The Lion, The Witch And The Dress Code

Life In The Magic House

After I mentioned my time renting a house at Dartington Hall in this piece ten days ago, a few people responded asking me more about Dartington, and mentioning their own experiences of it, so I thought I’d repost this quite extensive piece about my time there, as most of you won’t have read it. I also want to post it because it’s the final section of my book Ring The Hill, which I will sending to all new full annual subscribers to this page for at least the next month, wherever you are in the world (I’ll email you for your address once I get notification of your subscription). I still view Ring The Hill as my best non-fiction book and this section from it, particularly, as the best thing I’d written up to that point in my life (not to mention the best thing I’ve ever written which contains cats). It’s long, so doesn’t fit on an email and you’ll have to click through to read it, but I have made it free for everyone to read. Of course if you would rather not read it from a screen you can always just read the paper version… I have LOADS of copies here and if you can’t afford to subscribe I can still sort you out with a book, no problem, if you can afford the postage.

There’s some more info, in case you missed it, here about how you can currently order my books, plus the difficult situation I’m presently in with them (which I hope might soon be improving).

If I’m going to speak in depth about the Magic House, I should probably begin at the railway station. There are persuasive arguments for starting on the riverbank, or on the wildflower path leading down to the back gate from the top of the hill, or even in the pub, but I think the station is the place, because that was the walking route I took back to the Magic House most often, and the direction I was coming from when I first set eyes on the Magic House, which is a place where, in the nicest possible way, you cannot escape an ambience of rail travel. The station is also where you might say The Compound starts. That’s what I would announce to friends who were visiting for the first time, when we passed through the old stone gates of the estate: ‘We are now entering The Compound.’ It was a joke, a reference to the place’s otherness, its illustrious yet flawed past as a social experiment, and the idea that, once within its boundaries, you might not be able to escape, but now, with the perspective that comes from having been back on the Outside for eighteen months, it seems more like a plain statement of fact. The Dartington Hall estate in south Devon is a mixture of many things and isn’t really like any other place on earth. Once you’ve been part of it, you never entirely leave.

What is interesting to me now is that I remember walking past the Magic House on my first visit to Dartington in late 2011, noticing it from the pavement on the opposite side of the road – which a surprising amount of people don’t – and wondering what its function was. I don’t think I even realised it was a residential building, less still the kind I would ever want to live in. It looked dark and unwelcoming and Gothic, possibly a former chapel, and I was finished with dark old buildings and was now utterly under the spell of the light, functional living spaces of the mid-twentieth century, some of which – designed by the Swiss-American architect William Lescaze – I had come here specifically to see. What I didn’t know was that the Gothic front was a disguise. The Magic House was a sweet old grandma in a Dracula mask.

Sweating profusely in weather that was November’s only in name, I lugged my heavy bags on up the hill and did not give the building another thought for well over two years. Because I’m me, I had decided not to take a taxi to the estate from the hotel in Totnes where I’d stayed the previous night, and instead to walk with my suitcase and rucksack two miles from the far end of town to the hall, passing the station where I’d arrived for the first time two days earlier. Between March 2014 and the end of 2017 I would do the same walk – or at least the latter two thirds of it – close to a thousand times. By then I would be familiar with the shortcut: you nipped through the car park beside the westbound platform, down a small alleyway behind the disused Dairy Crest plant, whose huge chimney dominated the skyline of the town no less than its Norman castle or medieval hilltop grid of merchant houses and jumbled terraces. You passed graffiti and penitential-looking hoops of barbed wire, rounded a bend, then hit some trees, which brought you out at a junction of paths beside the river.

