Two weeks ago, in London, I went to a private view of an artist who we knew when we lived in Norfolk. Norfolk is as far East as you can go in England and we now live nearly as far West. We moved there from London when my first daughter was 10 months old because I suddenly couldn't stand being the only person in my 'set' with a baby and feeling like a big bore all the time. Also one day we were sitting in Kensington Gardens near the Peter Pan statue when she crawled up and proudly handed me a dog turd. The week before a man had sprung out from behind a bush with no trousers on. I had this vision of her running towards me through a field of waist-high buttercups and there being NO ONE ELSE there.

Norfolk is stuffed with huge houses as it was once the incredibly rich centre of the wool trade. It is also on the way to nowhere and miles from anywhere and famous for the surly and incestuous nature of the indigenous inhabitants. At that point there was some random oil crisis and everyone was worried that petrol would cease to exist or something, so massive houses in a place where there were no jobs were pretty cheap. So we bought one. It was big. And really damp and rotting and the entire roof needed replacing. It had been a Rectory right up until that moment so I felt intrusive and sacriligious and also that we had taken away the heart of the village, although the house and the church were, weirdly, alone half a mile outside it. Something to do with the Plague.
I tortured myself with these thoughts and lurked about for some months until I discovered that the woman in the Manor had been dying to boss the village about for years and had sneakily moved all fetes etc. to her house, without revealing that they were normally held with us. She was also pretty unfriendly, considering that we were practically the only people for several miles who weren't slow moving and mud-covered. She was divorced, with teenage children, and her father was the local grand land-owner, living in an exceptionally vast house at the end of a mile-long avenue. I was quite young at this point, really young in terms of the size of the house and the rather stuffy life-style which would normally go with it. It turned out that we had outbid her dearest friends at the auction and, much, much worse. Her husband had left her in a really humiliating way, by running off with the nanny while she was actually still in hospital with her second baby. This had been a big surprise and strangely out of character. She had never forgiven him even when it was revealed that it would not have crossed his mind until his closest friend encouraged him to do it. The closest friend was the man with whom I eventually did the 'efiL pawS' , which although totally inocuous had been seen in some quarters, including hers, as 'disgusting'. We lived there for fourteen years and she asked us in for coffee the first week after we arrived and then, on somehow hearing that a mutual, smart acquaintance was staying, for a drink. Which we had to decline as we were so busy packing, ready for our move.

We were talking recently with some friends about how people often behave far, far worse in their 30's than they did when they were younger. Norfolk bears that out for me. The lonely, cut-off feeling of the place and the fact that there were so many friends living in big isolated houses in a bohemian way meant that there were endless parties and endless opportunities for inventive behaviour. I must write about it some day.
- posted by Iris @ 11/12/2003 12:19:00 AM comment