News from Norfolk

You will recall, perhaps, that most enjoyable conversation over dinner the other week?  You were assuring me with great conviction — I cannot now reconstruct the context — that there are now no fairies left in Norfolk. 

Apparently — or so you said — the Puritans — or was it the Roundheads? — had driven them all away. And even if a few had somehow survived, they wouldn’t much like our vast, industrial-scale, expensively disenchanted fields. ‘Tis is a well-known thing — or so you insisted, pouring more claret — that fairies much prefer a landscape of stone walls, age-old hedges and ancient ring-forts, of the sort you are so lucky to have still in Ireland. 

Well, that reminded me of something. Indulge me, then, briefly, while I tell you the story of Ferier’s Hill. 

I must have been twelve years old at the time. That’s almost sixty years ago now! I was in my last year at my frankly appalling junior school, so welcomed the advent of the Easter holiday as only a small, bookish, hopelessly unpopular schoolboy could. 

Imagine my consternation, then, when it transpired that I was to have a companion up at our Norfolk place — and, what’s more, that he was to stay with us for the duration of the holiday.

Max was fifteen years old — going on a louche thirty-six at the very least. He was a distant cousin. At the time, I was told that he was being foisted upon me because “it would be nice for you to have a friend, darling, wouldn’t it?” With hindsight, it seems more likely that his parents’ divorce, their miscellaneous erotic entanglements and lack of enthusiasm for their existing children prompted this rush to find a place to park Max for the holidays. 

Max was then resident at one of our great public schools, from which he was later expelled. He was quick to compare yours and my own, rather older, public school, at which I was due to start that autumn, unfavourably with his own. He smoked whenever he had the chance. He swore like a trooper. He helped himself to the odd nip from my father’s cut crystal decanters when he thought no adults were watching. He was, in short, very worldly, in a way that I certainly was not. 

Our introductory conversation set the tone for all but the very last of our subsequent interactions. 

Max wanted to know whether we had a boat — which, living a good ten miles inland from the more fashionable north Norfolk coast, we did not. Secondly, he asked after our tennis court. Here, I could only report that although my grandfather had created one back in the 1920s, it had by our own time deteriorated into an overgrown sandy patch where, in summer, lizards and slow-worms basked on the crackled, crazed, bituminous landscape of what was left of the playing surface. 

What, though, about our swimming pool? Alas, I was forced to admit that while we did at least have a pond, it was choked with pond-weed and rushes, hence suitable only for small fish, frogs and a single, ferociously predatory heron. 

Extended interrogation by Max elicited the confession that not only did we fail to ski at Val d’Isère, Gstaad or Courchevel — we didn’t ski at all! Nor did we have a place in the south of France. Nor, as far as that went, had I ever been to the Caribbean, nor Hong Kong. 

My eventual shy assertion that we did, sometimes, go to Scotland in the summer, produced what was to become a very familiar sneer, and a flick of cigarette-ash onto the tiled floor of the Orangery. “How extraordinary!” Max opined. This would turn out to be his catch-phrase, employed whenever some aspect of our Norfolk existence seemed to him pitiable. He said it very often.