William’s Progress. Matt Rudd
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and this will affect your insurance premiums. Another two miles an hour and you’d have got a ban.’
‘But I thought you were—’
‘There’s no excuse for driving so fast on a motorway. You’ll get yourself killed. And your little kiddie there, too. And perhaps someone else’s kiddie. Like mine.’
Unbelievable. He knows about the piercing scream that cuts straight to the very core of your brain but because he’s a copper with an annoying high-vis jacket and a Taser and a hat, he thinks he’s above the laws of parenting.
‘But he is right, darling. You shouldn’t really be driving so fast,’ says Isabel, astonishingly, as we pull away, but I know better than to try to argue. She’s tired. I’m tired. We must get through it. I shall content myself with muttering all the way to Devon.
Why would anyone pay good money to stay in a house that is more rubbish than their own? Because it looked nice in the picture? Because they automatically but inexplicably drop their standards while they’re on holiday? Because holidays are supposed to be rubbish? And because if they weren’t, it would be unbearable to go home at the end of them?
The cottage is what an estate agent might call rustic but what I might call uninhabitable. The drive and garden are submerged in five centimetres of what an estate agent might call locally sourced, organic yard cover but what I might call mud. The puddle by the front door into which I drop the seventh bag, the one containing all Jacob’s baby clothes, is a metre deep, although no one could have foreseen that until a bag had been dropped in it. An estate agent might call it a well-appointed plunge pool.
The heating system is what an estate agent might call an original fixture, the logs for the fire are what the lying bastard might call slightly damp. The oven has the remains of someone else’s pizza in it. The microwave doesn’t exist. There are many beds scattered around the top floor, but none of them are comfortable. The windows open, but they don’t shut. The bath has a pink and brown shower curtain slouching bacterially over it. The pink is its original colour, the brown a modification over years. Or vice versa.
If we put the quarter-kilowatt electric shower on at the same time as the kettle, the television, the radio or the baby-listening monitor, we have a power cut. To re-trip the switch, I have to walk across the swamp to a shed in which the mains electrics are housed.
The television, in direct contrast to every other television in the land, only gets Channel Five.
Unfortunately, the farmer is very friendly. He describes himself as an artisan. He grows not enough pigs and not enough cows and sells them to people like Isabel at posh farmer’s markets at vastly inflated prices. And people like Isabel can’t help feeling sorry for him, this last protector of the land, even though he’s conned us out of £400 for an outbuilding on a farm he is clearly struggling to keep going.
I refuse to feel sorry for him. He could always stop being a farmer and condemn himself to a life of office radiation and zombie commuting like the rest of us. He could be an accountant. Isabel claims that, without him, a way of life will be lost for ever. And the bumblebees and barn owls would go with it. We must use this week to live the good life…conversation round a candle, reading a book, playing backgammon, listening to the drip-drip-drip of the leaking roof.
There is nothing for it but to go to bed.
So I go to bed.
And Isabel goes to bed.
And Jacob starts coughing.
It is this damp shed’s fault. Pursuing a dream of rural existence that vanished in the nineteenth century, we are dooming our tiny, defenceless baby to a nineteenth-century cough.
Tuesday 19 February
I have caught the cough. The one time I thought I might go on holiday and not immediately get sick (‘It is your body relaxing, darlink,’ says Isabel’s mother every time it happens), I get sick. It is raining so hard that we abandon going outside altogether.
Wednesday 20 February
Isabel has also succumbed to the pleurisy-type disease Jacob and I are struggling with. They don’t mention this in the ‘Welcome to Devon’ pamphlets that lie curled and ageing in the top drawer of the only piece of furniture in our damp and smelly living room, so I burn them. And unless our chipper farmer produces some dry wood in the next hour or so, I’m going to burn the chest of drawers they came in, too.
Thursday 21 February
There is nothing worse than having a sick baby, except when you are sick yourselves, except when, instead of being at home, you are in mid-Devon, about a thousand miles from a chemist, and bloody wildlife is keeping you awake at night. Last night, in the precious minutes when Jacob wasn’t hacking his way through an illness he wouldn’t have if we were in a nice centrally heated house, a barn owl, a bloody barn owl, was hooting away in the adjacent bloody barn. Isabel, the barn owl conservationist, didn’t notice. She had a pillow over her head. This was a shame. Even she, the great farm-loving romantic, is beginning to see that there are advantages to the twenty-first century and that perhaps farm holidays aren’t right for (a) this time of year, (b) a young family and (c) enjoying oneself in the slightest bit, ever, at all. If a bloody barn owl had kept her awake all night, too, she might have also seen that (d) barn owls aren’t worth conserving.
Friday 22 February
I have made an executive decision. We are leaving. We are leaving one day early from the holiday we started two days late. I don’t care about the money. I don’t care about offending the friendly farmer. I am tired. I am damp. Most of Jacob’s clothes, the ones I dropped in a muddy puddle, are still not properly dry. The bloody goddam barn owl was at it again last night with his infernal hooting, so much so that I woke Isabel to complain. She then had the temerity to shout at me because I’d woken her up.
When she had finished shouting at me, she listened to the barn owl and then said, ‘Wow, it is a barn owl. You’re right. How amazing,’ and immediately went back to sleep, content that our annual subscription to the Barn Owl Conservation Society was money well spent.
I went downstairs to make a Lemsip and, because I’d forgotten to turn the bedside clock off first, fused the lights. I then stepped in the three-foot-deep puddle on my way to the shed. I then locked myself out. I then threw stones at the bedroom window, but Isabel didn’t hear me because she presumably had the pillow back on her head and it had begun to rain noisily on the tin roof.
She noticed when the last stone I threw broke the window. And that was when we had the argument that ended in my executive decision. It began like any normal middle-of-the-night, exhausted-parent shouting match, only with one of us standing outside getting wetter and wetter, and the other one shouting through a nice new hole in the window. But like a migraine, it developed into something darker, something more poisonous and unshiftable. It became one of those arguments in which horrible lurking disputes that were supposed to be long ago forgiven and forgotten rise to the surface.
‘You’re always negative.’
‘No, I am bloody not.’
‘You were negative when we lived in Finsbury Park.’
‘That’s because it was dangerous. And our neighbours were crazy. And that man with a knife tried to kill me.’
‘A boy who said he had a knife said he might try to kill you. That’s not the same thing.’
‘It is in this day and age.’
‘You’re negative about living outside London.’
‘That’s not true. I love it. I love our suburban existence with our curtain-twitching neighbours, our soon-to-be-ruined bathroom and the relentless commute.’
‘You see, that’s