There is a shockingly dark spot in those trees, so dark that I find it hard to believe that there could be a darker spot of countryside within half a mile of a town in the whole of the UK. You’re still within a hundred yards of residential streets at this point, which makes the darkness all the more unfathomable. Soon you will be properly out of town, into the untrammelled countryside of the estate, but you will find nothing as inexplicably dark on the paths there. On the nights when I had no phone battery or torch and walked back from town and hit the dark spot, I would often lose my sense of direction entirely, realising I was walking back the way I came, as if the dark spot itself had spun me around. And I am generally a person with a good sense of direction. On one occasion, I hit the dark spot, fell over and grated an amount of skin on my arm that would have not been viewed as a frugal addition to an Italian meal, had it been parmesan and not skin. I was a little drunk, but I don’t think that was the reason I fell; it felt more as though the dark spot had been in a particularly black mood and had dashed me to the ground. The official entrance to the estate was another couple of hundred yards on from the dark spot but I began to think of the dark spot as a curtain in the land, a partition where you became briefly invisible – the unofficial entrance to The Compound.

I had only been dimly aware of it at the time, but during my initial visit Dartington was going through a period of transition. The legendary Arts College there had been shut down a year before as part of a drive to save money, and a rebranding process was underway which would involve the vans of estate workers being emblazoned with inane, airy slogans such as ‘Driven By Ideas’, and the beautiful, cosy White Hart pub in the fourteenth-century Hall being relocated to a bigger, adjoining room and laid out in a manner that my friend Jay once memorably likened to ‘a 1980s German techno bar’. By 2014, when I arrived as a tenant, the estate was in a quiet, sluggish period. There was a lot of resentment in Totnes regarding how far it had strayed from the original vision of Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, the couple who’d bought the estate in 1925 for £30,000 and had turned it into a charitable trust, a school, a working farm and an arts venue, generating hundreds of jobs in what was at the time, largely as a knock-on result of the Industrial Revolution, an extremely deprived area of the British countryside. Anyone who had lived in the TQ9 postcode for more than a few years remembered a time when you could wander along the River Dart and into the woods of the 1,200-acre estate on a summer evening and stumble on an impromptu piece of theatre or live music. They could not help but notice the drop-off in attendance at gigs in town since the college had closed and the students had gone, and many were saddened that the estate had turned its focus towards corporate weddings and other functions and away from community and creativity. But all of life is relative. Not being saddled with the comparisons that having known Dartington in its heyday entailed, I simply marvelled at how amazing it all was. My first spring and summer were one long dream where, while being regularly told how terrible it had all become, I wondered what administrative error had allowed a scruffy ill-educated northern oik like me to live in a place so picturesque, historically esteemed and spiritually untarnished. ‘TOTNES: TWINNED WITH NARNIA’ announced the defaced sign at the bottom of the lane. But the sign was facing in the wrong direction. Everybody who knew Dartington and Totnes knew the real Narnia was through the gateposts and up the hill.

In late 2013 and early 2014, I had been looking unsuccessfully for a place to rent in south Devon. Because I was doing my hunting from my home in Norfolk, at a 350-mile disadvantage, everything decent in my price bracket was snapped up before I got chance to see it. Then the happy memory of my visit to Dartington three autumns earlier popped into my head. ‘They had lots of buildings on that estate,’ I thought. ‘And people probably live in some of them.’ I wrote to the Trust, who put me on a waiting list for their rental properties. The houses were thin on the ground and Dartington employees got first refusal, but timing was in my favour; just as my contract was coming to an end on the bungalow I’d been renting as a stopgap in Norwich, a terrace on the north- west side of the estate became available. Better still, it was one of the flat-roofed modernist Lescaze buildings that I’d been fetishising on my earlier trip: the smallest one on the estate.

