Chapter Nine

9


Box Number Two, please Gabriel

Box Number Two met even less of my mandatories: It was considerably more isolated. It wasn’t tacked onto a village. It was in the middle of nowhere. The nearest pub and convenience store were five miles away. It was a windowless box.

It was perfect.

We approached Box Number Two through an ever-changing moors landscape of clinging forest and purple heather wasteland and undulating brown and green chessboard farms dotted with livestock and crops; ragged drystone walls and hedgerows running every which way and keeping textures, colours and animals in check like outlines in a children’s colouring book. I was thirty-five going on fifteen. This was the North York Moors I had come to know and love through John Landis and Sherlock Holmes and any other moor-based movie in-volving isolation, monsters and mist.

Five miles from Box Number Two we broke free of woodland on a steep escarpment and were suddenly confronted with ‘civilisation’. This came in the form of a dozen quaint little houses perched precariously on the side of a wooded ridge like grey stone pigeons. We were in the village of Cragmoor (from the English word ‘crag’ meaning crag and the English word ‘moor’ meaning moor), which Gabriel informed me was the nearest source of supplies from Box Number Two. These supplies came courtesy of a grey stone building slap bang in the middle of the village bearing a swinging sign which said ‘Cragmoor Grocers, Sweet Merchants, Post Office and Tea Rooms’. Hanging on for dear life at the far end of this precipitous scene was a tiny white-walled pub with a thatched roof; the sort of place Frodo Baggins would have popped into for a pint on his journey to Mordor. It was called the Fox & Hound. There was a remote, otherworldly feel to Cragmoor that had considerable and immediate appeal.

Out past the Fox and Hound, we plummeted steeply down through more woodland, then up through barren wasteland, then down through more farms, then up again on a slippery drystone-walled luge ride of suicidal pheasants, quails, roaming sheep and back-to-back hairpins. For a lad accustomed to four lane motorways, it made for exhilarating but white-knuckled driving as I threw the little Skoda into corners like Mika Hakkinen’s mother, Gabriel screaming ‘Come on, grandpa!’ as I overreacted to the endlessly treacherous wet carpet of fallen orange leaves.

Finally, as we dove yet again into a wide valley, took the right fork at a skinny wish bone intersection, crossed a busy stream via a single lane, camel hump of a crumbling brick bridge and headed steeply skywards again, Gabriel said ‘We’re nearly there.’

Half a minute later, she said ‘Look right.’

I looked right. I stopped the car. I looked right again.

‘Is that it?’ I said peering through a fogged window.

‘That’s it,’ she replied.

I got out for a condensation-free view and this is precisely what I saw: Below us in the valley, the left fork in the road ran in a bit-mapped, convex arc bordered by forest, the stream and a drystone wall. Beyond the drystone wall, flat, lush, sheep and cattle-dotted pastures ran two football fields deep to another rock wall at the base of a hill. This hill rose in a wide, natural amphitheatre of animals a hundred feet up on the angle. Beyond that, another drystone wall and a flat hill top knoll. Atop this knoll, set commandingly against a backdrop of grey sky, was Box Number Two.

I got back in the car and gave Gabriel my most pleading look. ‘Please tell me you’re not joking.’

She offered a hopeful smile and peered up at the house.

‘I’m not. That’s definitely it,’ she said and I said ‘Oh, my God.’

The house was colossal – larger than Chicken Colditz – made even more so by the angle we were looking up at it from. It was an imposing grey stone manor with miniscule white wood French windows and it was made up of five tall, wide sections that shot off at angles to each other, umpteen chimneys protruding from a black tile roof.

But that wasn’t what I was really looking at: The house had a substantial tenuously attached ‘wing’ jutting out to what may have been east, west, north or south for all I knew, but which was definitely to my right. A wing that made this wide-eyed Kiwi almost wet himself. A wing that put petty quibblings over window size in perspective. Who needed windows? Who needed views? Who needed any of the crap on my long list of prerequisites when, right there in front of me was the one thing I never thought to add, something too intrinsically English to even think to add, yet something, here and now, that made views and en suites and pools and yards and acreage and electricity, water and sanitation utterly irrelevant – the ruins of a castle.

