Chapter 11: From 1992 to the Present Day

Looking back, it’s extraordinary that, after all the major structural work on the house done in 1991, in 1992 no such work occurred at all. It was almost as if I needed a break from it. Instead, other tasks took priority. One was decorating. The works to the bathroom, kitchen and dining room had left those rooms intact but bare-looking, with exposed plaster everywhere, and it seemed a priority to get them properly decorated. And, from the outset, I seem to have decided that the house should be done out in expensive wallpaper. Quite where this idea came from, I’m not entirely sure. I do recall that David and I decorated the hallway at Ashburnham Cottage with a rather elaborate gilt wallpaper, I think by Owen Jones, and expensive wallpaper was also used in the reception rooms at Oakley Square; in addition, I seem to remember that the staircase there had rather a nice paper, though I don’t seem to have any photos of it. Now, I really got into selecting refined and striking papers, starting with a delicate Colefax and Fowler pattern for the dining room (called ‘petits diamants’) and a bold, blue Owen Jones design for the bathroom.

View from dining room into sitting room

The problem was that I didn’t have a decorator of appropriate refinement. Through the joiner, Stuart, I was put onto a decorator called Mark, who doubtless appealed for his cheapness. But, although he could handle a paint brush all right, he made a complete mess of the paper-hanging which he carried out that summer. The dining room has no cornice, so he just hung crudely-cut lengths of paper, leaving a very uneven effect at the angle between the wall and the ceiling which looked terrible - in fact, it seemed to represent a complete waste of very expensive paper. Luckily Stuart (as I recall) intervened and insisted that he tidied it up (I was so naïve at that point that I wouldn’t have known what to do), and the final result looks quite presentable. The bathroom was an equal disaster, though this was not Mark’s fault. It turned out that the rolls of the Owen Jones paper that Sandersons had supplied were the end of a batch and one of them had a dark line down the middle of it. This only came to light while the paper-hanging was in progress, so Mark had to use the offending roll. We subsequently got the paper replaced (in fact, I still have the unused rolls in the house somewhere), but I have never replaced the original paper that Mark hung, and the line still shows under the cupboard behind the towel rail. View image.

The further bit of decorating which was done under the auspices of Stuart unfortunately lacks documentation -- I don’t even recall the name of the man who did it -- but it is worth recording because it was so excellent. This was the complete stripping of the old paint from the railings at the front of the house. The work was done by a friend of Stuart’s who had lost his job and was a bit desperate for cash: I seem to remember that he owned one of the large, double-fronted houses in Laton Road. But he did a brilliant job on the railings, which really showed for many years by contrast with the clogged-up state of the railings to Exmouth Cottage (though these, and particularly their pineapple heads, were brought up to a comparable state in 2023). View image.

Minor jobs that took place in 1992 comprised inserting a door to the garage (the Willetts had just left a cavity) and installing the cast iron stove in the dining room. The latter is quite a notable feature of the house, and it needs to be explained that it came from Adrian Rivett, who lived in South London. As I recall, he had meticulously restored the stove and it had been sitting in the middle of their kitchen until his wife insisted that he got rid of it. Negotiations must have followed, and I seem to have paid £300 for it, which presumably included delivery to Hastings, which was done on a trailer. Once it got to Exmouth Place, we managed, using scaffolding poles as rollers, to get it up the back steps and into the house: it must have been quite a job! It was then installed in the alcove in the dining room, with the extant rear panels from what was an original Victorian stove attached to the wall behind it (if you look carefully, it is apparent that the earlier stove was a little smaller in size). My diary confirms that the delivery took place on 13 March, prior to Mark’s wallpapering work later in the year.

The other area of operations in 1992 was the garden. View image. I got various estimates for coppicing the sycamores at the top of the cliff behind the house and accepted the one from David Archer of Arrow Tree Services: he carried out the work at the end of February. Then, on 7 March, I paid a visit to Bodiam Nurseries and ordered a lot of shrubs which were delivered a week later and subsequently planted. A number of these still survive in the places where they were originally planted, especially two large hydrangeas, a cyclamen, and a flowering currant; I think the clematis was also from Bodiam Nurseries, but I’m now not sure. Others seem to have died: as has already been noted, I should really have stripped back all the topsoil and exposed and removed the asphalt from the school playground lying underneath it on a systematic basic, whereas what I actually did was to dig holes through it for the shrubs, and some plants found the soil too poisonous to survive. But other plants flourished almost too much and have since had to be moved, including a Philadelphus and a Choisia which used to be at the western back corner of the garden but were moved to the other side, just inside the back gate, in 2002. This was to make way for a Trachicarpus that I was inspired to buy after my trip to South Africa but which subsequently died. The other memorable plants are the Rugosa roses, which I recall were given to me by Elisabeth Page, and these seem to have arrived in November 1992 (my file contains a delivery note from David Austin Roses of that date). The last component of the garden was the lawn, which was laid on 18 December 1992.