People think they can get the hots for a house solely from seeing its photographs, but that’s not true: it’s ultimately all about a house’s pheromones. You need to have a chat with a house in 3D and see if there’s any chemistry. When I met the Lescaze house in person, I liked it, but not nearly as much as I’d imagined. As she showed me out, the Property Manager announced that by sheer chance a detached cottage had also become available that very day, on the opposite side of the Hall, and we wandered over, through the courtyard and a little way down the hill. Because we entered the garden through the rear gate, I didn’t initially realise I was looking at that same Gothic building I’d spotted a few years previously. It oozed charisma instantly from every brick. It was, like Dartington itself, a mix of many apparently disparate elements that somehow coalesced into a mellow coherence: classic inky Devon granite, 1920s Crittall windows, a touch of arts and crafts, a cottagey extension, that ecclesiastical front. It appeared very substantial from the back but much of the bulk came from the depth of the walls. ‘It’s like a Tardis!’ is the King Cliché Phrase of house viewings, an observation made so often, and often so inaccurately, that all meaning has been beaten out of it. This was a rare instance of the opposite, a house that was much smaller than it looked from the outside: the Anti-Tardis. Its core felt deeply old, but not spooky, with the sole possible exception of the understairs cupboard, which my cats would give a wide berth or gaze into in wide-eyed terror whenever I opened it to fetch a screwdriver or the vacuum cleaner. The house was only dark in summer, which ultimately wouldn’t matter because in summer, at Dartington, you always wanted to be outside. Close to the centre of the building was a second doorstep, an arch and a huge old painted hinge: evidence of a former main door, a suggestion of a solid, squat edifice dating from long, long before the Elmhirsts arrived here, when the estate belonged to the Champernowne family. In winter, the almost-hilltop location and lack of double-glazing resulted in draughts that slithered under the hedges, through the gaps in the doors and windows and up the legs of your pyjama bottoms. On the hottest days of July, every room remained a benevolent, slatey sort of cool. In four months’ time, returning shivering from the estate’s unheated outdoor swimming pool, I would dash up through that slatey cool, and warm myself in a hot bath, still feeling the buzz of the cold and the exercise, watching the purple gradually drain from my fingertips: a new kind of bath experience, better than any previous bath experience I had known.

What I remember most about my first weeks at the Magic House is the growth, all around me, a crescendo of it, building and building until it finally broke, in early July, and the universe momentarily attained total perfection. It was evident even in the alleyway near the station with the graffiti and the hooped barbed wire, where the walk to Narnia began; in a small patch of waste ground under a wall, red valerian, ox-eye daisies and St John’s wort formed a gang to suffocate broken bottles and crisp packets. That path to my new back gate, my favourite approach to any house I had ever known, was a waking dream of speedwell, forget-me-not, fleabane, wild strawberry, crocus, snowdrop, celandine, primrose, bluebell and teasel, if never quite all at the same time. Part of this could be attributed to early 2014’s particular combination of weeks of flooding followed by weeks of fierce sunlight, but partly it was just south Devon. When the Elmhirsts began to restore the gardens of the estate in the 1920s, they discovered it was possible to grow numerous sub-tropical plants there that they wouldn’t have been able to grow in the east or north. Horticulturally, and in several other ways, it felt to me like a different country, after almost four decades spent entirely on the other side of England.

