the country, the
end result was rather more than a house – it also led to this unexpectedly
entertaining chronicle of their experiences.
Unexpected because in the hands of a
less-engaging author, ‘A Horse in the Bathroom’ might so easily have become
bogged down in the dreary minutiae and indulgent journaling of the process of
building that ‘perfect house’. Well, Taylor’s book is anything but an indulgent
self-builder’s ‘how to’ guide; rather a characterful, colourful and
illuminating real-life yarn that reads with all the page-turning qualities of a
novel.
The story is simple enough; the process
of building their own home anything but. As the blurb puts it: “When Derek and
his part partner, Maggie, decide to escape to the country, they don’t opt for
the simple life. Instead they set about converting an old Cotswold stables in
Stow-on-the-Wold into their dream home. Over the next two years, they wage
guerrilla war on the Planning Office, are cursed by everything from collapsing
walls to poison gas and dozy apprentices, run out of money, and meet some very
strange characters – till in its final stages of construction, the place
unaccountably floods.”
To compound the difficulties from
inception, the couple have – shall we say – contrasting requirements for their
‘dream home’. Somehow these have to be accommodated. Taylor favours a house
with “character” while his wife wants a house with “lots of light”. Both of
them are stubborn to the core, but somehow they must fulfil their disparate
requirements, along with the demands of the planning and conservation
departments (which often appear capricious, but as Taylor concedes, have method
within their moody demands to maintain the rural aesthetic both he and his wife
crave).
Along the way comes compromise, set-back,
good fortune, and more than a few occasions when the couple wonder if they
haven’t over-reached themselves, as slowly but surely an overgrown burgage and
its derelict stables gradually become a garden and a home. The story is as much about the characters
they meet, as it is the self-build, and holding it all together is the pair
themselves, as the process tests their relationship to the full. In that, it
reveals a couple who very much complement one another, whose contrasts serve to
deliver a winning team.
The story is filled with an engaging
human warmth for its subject matter, an infectious enthusiasm for the quirks
and foibles of rural and city folk alike, and filled with snippets of
information and entertaining anecdotes that really keep the pages turning. Taylor
demonstrates a keen eye for the kind of detail that might at first seem to
sidestep the story but in fact reaches to its beating heart, especially as he
guides his readers through the main heart and soul of his story.
While the focus of the book is the
couple’s efforts to achieve the dream home, the heart of the story is the
context: stung by a chance comment from a city-dwelling friend that they are
just seeking to achieve some fanciful ‘rural idyll’ – Lark Rise To Candleford
syndrome – he sets out to investigate rural life in the 21st Century
– to discover what makes modern villages tick. So the story encompasses rather
more than a comfortable middle class couple’s desire to get their perfect house
– it explores the world of village living, from the good to the bad, to
discover the truth behind the ‘warm beer and cricket on the village green’
image of rural England.
Again, it’s a compelling read, almost a
voyage into another country. Taylor’s verdict: that modern villages have never
had it so good, at least those that have managed to re-invent themselves for
the 21st Century.
“In the globalised economy of the twenty
first century, city-dwellers yearn for clean air, open views, less stress and
fewer drive-by shootings. So they retire to a village. We’ve come to see the
escape into village life as ‘Recapturing an Ancestral Peace’. TV programmes,
sociologists, me, we talk about RE-generating the English village, as though
some past dynamism has been lost. Maybe it has in some places. But not
everywhere,” he writes.
“It’s not a question of having lost ‘The
Good Old Days’ at all. It’s more ‘You’ve Never Had It So Good As Right Now In
The Twenty-First Century’. [Bleddington] The most peaceful and affluent spot
was for hundreds of years a sink of misery and despair for most of its
population. How common is that story to the villages of England, I wonder?”
Later on, he writes: “One thing’s for
sure. Whatever people believe who move home from cities to villages, there
wasn’t some golden age of rural life back in village history waiting to be
recaptured. The past of villages is a tale of struggle against starvation,
death in childbirth, bubonic plague and similar man-made and natural
atrocities. Life in villages has never been as comfortable as it is in the twenty-first
century.”
Not everyone will agree with Taylor’s
take on the comfortable fortunes of modern day villages, given the very real
existential issues facing a good many rural communities – as the author also
alludes to in his writing – but the journey through this countryside world
proves a colourful, eye-opening and informative excursion. And Taylor proves a
most entertaining guide through this living landscape.
All told, ‘A Horse In The Bathroom’ is a
compelling read, filled with an infectious enthusiasm and affection for its
subject, and told with the panache of a man who has an eye for the human
interest.
Details:
A Horse in the Bathroom
How an old stable became our dream
village home
By Derek J Taylor
Summersdale Publishers
ISBN: 978-1-84953-240-2
Paperback, 320 pages, £8.99
www.summersdale.com
MC
First published on Cheshire Today, 17 June 2012.
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