When I walked round my garden this morning with Diana I was trying – really very unsuccessfully, to remember what it was like thirty years ago, when we bought the Mill and the half-acre attached. I find it almost impossible to see it or even any part of it – but then by straining my memory I can see a bit, and then a bit more, and I can remember episodes which bring the scene back, at least to some extent. In the summer when we arrived the central garden features were indeed odd – a mulberry tree, already fifteen or so years old and grown not for anything as elegant as a lawn tree – which it now is, but planted, we gathered, by an ex-policeman who was running a rather chaotic smallholding – for what purpose (except the delicious fruit) we never learned; a walnut tree, also fifteen years old, and almost impossible to move, but liable – indeed certain – if left, to ruin our drainage system. So one of our early tasks was to move it – a mini-saga I shall tell later. Then there was a largish patch of worcester-berries – fiendishly prickly, hairy, unlikely-looking, foxy red, with fruit that was supposed to be a cross between blackcurrants and gooseberries and tasted rather unpleasantly of neither. Down the right-hand-side, there was an appalling old hedge of hawthorn and myrobalan plum which divided us indeterminately from our neighbours in the tiny miller’s assistant’s cottage with its small plot facing the road – a pretty cottage, but I feel sure, very dark and damp. The people were charming but inclined to want over-long daily chats through the gappy hedge which didn’t chime well with our London ideas of privacy. Geographically we shared a pump although we never used the water; for the few months before we had water laid on we fetched buckets full from our other neighbours who had piped water and lived in the larger and slightly more convenient miller’s house. It was from this family, a colleague who taught art, that we had bought the crazy broken-down mill and the parcel of land. He had made some half-hearted attempts to grow vegetables in the vicinity of the hedge without really removing the weeds first – so among the wild radishes with their curious pale-yellow-mapped-with-mauve blossoms were cultivated radishes in roughly the same state with long curly crimson roots and a mass of blossom; carrots unthinned grew in apparently unraked soil. The weeds had been hurled on top of a bank of older larger weeds, so tall vertical ones grew out of yellowing horizontal ones and a sprinkling of wall barley seedlings sprouted everywhere. Not a gardener, my colleague, I felt – though he was a more than respectable sculptor.

The dominant feature of this chaotic patch of land was the pigsty which dominated what was later to be our main lawn. Bob’s predecessor had kept several pigs and had built truly gargantuan premises for them – not very good concrete for the yards and the sleeping quarters, but relatively huge 6' by 4' timbers to support the houses and pigyards themselves.