In April and May, below Nellies Wood – a wood without an apostrophe, so presumably an area where you might once have found several Nellies, rather than one Nellie who lorded it about the place – not far from the entrance to The Compound, the bank of bluebells always raged, but I have never seen it rage quite like it did during that period in 2014. The colours were like colours only normally seen on old postcards, or under the influence of drugs, or in a mid-twentieth-century Powell and Pressburger film with cinematography by Jack Cardiff, or in your vision of spring as you always assume it looks in your grandparents’ saturated memories. On the lane here someone installed a BEWARE FROGS sign. I never saw any frogs near it but as I passed I would often spin around, a little wired, vigilant for frogs in every way. I soon learned on my walks back from the station that the best way to the house was not to continue up the hill, but take a half-right shortly after this, along the footpath that runs parallel to the river and into a meadow. From April until summer’s end you found small rings of lolling teenagers here letting their river-damp hair dry in the sun, listening to the techno hippie music all Totnes natives under sixty bafflingly seem to love. Young cows with big eyelashes rubbed their sharp cheekbones ecstatically on the low-hanging branches of the oaks closest to the bank. Near the mainline station, the two trainlines of the area intersect: the more functional one running between London and Cornwall and the one used by the steam train that chugs down from Buckfastleigh. After that, the pair part ways and the steam train rejoins the line of the river. My dad was so excited when he first walked along here with me and saw the train make its gentle way through the valley that he ran alongside it for a little spell, cheering. If you were to turn the soundtrack of the Magic House’s garden into an LP, ‘Steam Train Whistle’ would be one of the essential tracks, along with, ‘Woman In Tunic Learns Flute Under Distant Mulberry Tree’, ‘Woodpecker’, ‘Bat Wingbeat’, ‘Newly Besotted Lesbian Couple Discuss Bio- dynamic Farming While Resting On A Navajo Blanket’, ‘Upmarket Dog Gets Lightly Scolded’, ‘Sudden Jackdaw’, ‘Industrious Bee’ and ‘Randy Owl’. From dusk, the tawny owls were a constant in the oaks near the river. My friend Nathan helped restore the crumbling eighteenth-century wall of the estate’s medieval deer park and was adamant that, during winter, not long before the end of his day’s work, he would hear the owls calling back to the whistle of the train, perhaps mistaking it for a giant owl, the Master of All Owls, an all-seeing Owl Deity.

After reaching the end of the meadow on my walk from the station, I passed through a gate into a wooded, often boggy area, where huge gale-blown tree trunks snoozed in the shallows, some horizontal and dead, some looming at impossible angles over the water, like tall hung- over executives who’d fallen asleep leaning on the desks in their office. A red setter once chased a fox past me close to this spot, and I worried for the fox until it found its extra couple of gears, leaving the dog in a pleasing, literal cloud of dust. Of its ilk, if it has an ilk, which I’m not convinced it has, the estate is virtually unrivalled for public access, a wish of the Elmhirsts that is still upheld to this day. Dog walkers are encouraged into the compound but asked by numerous signs to keep their dogs on leads. While I lived there many ignored the signs, unable to believe their coddled, perfect dogs could possibly do any harm to another living thing, until – as happened with depressing regularity – their dog killed one of Dartington’s sheep. It was always when the dog walkers weren’t around that you’d see the best wildlife Dartington had to offer: the foxes, the badgers, the kingfishers, the cirl buntings, the otters.

You can continue along the Dart here and, as a newcomer, be under the impression you’re walking far, far away from the Hall, not realising that the river forms a semicircle around The Compound, keeping you safe, looking after you, never putting you in danger of re-entering society. That was the way I went on my walks in the early mornings, when I was looking for wildlife or mist, often still in my pyjama bottoms. But when I was coming back from town I left the river here. After a few more yards in the boggy area, I took a gate on the left and doubled three quarters back on myself, before taking a right turn up the hill, past a compost cradle set up by the estate to encourage Dartington’s adder population. A grass corridor, where rabbits hopped about sweetly oblivious to the narrowed eyes of stoats and weasels in the undergrowth, led to the long, rising meadow in front of my house, a deceptive steep place where I would always feel the ache in my calves and shoulders, especially if I was carrying the paraphernalia of a supermarket trip or train journey, and would yearn for the respite the Magic House offered as it came into view up the hill.

The meadow changed character drastically from season to season. During my second summer at Dartington, satisfying curved paths were mown into the meadow and the remainder was left unkempt, for the benefit of pollinating insects. On my lawn, on the opposite side of the lane, I mowed paths mirroring those in the meadow, leaving much of the rest long, and not just to get out of some of the giant job of mowing the massive, temperamental, wrap-around collection of grass patches that came with the Magic House. Corvids were always circling above the dead trees in the meadow, a 300-yard-long rectangle of ground where small moments of aggro occurred strangely often. In spring, obnoxious bullocks crowded and shad- owed walkers who crossed the meadow, as if jeering at them in the way sailors might as they followed anti-socially close behind a girl walking along a pier. Dogs quarrelled. Dog owners attempted to adjudicate, often without success. Here is a five-way dog and dog owner conversation I transcribed after witnessing it take place in the meadow in November 2016:

Pooka the Dog: ‘Ruff!’

