There’ll always be an England

While there’s a country lane,

Wherever there’s a cottage small

Beside a field of grain –

 

“There’ll always be an England” (1939 song)

 

It’s been a quiet day here in my corner of Wiltshire, and now it is evening and I’m trying to come up with a topic for this week’s blog. I’m also baking cookies, so I can only write for ten-minute intervals before I have to hop up and trot into the kitchen to peer into the oven. When I trot back to the desk to stare some more at the blank computer screen it is often with a warm, soft cookie in my hand and crumbs around my mouth. It occurs to me, on one of these trips to check on the cookies, as I stand surveying my kitchen, that perhaps my readers would be interested to know something more about my house – my first British home. So come with me while I take you on a little tour.

The first major adjustment Americans have to make when moving to the UK is the simple fact that houses are much smaller here.  According to a 2009 compilation of census reports the average size of new homes in the US is 2,164 square feet. Compare that to the average size of a new home in the UK at 818 square feet. My home is slightly smaller than average at 653.7 square feet – and don’t try to short me that .7 of a foot because even with just two of us living here we need every last inch of space.  The dog has to sleep somewhere.

In the US the type of home we live in would be called a townhouse or a condo, but here it is called a terraced house. We live in the middle house of three, with a neighbour on either side of us. We have a small back yard and an even smaller front yard – only here they are called the back garden and the front garden. The word “yard” seems to only be used here for the unit of measurement or the headquarters of the London police, not for the area around your house. I keep trying to remember to use the proper word, but old habits die hard.

There are several features of my new home that are quite nice…in theory. The first one is that when you enter the front door you step into a very small entry area with a nice shelf-lined cupboard for storing muddy shoes. You can wipe your feet, take off your shoes and stow them away before proceeding through the inner front door into the living room. As I said, in theory this is a lovely innovation. The problem is that this unheated space becomes damp and cold, and one dark day my good hiking boots were discovered to be enveloped in a thick overgrowth of mould which nearly caused me to get on the next plane back to the desert. After much scouring and bleaching we now stow all but Wellies and snow boots indoors, and the handy closet is reserved for things like the dog’s leash and his collection of sticks.

Once you have stepped into the house you see that it is basically the width of one room. The living room is in front, with large windows to let in the light. Beyond that is the kitchen, and at the back is the conservatory, which we have turned into a combination of dining room and office. I do love that this house has plenty of light pouring through the windows, and wide windowsills where vases of flowers and houseplants can sit.

At the back of the living room the stairs lead up to the two double bedrooms and a bathroom. In real estate listings I have discovered that over here a room is either a double room or a single room. When they call a room a single room they are not kidding. It means you can fit a single bed in there, push it up against the wall, and maybe you will have room in which to turn around. Then again, maybe you won’t. You might have to back out like a huge lorry stuck in a narrow, dead end street. I’m not joking. What is called a single room here in the UK would be called a walk in closet in the US. Thankfully both of our rooms are double, which means that you can fit a grown-up sized bed in and still manoeuver around on either side without breaking an elbow.

The other thing that needs to be able to fit into the average British bedroom is a wardrobe. Once I moved over here I realized why IKEA is so popular, why it came into existence in the first place. Closets are not standard features. We have one closet in our entire 653.7 square feet of house,  and that is under the stairs, crammed full of the iron, ironing board, vacuum cleaner, steam mop, fold-up clothes drying rack, and everything else that we couldn’t find a permanent home for. Every time my husband can’t find something it is usually unearthed under the stairs. The rule is: if you can’t find it, it’s probably under the stairs. This is standard operating procedure for closets the world over. They are a catch-all for everything you don’t quite need now, but might later and so you don’t want to get rid of it; so you open the closet door and chuck it in until you have a horrible jumble.

Without half a dozen closets in a house one is required to be neat, orderly, minimalistic even. You have to make decisions about what to keep and what to purge or things will rapidly build up and overwhelm you. Pack rats cannot thrive in such conditions, at least not for very long. So perhaps this is a good thing. I am sentimental by nature and hang onto tokens and keepsakes with fierce possessiveness, but given my new environment I have learned to pick and choose what will be honoured with keepsake status and what will go into the recycle bin.

