Like Enid Blyton 1

I

I hated school. The mid 20^th century grammar school system was doing me no good at all. But I had another life.

At the brow of the hill on the road from the Fosse Way to Colston Bassett, on a Friday evening, the deadliness of school sloughed off. I swooped down into the Vale of Belvoir on my 14^th birthday bike feeling the wind in my face; elation took hold as the reality of the anticipated weekend was assured. Down there was my planet - freedom, mates, romantic surroundings; weekend self reliance set against the weekday put-downs.

***

When I was 14 our scout group gained the use of a two roomed cottage in the grounds of Colston Bassett Hall in the vale of Belvoir, 10 miles or so from town.

Colston Hall was being used as a Roman Catholic care home for babies and toddlers. No longer needed, the grounds, walled garden and outhouses had lapsed into romantic decay.

This is Colston Hall now, looking beautiful in its new role as apartments. 

The photo comes from the Nottinghamshire History website and you can read more here: http://www.nottshistory.org.uk/Jacks1881/colstonbassett.htm

The Hall and grounds as shown on the 1900 Ordnance Survey map, with the walled garden in the middle of the picture - see

 http://www.rushcliffe.gov.uk/media/rushcliffe/media/documents/pdf/planningandbuilding/conservationareas/Colston_Bassett_Conservation_Area_Appraisal_and_Management_Plan.pdf

'Our' cottage was built against one wall of a large walled garden, part of a row of lean-to buildings serving a variety of purposes. It was a fascinating place to explore in those days before danger was invented. There were, for instance, two basement furnace houses, extinguished  for half a century, dark and silent. Curiosity and a sense of adventure overcame  apprehension as we tippy-toed down the rotting access ladders. 

Donations of unwanted oddments furnished the place for us - straight backed Victorian chairs, a chest of drawers, a dressing table, odd ornaments and a marble topped washstand which, with a couple of primus stoves, was our cooker.  Three pairs of steel bunk beds were acquired; the bedroom was wallpapered with a random collection of odd rolls. I still have the stuffed owl.

Each room had a french window opening into the garden, shown in the picture above. The tree growing up the wall to the right is a fig tree whose fruit never ripened. 

From the 1900 OS map, showing the cottage and lean-to glasshouse (red arrow), the greenhouses (orange), the 'rose garden' (green) and the campsites (lilac). 

It was only when I studied the 1900 OS map for this post that I realised why the fig tree was there, why the wall had been rendered and why there were bits of gadgetry stuck to it. The map shows that there had been a glasshouse running along it. It was a wide cavity wall, presumably to carry heat from the furnace rooms, so the lean-to glasshouse would in fact have been a hothouse. 

This fits with Leonard Jacks' 1881 description of the horticultural activities of owners G B Davy and Robert Millington Knowles:

From The Great Houses of Nottinghamshire and the County Families by Leonard Jacks, 1881. See  http://www.nottshistory.org.uk/Jacks1881/colstonbassett.htm

II

I paused. Without the rasp of my bow-saw there was silence. The air struck cold as I breathed it in; warmed and exhaled, it hung undispersed. Across the narrow path a high hedge hid the tangled orchard where windfalls, uncollected, decayed softly back into the earth under the brambles. One pink campion stood among the damp brown leavings of last summer. Spider webs glowed in the hedge, illuminated by droplets of the mist which I knew would be laying across the fields on the other side of the wood. Soon the sun would lift it off to reveal a bright October Saturday.

***

At each end of the row was an open-fronted outhouse. One we used for storing Pete the scout-leader's motorbike, our bikes  and larger items of camping kit; the other was where we stored and cut wood for the fire. The narrow path between the buildings and the the old orchard snaked round the end of this one into a more open area we called the rose garden (green arrow on the map). It had obviously been a garden and old roses ran wild over it, escapees perhaps from the decorative arches which straddled the path at intervals.

An arch in the rose garden. Ahead, beyond the fountain is the garden wall, and the chimneys belong to the house which, I think, must be the head gardener's house, 'large enough to accommodate a tolerably influential family', referred to by Leonard Jacks. Now it accommodated Father Nolan.

There was a dried up fountain in the rose garden , and rectangular formal ponds, marshy and clogged. We used spades and yard brushes to scrape clean the terracing around one of them and, in so doing, revealed a flagstone with a metal insert. If this were one of Enid Blyton's Famous Five stories, the metal would be a handle and the flag would be a trapdoor leading to adventure. Knowing that these things only happen in stories we were now too old to read, we nevertheless piggled the metal free from the earth packed round it. We pulled. It slid up four inches to reveal itself as the cross piece of a T-bar. We took hold of it and heaved. The flagstone moved. If we were 8-year-olds we would have been excited by this - we told ourselves, excitedly.

We lifted the flagstone. There was a metal ladder. But there the potential for adventure ended: eighteen inches down, the ladder disappeared into water. Our sense of anticlimax was not great though. This, we felt, was pretty awesome stuff. Like archaeologists, we were uncovering the remains of a disappeared civilisation. So over the next few weekends we scraped slashed and brushed, to reveal the paths and terraces of the old garden. 

And we did find and lift other trapdoors. Then under one of them we were not met by water. The ladder just went down into the dark. We thought carefully for a millisecond about the danger of going down a rusty old ladder into the unknown and rushed off to fetch a torch.

This was real life and I am telling it as it happened so I can't give you ghosts or pirate treasure. At the bottom of the ladder we found water, ankle deep. Crouching under a low roof, we shone the torch around to reveal a space supported by shallow arches - stone or brick, I can't remember - not quite high enough for us to stand fully upright. We advanced through the water. I do hope we had the sense to poke the floor ahead with a stick before stepping on it. 

The place was about the same area as the pond above. We figured out that it must be a storage tank for some kind of circulating fountain arrangement. I think we were probably right. The only remarkable thing about it, apart from the thrill of sploshing about in a spooky place underground, was the presence of many 'stalactites'. These were white, slender, very delicate and up to a metre in length as they hung from the roof. As we reached out and handled the nearest ones they broke instantly; after that we were careful to avoid brushing against them. Teenage boys know about things like stalactites. So we knew they could not be the usual sort, given that the garden was not millions of years old. Discussing it later with the grown ups, we decided that they must have been formed by dissolved chalky stuff precipitating out of dripping water over decades rather than millenia.

There were a few times during my childhood and adolescence when I uncovered the past and stared it in the face. The thrill I felt then is the one I still feel whenever I go about doing History in my more grown up and organised way. I think these occasions seeded my lifelong love of the subject.