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By Root 2224 0

of the name was Nerodene, and a handsome milestone upon the coast road retains this spelling. The little place consists of a few streets of stone-built cottages, some hillside bungalows and one general shop. I cannot get The Times, or any batteries for my exhausted transistor radio, but this does not worry me too much, nor am I dismayed by the total absence of a butcher’s shop. There is one pub, the Black Lion. The cottages are charming, solidly built in the yellowish local stone, but the only building of any special architectural interest is the church, a fine eighteenth-century structure with a gallery. I am of course not a churchgoer, but I was glad to find that there are services, though only once a month. The church is well kept and regularly provided with flowers. The distant sound of bells which I sometimes hear comes I think from an equally tiny village lying inland beyond Amorne Farm, where the country is gentler and there is grazing for sheep. There is no rectory or manor house in Narrowdean; not that it was ever part of my plan to hobnob with the parson and the squire! I am also glad to intuit that the place is not infested with ‘intellectuals’, a hazard everywhere nowadays. To return to the church, there is a most attractive cimetière marin, which evidences a more spacious past than one would expect this ‘one horse’ village to possess. Many of the tombstones carry carvings of sailing ships, decorative anchors and strangely eloquent whales. Could men have gone whaling from here? One stone in particular attracts me. It bears a beautiful ‘foul anchor’ and the simple inscription: Dummy 1879-1918. This puzzled me until I realized that ‘Dummy’ must have been a deaf and dumb sailor who never managed to achieve any other identity. Poor chap.

Let us now come back again to Shruff End. The façade which looks onto the road is, I suppose, not in itself remarkable, but in its lonely situation is strangely incongruous. The house is a brick-built ‘double-fronted’ villa with bay windows on the ground floor and two peaks to the roof. The bricks are dark red. It would scarcely attract notice in a Birmingham suburb, but all alone upon that wild coast it certainly looks odd. The back has been horribly ‘pebble-dashed’, no doubt against the weather. An expert could probably date the house from the pale buff-coloured blinds which survive in almost every room, in excellent condition, with glossy wooden toggles on strings, silk tassels, and a lace fringe at the bottom. When these blinds (expressive word) are drawn down, Shruff End, seen from the road, has a weird air of complacent mystery. While within, the yellow light of the ‘blinded’ room somehow and sadly recalls my childhood, perhaps the atmosphere of my grandfather’s house in Lincolnshire.

The two bay-window rooms I have christened the book room (where I have put my crates of books, still not unpacked) and the dining room, where I store my wine. But I live entirely on the seaward side of the house, upstairs in my bedroom and what I am determined to call my drawing room, and downstairs in the kitchen and a small den next to it which I call ‘the little red room’. Here there is a good fireplace, with traces of a wood fire, and also a decent bamboo table and bamboo arm-chair. The walls have white wooden panels on the lower part, above which they are painted tomato red, an exotic touch not matched elsewhere in the house. The kitchen, with the calor gas stove, is paved with the most enormous slate flags I have ever seen. There is of course no refrigerator, which is dismaying to a fish-eating man. There is a large larder full of woodlice. All the downstairs woodwork tends to be damp. I prised up some linoleum in the hall, and replaced it with a shudder. There was a salty smell. Is it conceivable that the sea could be rising up through a hidden channel under the house? I suppose I ought to have had a surveyor’s report, but I was in too much of a hurry. There is an old-fashioned mechanical front door bell with a brass handle and a long wire. It rings in the kitchen.

The chief peculiarity