Part 6: Birds bees, cats and a couple of surprises.
The cottage was very basic, 4ft thick stone walls, a bare timber beam ceiling between the ground floor and bedrooms, which were just about 18 inches of stone wall and the remaining low headroom in the roof space. We filled the place with book cases full of our favourite books, artefacts and bric a brac.
We furnished the place with stuff that was thrown out by local people, the majority of rural Welsh folk were getting rid of all their old classic furniture, dressers and well made, post war stuff and replacing it with modern G plan and more mass produced furniture, in the same way they were abandoning their old stone cottages and farm houses and building sterile bungalows.
The local dump, an open landfill site, was about 2 miles
away and was a rich source of building materials, timber, furniture, glassware,
cooking utensils and much more. I would generally do a weekly or fortnightly
trip in the car and come back with all manner of treasures. Our other main
source of stuff was the monthly farm auction in the nearest town, Llanybydder, famous
for its monthly horse sale and auction house.
The cat that we brought with us from London was a white Persian
style puss, that adopted us when we lived in Balham, she was called ‘Chang’ and
she loved the new vast countryside that we had brought her to, she proved very
popular with the local Toms as well and over time had two litters of mostly
pure white kittens, so we had about 6 white cats. The kittens were semi feral,
but would always come home to the fireside and warm bedding of the cottage in
the winter evenings, it was quite a sight.
Us, with Chang the mother of our white cat dynasty
On one trip to the rubbish dump I found a Raven, black as
night, limping across the recently tipped garbage, dragging one of its wings
along the ground beside it. We wrapped it in a blanket and took it home, fed it
milk, grain and muesli. It got used to us after a few days of care and about a
week later had its wing looking like it was in the right place, healing. We
took it outside and it was able to fly a little, weakly at first up on to the
front porch and out of the way of the cats. It spent about two weeks perched
above our front door as it got stronger and the local postman refused to
deliver mail telling the local shop keeper that with that Raven and all those
white cats, the home-made velvet and embroidered capes that we wore in winter
and the general aroma of Patchouli Oil, we must be practising black magic and
they weren’t taking any chances. We had to collect our mail at the little shop
about a mile down the mountain.
The raven on our roof, ( Forgotten lore or an ode to Lenore ?)
Meanwhile I was coming to terms with the garden and vain
attempts at self-suffiency (slugs and rabbits mostly better fed than us) and we
were given some Chickens, which roamed the unfenced bit of the garden area by
day. I did my first attempt at Bee Keeping, having read an antiquated book from
the library by a monk who was apparently the father of British beekeeping and the
place was pretty busy. Our old friend Janet would stay over a few days a week
and help us with the candle making, pottery and egg hunting, in exchange for a
warm bed, hot stew and debate about fairies, wood nymphs, the teachings of Mme
Blavatsky and herbal medicine. Janet would read for hours and join us on visits
to our valley for sun bathing and reflection. She would draw local single hippie
lads like moths to a flame and we would drag them into our craft production and
building repair work. She eventually went and set up home with a guy we
nicknamed “Gosh” David because every time you told him about something new, he
was genuinely filled with wide eyed wonder and would seem speechless until he
uttered the word g o s h in a slow and meaningful way.
Another trip to the dump, this time with Hillary in tow, was
interrupted by the strangest incident. We would see, from the corner of our eye,
what looked like a small piece black wool apparently rolling across the top of
the tip, hit a fence and bounce back to somewhere out of sight. Then nothing, until
a few minutes later when the same thing would happen in a different direction.
If we moved towards it would sort of float off in the opposite direction until it
hit an obstacle. We pursued it and eventually corralled it into a corner. it
was impossible to identify, no discernible legs, head or tail, it was clearly
an animal. Once we had picked it up and put it in a box (it stank, covered in
waste emptied by drain and waste tank clearing vehicles) we could discern two
eyes and a black nose buried in matted curly hair. We assumed it to be a
damaged wild animal of some sort that neither of us could imagine and we took
it home.
We tried to cut some of the hair to get a better idea of
what it might be but couldn’t really tell whether we were cutting hair or a
something more substantial so we took it to the local vet.
The vet, definitely a farm vet rather than a pet vet, was initially
as confused as us, but quickly established that this was in a fact a poodle. He
cut it free from its own hair, gave it antibiotics ( it’s skin was badly
infected) and gave it a couple of vitamin shots ( it was badly mal-nourished)
we took away some high protein feed, skin creams and antibiotic tablets to mix
into its food and went home the proud, if unintentional, owners of a small lady poodle cross.
While we were chasing it across the dump Hillary hade called
it a ‘Grimble’ (sort of home penned name for a generally unknown mythical
creature). The name stuck and she became a central part of our lives from then
on.
Malcolm, visiting, holding Grimble the poodle
About six months later we went to the Lllanbydder horse fair to go to the farm auction and while I bid for some huge enamel saucepans suitable for candle making, Hillary disappeared. When we met up to go home, she informed me that she had just bought a horse.
All Photos courtesy of Miriam Mills
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