The bohemian (with a lower case b)

This approach to the house as outlined in my previous post is I suspect a coming together of a number of influences and aspirations. As ever in talking about such things in this blog I find myself looking back at childhood influences. I confess that I have always loved those homes which displayed the artistic and individualistic, that were comfortable in themselves and what they said about their owners. In fact I loved the bohemian before I ever was drawn to Bohemia.

A major influence was the home of my creative writing teacher. Her house was down a steep lane near Painswick in Gloucestershire – a Cotswold stone house in a runaway garden. The house was decorated with angels in all sorts of forms – indeed “you turned a stone and found them there”. The main sitting room was full of books, in bookcases, in piles on the floor and on tables. Also in piles were pieces of paper filled with some form of creation – musical or poetic, by her or by some protégée, often myself. On the walls were all sorts of pictures. The furniture was old, some of it probably valuable, all of it comfortable and lived in. On the surfaces not occupied by books or papers was an eclectic collection of decorations. Antiques, stones of unusual shape or colour, little presents from children, reminders of trips to her beloved Greece - all jostled for space.

The kitchen had a bare Cotswold stone wall on one side and whitewashed walls on the others and a large kitchen table around which we sat. On the shelves were tins and jars and books. Work was needed on it, I don't recall it happening, but I do remember the smell of her cooking and herbs (she had a fine line in stews). Outside the kitchen window she had decorated the wall of an outbuilding with a Greek scene. Upstairs at the very top of the house was an attic full of costumes (for the plays which she directed us in) racks and piles of them. When you went up there you would feel your way through, with memories of Shakespeare, Christopher Fry, Euripides, Dylan Thomas and the annual pantomime hitting you in the face and nostrils. I felt very at home in her house. Several years later I was reminded of her home, when first I stepped into the Blackheath flat of my Czech puppeteer friend.

It seems to me looking back that my teacher's openness to the collection of objects which occupied every cranny of her house was symbolic of her openness to everything, to the potential which she saw in us and to the beauty of the world. And I loved it and have tried to live my life with my eyes open, with a willingness to turn stones and seek angels in the unordered order of God's good world.

Roots - The Shed

When I was very small my parents moved to the house that has been their home ever since. It is in the small Cotswold town of Winchcombe,a terrace house in the street that leads past the church. It is a non-descript house, but one with a long history. All the houses in the street were built on burgage plots – long thin pieces of land with a relatively small road frontage built in the late Middle Ages to house the homes and workshops in a single plot of the artisans who serviced the community that had grown up around the large Saxon abbey. Our house had until recently been a bakery. When my father built the kitchen extension, he found medieval walls of some outbuilding.

At the end of the garden stands the “shed” - a two-storey Cotswold stone stable, where my father and later my sister had their workshops, thus the tradition of craft continued to the modern day. When we moved in, my father found owl pellets and dead snakes in jars at the bottom of the garden, the former owner had kept his owls in the shed. A large lean-to greenhouse ran the length of the shed, in front of it were vegetable beds, before they succumbed to my mother's ever encroaching flower beds. At one end of the shed instead of limestone there was an old brick wall with bricks that were crumbling away, these afforded me, when I was practicing to play backstop for the school rounders team, a surface which deflected a thrown ball in all sorts of directions. At the same end an external staircase led up to the second floor.

As is so often the case the shed was my father's domain, it was where my mother did not attempt to organise his untidyness. It was the place where he invented things – he like his father before him is an inventor and one such invention paid for the kitchen. It was also the place where he kept his wood.

My father had plans for the shed, throughout my childhood he was restoring it. It was a huge adventure – he was delighted to find cobbles in the floor, which he carefully uncovered. One day he returned from the pub with a large piece of Cotswold stone which he had been given. It looked like nothing at first until you turned it round to reveal Norman or Saxon carved stone – it was part of a pillar from the old abbey. The stone was carefully installed in the stable wall. He claimed some oak beams from the demolition bonfires at a nearby flourmill and singlehandedly installed them in the ceiling, whilst my mother watched through fingers standing at the kitchen window, unable to stop him but worried stiff that something might slip and he would be injured. By the time I was at university the shed was now so restored that I was able to have my 21^st birthday party there. But somehow that was as far as it got, somehow he never did finish it. The woodturning lathes which were waiting his retirement there have stayed unused.