Rufus the Dog: ‘Ruff Ruff!’

Pooka the Dog’s Owner: ‘POOKA!’

Rufus the Dog’s Owner: ‘Rufus.’

Pooka the Dog: ‘Ruff Rawgh!’

Rufus the Dog: ‘Ruff Ruff!’

Pooka the Dog’s Owner: ‘POOKAAAA! NO! POOKA! Nooooo. POOKAAAAAA.’

Rufus the Dog’s Owner: ‘Rufus.’

Wilson the Dog’s Owner: ‘Don’t even think about it, Wilson.’

You couldn’t see a person approach the front gate of the Magic House from the meadow, due to the screen formed by a huge leylandii, my garden’s least interesting plant. So it was baffling to me how my cat Shipley was usually already three quarters of the way down the long path to greet me by the time I’d got through the gate. Shipley, a wiry, strutting cat whose meow wasn’t so much a meow as a swear-yap, was late into the autumn of his life by the time I moved to Dartington, but still had tip- top hearing and presumably could distinguish the sound of my footsteps from those of the postman, friends, the boiler repairman, and Ian the Dartington plumber. This is more than could be said for my even older cat The Bear, who, by the time I’d been renting the Magic House a year, lived in a soundless world and could frequently be found curled in a happy slumber, 2,000 leagues below consciousness, as I mowed the grass two feet from his tail. The total degeneration of The Bear’s hearing had robbed Shipley of his favourite pastime of creeping up on The Bear then blasting him with thuggish profanities. The pair had, in their respective old and older age, become friends of sorts, and ultimately Shipley’s swearing had always worked a little bit like the swearing of many of the people I’d grown up with in the East Midlands: calling you a colossal twat or prime bellend was his own special way of demonstrating that he liked you. As I climbed the path to the side entrance to the house, he’d hit me with a volley of salty anecdotes and affectionate slights on my character and appearance.

‘Squirrels pay me to take my collar off and twerk when you’re not here!’ Shipley would say to me, as I climbed the path, being careful not to slip on a damp mossy patch.

‘Why don’t you get your hair cut?’ he would ask, as I diverted diagonally across the lawn to the back door, past a tulip tree whose canopy contributed to the house’s darkness – and the garden’s lightness – in summer. ‘You look like one of the three crap Irish wolfhounds I ruined last night.’

‘I’ve been going around some local bungalows, shitting in bins,’ he would add, following me into the house.

‘You bought a job lot of this last month,’ he would say, as I hurriedly spooned out some expensive new cat food I’d bought, in an attempt to keep his life interesting. ‘I pretended to eat it then sold it online to some Russians.’

In the middle of any day outside the boundaries of winter, and quite a few within, you’d be able to lift petals and fronds in the Magic House’s garden and almost certainly find at least one cat snoozing beneath them. It gave the impression that cats were just another product of the rich earth, another element of all that rampant growth. In addition to Shipley and The Bear, there was Shipley’s sun-loving hippie brother Ralph, and, for a brief spell, George, a ginger and white stray I lured in from the nearby foliage for a summer before sending him off on a permanent spa weekend at my mum and dad’s house in Nottinghamshire. Finally there was Roscoe, my CEO, an industrious feline strategist who was attacked by a dog in one of the mostly strictly dog-free zones of the estate, brought back from the vet half-bald and covered in deep scars after two huge life-saving operations at Christmas 2015, then, over spring and summer, flourished against all odds into an even more dynamic version of her former self. The bald patches from her operations stayed bald for four months, then, in April, grew rapidly, as if her fur worked like the copper beech hedge in the garden, and had just been waiting for the right amount of warmth and sunlight to restore itself.

