I don’t think I’d told my friends I was the kind of girl who got keys through the post from law firms in Westminster about houses that were empty and mine, but they took it in their stride. As we piled into my camper, my tall and pretty as an angel boyfriend, his dog, some of the band, a few friends who’d been passing by I remembered the last time I’d been there. It had been a day like that one, sunny and bright, summer coming. I was eleven years old, I’d been hanging about in the low-beamed kitchen of the cottage where my father lived, the place we invaded at weekends. 70’s jeans, Kickers on my feet, my mother baking bread and my father in tweed suit and wellies saying come along. I’m taking you to see your house. His Porsche on the gravel, the soft front seat, his ordered hands on the wheel, the secure warmth of him, it wasn’t the your house that I registered, it was the being with him; we could have driven in circles all day and I would have been happy. We slipped along narrow sunken lanes, hedgerows green and stretching, the sun shining, the car warm and purring to a house on a hill hugged by woodland where a man tidied away blankets he’d slept on in front of the wide fire, guarding the place while it was empty. I remember standing on the first floor and looking through the windows at the view stretching like the Serengeti. And now this same view, my rag-taggle friends and I, a pink camper, a black and white dog, the same sunshine, the same woods that hugged, the same expanse of fields and trees swooping. The key was turned in the lock, the ancient doors swung open, my friends disappeared into rooms, up stairs, calling out, opening windows. I sat on a low wall, remembering. The letter had said between tenants but what was to stop me? Nothing but a few parties to raise money to build the studio in the garden that my boyfriend and his band had always wanted. I touched the iron gate hitch shaped like Aries horns and decided. By the time we were on the road back to London, The House of Grow was born. Parties were about to happen. I wrote to those lawyers in Westminster and told them I was moving in.
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Your stories are totally addictive. Keep the one minute highs coming.
EPIC!!! You are SUCH a GREAT writer EB!!! xxx