Admittedly, a small castle, but a castle nevertheless. The ruins were the same height as the house – three storeys – but half as long again. They were a rough and ragged affair constructed entirely of uneven grey and brown slabs. Half a dozen deeply recessed slits and squares scattered randomly about the ruin’s sombre façade passed for windows (not that that mattered anymore). Its roof, well, it didn’t appear to have one – wild mounds of green moss and grass topped its walls, even where huge ragged bites had been ripped out of it by crumbling mortar or, better still, cannons.

Back in the car I was in Disneyland. Awestruck. Moaning. Holding my head. I may as well have been thirteen again staring in open mouthed wonder up Main Street at the great grey edifice that meant so much more than the Matterhorn immediately behind.

I laughed. Clapped. Shook my head up at the house glassy eyed. That’s it!’ I said. ‘It’s a done deal!’

‘What?’

I grinned at her, leant in and kissed her on the cheek. ‘It’s a done deal. I want it!’

‘You haven’t even seen it yet!’ she said pusing me away.

‘I don’t care!’

Gabriel gawped at me open mouthed. ‘Monkey, it’s got smaller windows than the last place.’

‘I don’t care!’

‘The drive in? You hate these roads.’

‘I don’t care!’

‘It’s a working farm?’

I opened my mouth. Frowned at her. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It means that the house is part of a working farm, meaning those outbuildings over there,’ – she pointed to the left of the house – ‘are in use by the owner who lives just up the road and owns all this land.. Which means there will be farmers and tractors and all sorts coming in and out of our drive.’

It was a lot to take in for a city lad unaccustomed to such terms as outbuildings and farmers and tractors. So I frowned at nothing in particular and tried to assimilate the extent of this potential intrusion.

‘I don’t care!’

‘They’re beef farmers, Bailey. Beef and mutton and lambs. As in animals. As in these animals outside your window.’

This was a little harder to fit into my growing list of distorted sensibilities. I thought about the animals. I could see the animals. I could also see the jagged walls attached to my Disneyland.

‘I don’t care! We have to have it! I’m going to offer them a year’s rent in advance.’

‘You’re what?’

‘Gabriel. I’m from New Zealand. I have no credit history here, no employment history. Who in their right mind is going to rent me a house based on a job I can’t even prove I’ve got.’

‘What do you mean you can’t prove?’

‘I can’t prove. Nothing was signed. It was all done by video conference. A gentleman’s agreement.’

‘These are advertising people you’re talking about.’

‘Excuse me, I’m an advertising person. Look, that’s all by the by. It’s done and it’s fine. The point is, and okay, yes, I admit, I should have got something in writing—’

‘Yes, you bloody well should!’

‘The point is…I didn’t. My fault. But all these people want is assurance that the rent’s going to be paid and that we’re not going to wreck the place – I’ve got references for that and what could be more reassuring than an entire year’s rent in cash, upfront?’

‘Not a lot.’

‘Good. Shall we do it?’

‘You haven’t even seen the house!’

‘I’ve seen the castle. What more do you want?’

Gabriel angled her head and regarded me sternly. ‘How old are you again, Bailey?’

‘You know how old I am.’

‘Just say it.’

‘I’m thirty-five-and-three-quarters.’

‘And how old am I?’

‘You’re twenty-four.’

‘I’m twenty-three. And sometimes living with you is like being a solo parent.’

I laughed. ‘Of course, carried to its extreme, this means you’re sleeping with your son.’

She grinned and nodded. ‘Indeed. So be a good boy and keep your trap shut until we’ve viewed the house properly or you won’t be eating out mummy’s wide open beaver on the way home.’

Had the realtor been peering out from the house on the hill, he might have noticed his prospective tenants falling about laughing in the tiny interior of a clapped out Skoda on a ridge road below.

We were five minutes late. We were fifteen minutes in the house. We were eighty minutes following the realtor back to his office. The realtor was half an hour in speaking to the owner and faxing references. The owner was half an hour in getting back. I was an hour at the local Lloyds TSB getting a bank cheque for twenty four thousand pounds.

By nightfall, Gabriel and I were the gigglingly euphoric new tenants of a ridiculously isolated hilltop property slap bang in the middle of the North York Moors; a property that went by the name Hartley Castle House.