As an aside, I will note that my husband tells me I should not keep using the word “closet” because over here they use the word “cupboard”. However, in this instance I am going to stand firm. If the door goes all the way to the floor, and you could theoretically step inside it – if it were not so full – then it is a closet, not a cupboard. So my English readers shall have to understand that when I refer to a closet I am not talking about the water closet, but rather a small, dark space used for storing clothing and ephemera until such time as they can be relocated to the attic.

Now back to the subject of wardrobes and IKEA. Have I mentioned how much I love IKEA? Visiting their huge store in Bristol is like going orienteering, only indoors. On a busy weekend day it also has something of the running of the bulls about it. On one of our trips there they ran out of trolleys and we had to wait for probably ten minutes or more with a large crowd of impatient shoppers, then pounce on one when the trolley man finally pushed a few in from the car park. No sooner had we rolled our trolley down to the warehouse to begin loading it with the items we needed than someone snatched it while our backs were turned.

My husband, in a rare demonstration of pique, said, “Someone’s nicked our trolley. Oh, now that was very poor! Very poor indeed!” Strong words from someone as mild-tempered as my beloved. I was so amused by hearing him say “nicked” in his cute English accent that my irritation was somewhat lessened. But we still had to walk about six miles back to the trolley gathering station, which thankfully was now fully stocked.

At IKEA you can find everything you need to customize a wardrobe for your closet-less bedroom, bring it home, and assemble it with those handy little Allen wrenches which they provide along with nineteen pages of instructions. It still won’t come close to an American walk-in closet, but it works. By now your double bedroom is starting to feel like a single, and you start eyeing the space underneath the bed for additional storage. IKEA sells stuff for that, too.

In our bedroom we have what is called an airing cupboard. This is nothing more than the cupboard housing the hot water heater. However, in a land where space is always at a premium, and keeping things nice and dry can be a challenge, this becomes the airing cupboard. Shelves have been built in the area in front of the hot water heater, and it is here where we store the linens; and when towels are stubbornly refusing to dry on a drizzly day, I hang them up in there for a few hours. It’s awkward, but it does the trick.

Now let us move on to the bathroom. Here we have some innovations that are truly sublime. The bathroom alone makes our 653.7 square foot house a palace. It has heated floors. It has a heated towel rack. It has a big tub and shower unit with its own hot water heater, instantly pouring out steaming water as soon as you turn the tap. So even if some crazy woman starts doing laundry and washing dishes at 6am there will never be shouts of “Hey! Who used all the hot water?”  Our bathroom is just lovely. On a cold day it’s a haven of warmth and comfort. I love our bathroom.

Above the bedrooms and bathroom is a full attic, which is called a loft over here. This has become our closet replacement. It is where we store the tent, our luggage, our off-season clothes, and anything else that won’t fit in the closet beneath the stairs. It is accessed by a trap door in the spare bedroom ceiling and a pull down metal ladder. I’m never completely at ease when I’m up there, probably because I always expect attics to be populated with rats and spiders, even perfectly nice attics like ours. When I make it back down safely there’s a little rush of satisfaction at completing an unsavoury task. I’m always home alone when I do this, which is sad because it’s rather anticlimactic to hear the trap door crash down and know that I’ve made it there and back again safely, but to have no one there to tell me how courageous I am. The dog is never impressed with my feats of bravery.

In addition to our loft and the closet under the stairs, we have the highly prized addition of a garage at the back of the garden. Many homes do not come with a garage, and people may only have a couple of assigned parking spaces, or they might have to park in the street; so we feel very fortunate to have one. This is the opposite of the US where homes are often dwarfed by massive three-car monstrosities with more square footage than my entire house. Garages in Britain are seldom ever used for parking a car inside. They tend to be incredibly narrow, and only the bravest of souls tries to drive his cherished vehicle in and out. Rather, the garage is where we keep the lawn mower, the garden tools, the bottles to be taken to the recycling centre, broken chairs, and any cardboard boxes that we think we might need someday.