That same February, while Roscoe was recuperating, I was told by the vet who’d saved Roscoe’s life that a scrawny Shipley was experiencing chronic kidney failure and had a maximum of two months left to live. By April, he had gained several pounds and was greeting me at the front gate more saltily than ever. The Magic Spring at the Magic House had done its work, again. I was told, repeatedly, that I’d had ‘bad luck’ with cats since moving to Dartington, but my take on the situation ran to the contrary. If you had several cats, three of whom were past the age of fourteen, it was likely you were going to have problems to deal with, and I felt lucky to be dealing with those problems here, rather than elsewhere. I lived with the increasing belief that this place had extended the lives of two old cats, one extremely old cat, and one cat who’d suffered critical injuries. No, it was not Cat Paradise – as what Roscoe had been through proved – because Cat Paradise did not exist, but it wasn’t far off.

One of the first ever photos of the Dartington Estate that is still in circulation – maybe the first – features a cat. It’s lurking in the background, through the archway near the then derelict-looking courtyard, in what is thought to be 1925. Although the photo is faded, you can see the cat is staring the camera down punkishly, possessive of its rich territory, eager to be in on the action. The spot, close to what is now the entrance to the Barn Cinema, is in more or less what was known to me as the outer northern limit of Roscoe’s roaming territory, about 400 yards from the Magic House’s back gate. But who can say for sure? She might well have regularly wandered much farther. She became the latest in a long line of cats who’d flirted their way into the Dartington culture, regularly sidling up to summer drinkers on the Great Lawn, climbing on the leaning sepulchres of the ruined church and beheading shrews beside the walled flower garden. During Dartington’s annual classical music festival, in late summer, I would walk through the Gardens and frequently witness her jumping coquettishly into the outstretched hand of a flautist, life coach or kinetic healer.

Once you climbed the wildflower path behind my back gate you were effectively in the Gardens: a vast area where people drank, kissed, practiced t’ai chi, sang, played didgeridoo, sensitively dissected their diets and friendships, and my smallest cat took on an ambitious second CEO position. And why should Roscoe have distinguished between our garden and the bigger one beyond? Both had been inextricably linked for a century, probably much longer. It was even there in the Magic House’s real name: Gardens Cottage. Before the Magic House had undergone a spell as cramped student accommodation then been tenanted by a string of Dartington employees and me, a succession of the estate’s Head Gardeners had occupied it, beginning with William Percy, the first ever gardener employed by the Elmhirsts upon their arrival in 1925. So much that was going on horticulturally at the Magic House echoed what was going on just up the hill. The two clipped Irish sentinel yews, beneath which The Bear liked to take his long deep naps, were scruffy siblings of the dozen at the back of the Great Hall, overlooking the Tiltyard. Fleabane self-seeded in my wall, just as it did in those beside the paths leading up to the White Hart pub. For decades, tiny flecks of magic had been blowing over the copper beech hedge that separated me from the Gardens, downsizers looking for a more humble home. A crackhead clematis spread its long ungainly legs all over my paving stones. In its spidery shadow, euphorbia danced in ever-decreasing circles. Behind that, bees violated a gangly buddleia, under the shadow of two trachycarpus, a magnolia and a pink hawthorn. In more senses than one, I lived in the place where the renegades and misfits escaped to make a new life.

The Elmhirsts, with the help of several experienced British and American garden designers, including Edith Wharton’s niece Beatrix Farrand, made the Dartington Gardens the magical combination of wild and neat, relaxed and formal, that they are today, but a vast garden of sorts had existed behind the Hall for centuries. The clipped Irish yews, known as the twelve Apostles, had been planted in the early 1800s to provide a screen between the old nursery and an area traditionally used for bear-baiting and dog fights. When the Elmhirsts first found it, the tiltyard at the Gardens’ heart was – besides being vastly overgrown – relatively unchanged since the fourteenth century, when it had been used for jousting matches. In the 1940s, a reclining Henry Moore sculpture was installed above its huge, restored terraces, beneath which I once saw a lone woman in a black leotard dancing very tenderly with a feather on a stick, as if it were her partner, rather than a feather on a stick. This was all in particularly sharp contrast to the area directly behind my previous house, in Norwich, which was used for the disposal and compacting of county council waste and was not associated with any known history of jousting, interpretative dance or modernist sculpture.