Why am I saying this in a log about the Czech Republic, why now? Well this morning I caught myself delightedly unearthing granite cobblestones in the yard and I was reminded of Cotswold cobbles in the shed. Looking up I gazed at the barn. As I have said in an earlier post it was the barn that had first attracted me to buy the house and yet it remains unfinished, as something prevents my continuing in its restoration. I wonder whether this is my “shed”, whether I am acting out my father's experience and whether I will complete my dream as he did not.

The Czechs and ..... Slippers

In the hallway of every Czech house, or in the case of many flats outside on the landing, you will find a line of empty shoes and slippers. The same is true of our Czech home. In the Czech Republic you remove your outdoor shoes on arrival and put on a pair of slippers. This is not just the case in your home, but also, and perhaps more importantly, in houses in which you are a guest.

This custom is a practical one, preventing the trailing of mud and dust from the street (to say nothing of the by-product of those little dogs the Czechs are so fond of) into the house and the subsequent damage of the lovely softwood floors that you will find in many Czech houses. In some cases your host will wave their hand to indicate that taking off your shoes is not necessary, but it is only polite to offer. In order to facilitate this custom the Czech home will have a selection of slippers in various sizes to proffer to visitors and family.

Personally I find it a lovely custom and one I adopt in England. It is not just the practicality that appeals but of feeling at home and welcome that I like. The custom of wearing slippers indoors sometimes extends to environments other than the home, something that seems to be taking informality too far. I am told that a rule had to be passed prohibiting slipper-wearing by MPs during sessions of the Czech Parliament (or maybe the Czechs are just pulling my leg)!

My first winter in the house 4

On my first morning in the house I put my nose out from under the two duvets on my bed. The woodstove had long since gone out and I discovered my blanket had even frozen to the wall. I reminded myself that the next time I stayed in the house we would have central heating. I got up quickly, lit the stove and climbed back into bed for thirty minutes until things warmed up a bit. Then I put the kettle on and made some porridge (very British and very good for cold Czech mornings).

My next five days revolved around the needs of the stove and not allowing it to go out. This meant that I could only leave the house for a maximum of a couple of hours - enough to walk through the snow to the nearby town of Horice Na Sumave but not a lot further. It also meant regular trips to the stable to chop wood and bring it in. I now realised why Czech houses in the winter are surrounded by walls of chopped logs. I also realised how rubbish I was at chopping it and I hoped none of my neighbours saw me. My day was determined by the length of daylight, for although I had electricity the night sent the temperatures plummeting and after a while it made more sense to go to bed. In other words I no longer had control of my time - the pace of my day slowed and I found it, despite everything, relaxing. This is how it would have been in some previous age.

Occasionally my day would be disturbed by visitors. The local carpenter came over regularly to chop wood for me, to plane the door down so it fitted more snugly and to measure up the windows, which he was to repaint and repair for me (although not necessarily in that order). He would ski over from Horice, carrying his tools.

I also had visits from a Czech lady, whom my puppeteer friend had introduced me to, who was helping me with translation and negotiating with Czech lawyers and civil servants. She was shocked by the conditions I was living in: "I admire you - you are brave." She could have added "mad", and I could see it in her face as she looked around the room.

On one day she drove me into Cesky Krumlov to sort some house insurance and to return the landtax form. This latter was a good example of Czech disorder in matters bureaucratic. In all sorting the landtax must have taken several hours of speaking to different officers, only for us to go back to having to do what we were told to do in the first place. Ironically after all that, the landtax (the Czech equivalent of the community charge) amounted to less than £10 a year and probably cost more than that to collect. One Czech I know commented when asked what killed communism - "It strangled itself". Here was why. Afterwards the lady took me to a restaurant near the castle carpark, where she made sure I had a large hot meal. Then she drove me back to then house and my routine.

My first winter in the house 3

On the first day in the house I was delivered by my friend together with a few bags of basic belongings. Most of these were her hand-me-downs - an old duvet, sheets, and cooking pots - and some of those in turn had been given to her by her mother when she returned to Czecho. And I was extremely grateful for them. There had been more snow over night and I had to clear my way through the snow in the yard. The door was frozen shut and I had to use all my weight to open it.