Now back down to the ground floor we go. The living room is your basic square. The large front window faces west for the afternoon sun. Out of this window I can see the neighbourhood children walking to and from school, see the progress of the man with the very stubborn Westie that can plant its feet and not be budged from a good scent, and occasionally a woman rides her horse down the middle of the street. Our small front garden is bordered by a laurel hedge, so there is always a touch of green to be seen, even in the winter, which is nice.

At the back of the house is the conservatory dining room/office. When the rain is heavy it pounds so loudly on the corrugated plastic roof that we can’t hear each other talking above the din. On a warm day it can feel like an oven. But whether it’s hot, or it’s cold, or like today it’s just right, we love it. It’s bright and airy, and we enjoy having our breakfast and being able to watch the sunrise, and the vast sky stretching out above us turning pink and gold. We can watch the sparrows chattering and squabbling on the neighbour’s roof behind us, and right now we can watch the progress of the daffodils as they grow and begin to flower in the garden.

And that just leaves the kitchen, by far the most interesting of rooms to me since it is where I spend so much of my time.  The key word here is once again: small. The refrigerator and freezer are individual units which each fit underneath the kitchen counter. I’ve seen men go fishing with ice chests to hold their beer which were larger than my refrigerator. But I have grown used to them and to realize that there are certain advantages to a smaller refrigerator. You waste less simply because things don’t get lost for weeks on end at the back of the bottom shelf. On any given day I could tell you exactly what is my refrigerator, and I’m always working out ways to make sure it gets used up before anything spoils. Because I have less on hand, I find that I’m more careful with how I use it. I snack less, which has been good for my waistline. And so although I do have to shop more often, I really can’t complain about the smaller refrigerator size. Would I turn up my nose at a big, American style one? No. But I’m content with my compact British one.

Another appliance lives in the kitchen, and is also small enough to fit under the counter. This is a strange thing called a washer/dryer. In the US if someone says she has a washer/dryer she means she has a washing machine, and she has a dryer. Before moving here I wouldn’t even have thought it would be possible for one machine to be both a washer and a dryer. In truth, it isn’t much of a dryer. It is small, and slow, but it does a good job of washing. Due to its size it does not dry very well, and you have to remove half of the load or more if you want things to actually be dry when they come out, and not just hot and steamy. What I usually do is let them run a medium-length drying cycle, and then hang them up to finish air drying. During the winter they usually have to be hung up indoors, unless we have a rare sunny, breezy day like today. In the summer I, and all of my neighbours, and women all over the country, hang our laundry outside to dry.

In the US the vast majority of people never hang clothes outside on a clothesline to dry. If they do they are usually the type of people who will brag about reducing their carbon footprint while driving their hybrid cars to Whole Foods to do all of their grocery shopping. The average person tosses the clean laundry into the dryer, pushes the button, and walks away to do something else for an hour; returning later to pull out their warm, fluffy towels and put them away in their linen cupboards. The very idea of pegging clothes out on a clothesline in the winter is ridiculous to your average American. We don’t buy those big dryers with the anti-wrinkle feature to hang our clothes out on the line.

When I first moved here I have to admit that it seemed odd that a nation known for its fickle, often rainy weather would have a clothesline in nearly every back garden, and that people would use them as a matter of course, not as a star to put on their environmental merit badge. Then we received our first British Gas bill, and I understood. Energy costs are ridiculously high over here. Coming from a region where electricity was abundant and still comparatively affordable, this has been one of my biggest mental adjustments. It’s why we peg our clothes outdoors any chance we have, and why we wear an extra layer of clothes rather than turn on the heating in the middle of the day.

And so I watch the sky for any opportunity to hang my laundry outdoors. Sometimes a cloud sneaks up on me and a downpour drenches everything. Once a strong gust of wind knocked the whole works down and all my clean clothes were muddied and had to be re-washed. But in spite of all of the inconveniences there is nothing quite like the scent of clothes that have been dried in the fresh air. Not only do they smell nice, but there is the added benefit of having to go outside to hang them out and bring them back in. Some days I’m so busy scurrying around trying to complete everything on my to-do list that I forget to stop and look around me and appreciate where I am. When I go outside, blinking in the sunlight like a mole emerging from its hole, I can pause and look up in the sky, listen to the gulls calling from the fields nearby, and off in the distance hear the bleating of sheep. Sometimes just those few minutes it takes to hang out the laundry are all I need to slow myself down, take a deep breath, and realize the world will not end if I don’t get everything on my list done today.