My first job was, as it was to be on every day of my stay, to set the fire going in the stove. I then put the kettle on for a proper English mug of tea. Whilst it brewed I used some of my friend's old tea-towels to block the drafts in the faulty double-glazed windows. Having drunk up I went into the bathroom to discover a large hole where the bath had once been. The local carpenter had set about preparing for the fitting of a stopcock. This was a bit of a shock as I hadn't agreed to it, but he had adopted me and there was no arguing about it, even if I could speak Czech it would have been rude and the Czechs take such things very personally. Upstairs he had even been whitewashing one of the bedrooms!

I went outside to the stable to bring in some more wood for the stove. It was glorious - in the orchard the top layer of snow had melted yesterday, only to be frozen again overnight into bright diamond crystals which flashed in the sunshine. Across the snow I could see the trails of the wild and domestic animals who shared the garden with me - deer, the local cats and others I did not recognise.

And so I pottered about for the rest of the day setting up home in the one room that was warm. I was happy, despite the cold, despite the absence of water in the bathroom, I was at last at home in my Czech house.

Home again - train journey

I left a wet Glouestershire bracing itself for more floods and caught the plane to Prague. The plane set down in a foggy Czech Republic and I proceeded across town to catch the train to Ceske Budejovice. As I have said before, I like the journey down to South Bohemia - it is part of my submersion back into the Czech. The compartment was already half full when I came in and settled down on the leatherette seating.

I rang my friend and told her which train I had caught and asked her to sort a taxi to meet me the other end. My travelling companions watched and listened, recognising that I was speaking in English and went back to their conversation secure in the thought that I was not eavesdropping. I wasn't really, just catching the occasional word or phrase, sometimes enough to understand. And of course I was able to watch them, again they paid no attention to me as if my visual interpretation was somehow also alien and so I was unable to read their faces and actions.

On one side sat a couple facing each other by the window. She was in her late fifties unless the lines on her animated face were prematurely the gift of too many cigarettes. The one thing that contradicted the years was her long and thick brown hair which fell about her shoulders and of which she was clearly proud, as her subconscious stroking and sorting betrayed. All the time she chattered to her male companion, leaning forward in her seat in a conspiratorial way, whilst he sat back in his, giving the occasional monosyllabic response. They were friends I thought, but not too close and he less close than she. I was right - she got out at different stop.

Opposite me was a young man, who reminded me of one of those daddy long-legs you get in the bath. He was all long arms and legs which he crunched up in a suit large enough to fit his height but too wide to fit his frame. His face was almost the face of a boy - it was as if the hormones had spent all their energy telling his limbs to grow, and they had run out of puff when it came to his childish chin. Each wished me goodbye "Nasdar" as they got out of the train, the daddy longlegs saying it in English.

At the station the taxi was waiting and I was sped off along the foggy road to Cesky Krumlov. The fog was pressing in but my taxidriver insisted on overtaking any car that was driving cautiously. As we passed Lidl just outside Krumlov I found myself smiling and despite the driving a sense of wellbeing was creeping over me, growing as we sped on, I was coming home.

Whitewashing Visitors

My sister and her family are staying in our Czech home at the moment. They have been there for a week, having spent a fortnight there last August/September. Just as last year the weather until the day they arrived was perfect - sunny and dry as is normal at this time of year. But, as has become a standing family joke, they brought English rain with them.

The advantage of that for us is they need something to do to pass the time and so last year we got a large chunk of whitewashing done for us! My sister wanted to be an art restorer when she was younger, but was denied by having done the wrong exams. So her art restoration skills were put into practice on the decorations in the house. In the old days the whitewashed walls of the houses in the area were decorated using coloured paint on rollers. The rollers produced a regular pattern on the walls similar to wallpaper. When the decoration grew old and tired, it was whitewashed over and a new pattern applied. Thus on the walls of our old house there were layers of decoration stretching back through many years and generations of house-proud German families. My sister painstakingly removed the layers and counted ten before hitting the stone wall.

The problem with these decorations is unless you know to apply a coat of stabiliser to the wall before applying the whitewash, the paint of previous decorators will appear like a ghostly signature on the wall. Not having any experience of whitewash (to those Czechs reading this, we use emulsion paint in the UK) I wasted a whole day painting a room, only to wake up the following morning to see the paint coming through. Whitewash has other disadvantages not least being the fact that it comes off on your clothes if you lean against it - so don't put coat hooks on the wall - but on the upside it does allow the old walls to breathe. What with the ghostly hand of past decorators and breathing walls this house has a life of its own.