And then I can go back into my small kitchen and finish our tour. If you are thinking I have missed an appliance, well, I haven’t. There is no dishwasher. Or rather, there is. I am the dish washer. It’s like being a kid again and visiting Grandma’s house. She didn’t have a dishwasher for the longest time, and we grandchildren used to be assigned the chore of washing up. Whoever was stuck on drying duty tended to take a vindictive pleasure in finding spots on plates and insisting they be washed over. You might think I have outgrown this, but when my husband is helping out it does sometimes make me feel slightly mischievous to do the same thing to him.

Now where was I? Oh yes, finishing the kitchen tour. Our oven is small. For Thanksgiving I cooked a whole chicken because a turkey wouldn’t have fit. When we were first stocking our kitchen we kept saying, “It’s just the two of us; we don’t need the big size.” And so we bought the small ice cream maker, the small salad spinner, the small food processor, the small slow cooker. I’m glad we did, because 99% of the time it is just the two of us, and with cupboard and storage space at such a premium we barely have room for the small stuff, let alone anything bigger. I do have a big stock pan and a large cast iron Dutch oven that I shipped over, but just about everything is built for two. However, this can sometimes be a problem.

Not long ago lamb was on sale, so we bought a nice leg of lamb that was a good size for two. On the day I was going to cook it my husband suggested I do so in the slow cooker. Some friends had served us lamb cooked in the slow cooker not long before and we’d both thought it was delicious, so I gamely decided to give it a try. I pulled up a couple of recipes online, and then had at it. First I seared the meat in oil – not easy since none of our skillets were large enough, so I had to do it in small sections and the entire kitchen ended up splattered with oil in the process. Next I lined the bottom of the slow cooker with carrots and onions, and then poured in some wine. Then I gently placed the leg of lamb on top of all of this – and discovered that it was too long for our cute little “perfect for two” crock pot. I’d already seared it, so I couldn’t put it back in the refrigerator till later. I couldn’t bake it then because dinner wasn’t for another six hours. I had to forge ahead with the crock pot idea; even though I was rapidly concluding that it had been a Very Bad Idea.

I hauled that leg out of there and began sawing away on the offending two inches of bone. The carnage that ensued is best left to the imagination. Suffice to say that I hacked and sawed, and perhaps said a thing or two that I shouldn’t have, until I was bleeding and close to tears. The dog was in a state of nervous anticipation, expecting the whole thing to go shooting off the cutting board and land on the floor at any moment. Nevertheless, I was not going to let that leg bone get the best of me, and in the end I triumphantly had reduced the lamb in size until I could cram it into the crock pot and jam the lid down on top to keep it from springing back out.

It was, my husband declared, the best lamb he’s ever had. Bar none. I wish I could report that I smiled serenely and said, “It was nothing,” but I’m afraid I launched into a long, exhaustive account of how much trouble it had been. I’m afraid smiling serenely doesn’t have quite enough dramatic impact for me.

Now when we shop for leg of lamb I look for the smallest one they have, which I cook in my small slow cooker, in my small kitchen, in my small house, in my small village, in my small corner of the world.

“This is my invariable advice to people: Learn how to cook – try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun!” – Julia Child

One of the people I admire greatly is Julia Child, probably because she married relatively late in life, moved to France and discovered her life’s great passion in her 40’s. When I reached my 40’s it was an inspiration to me to think that there could still be discovery and adventure ahead of me – that I wasn’t too old to dream or to follow those dreams and make them reality. I liked thinking that my best years were not yet behind me.

And now following my dreams with the man I love has brought me here. Yes, our house is small by American standards – even by British standards. But this is, and always will be, our first house together. This is where we have begun our life as a couple, where we have shared much laughter and some tears. This tiny house is our home, a cosy sanctuary, and to my eyes it is beautiful.

“Find something you’re passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it.” – Julia Child