It was for John Holland, the half-brother of Richard II, that the Hall had been built, in 1398. After he was beheaded for his attempt to assassinate Henry IV, the Crown took hold of the estate until the reign of Elizabeth I, when it came into the possession of the Anglo-Norman Champernowne family, where it remained for the next three and a half centuries. The last Lady Champernowne to live at the Hall was known for riding her horse down to Dartington village and rapping impatiently on residents’ doors with her horse whip when she required their services. When the Elmhirsts arrived in 1925, the whole estate was near derelict, having been abandoned by the Champernownes four years previously. The Great Hall, where the main events at Dartington’s music and literary festivals now take place and where I once ended up talking about vaginal glitter in front of over a hundred pensioners, was missing its hammer-beam roof. On his first visit, Leonard Elmhirst had to fight through rampant brambles, bracken and rhododendrons to get a look at many of the buildings, but excitedly pronounced to his wife Dorothy that Dartington was ‘a fairyland’. Fortu- nately, funds to restore the buildings were not a problem. Due largely to an inheritance from her father, a financier who had been the Secretary of the American Navy, Dorothy was one of the richest women in America. During her first solo trips into Totnes, she often walked out of shops without paying for what she’d bought, since she was used to being accompanied by a purse bearer who handled all her transactions.

Leonard, whom she’d met at Cornell University five years earlier, was from a more humble but still far from ordinary background, being from Yorkshire’s landed gentry. Dorothy’s belief that her wealth entailed social responsibility, combined with Leonard’s interest in rural reconstruction, gained from the work he’d done in India with the poet Rabindranath Tagore in the early 1920s, led them to utterly transform not just the Dartington Estate but the surrounding area, creating hundreds of new jobs and a vast cultural overhaul. The school they founded was a small revolution in itself, being anti corporal punishment, anti uniform, pro freedom of expression, anti segregation of the sexes, with teachers who were intended to be friends, not authority figures. Within a few years, artists, writers, poets and musicians were flocking to Dartington. Ballet director Kurt Jooss and his dance company escaped Nazi Germany to make the estate their home between 1936 and 1940. Michael Chekhov, nephew of Anton, set up Dartington’s Theatre School. The legendary ceramicist Bernard Leach founded the estate’s Pottery School. In his autobiography, Ravi Shankar cited his visit to Dartington in the summer of 1936 as the moment when he realised he wanted to devote his life to music. It was on the estate that the social innovator Michael Young – a former pupil at Dartington – would draft the original proposal for the Welfare State and NHS.

The local feeling during my first couple of years living in the Magic House was that the Dartington Hall Trust, tasked with continuing the Elmhirsts’ legacy as the money finally dried up, wasn’t making nearly enough of all this esteemed history, having become lost in a swamp of branding and corporate functions. Many of the Hall’s public information signs looked tired and sad. Cranks, the legendary 1960s vegetarian restaurant on the village side of the estate, had been purchased by Nando’s. A couple of nearby villages made quite a big deal of the thousand-year-old yews in their churchyard, but the one at Dartington, which was at least 500 years older, sat in the shadows behind the Hall, unadvertised. A timeline of significant Dartington events had been stencilled on the 1980s German techno bar at thigh level but, rather omin- ously, left no room for the illustrious future. A lot of the community – particularly the older residents of Totnes, Staverton, Littlehempston and Dartington village – felt deeply protective and passionate about Dartington. The place and its history could make people shake with emotion. Not long after I’d moved there, my mum saw an old friend, who asked after me. When the news that I was living in Dartington was delivered, the old friend sur- prised my mum by spontaneously bursting into tears of happiness. It turned out she had been to school on the estate in the 1960s.

When, in the Barn Cinema, across the courtyard from the Great Hall, I watched found footage of the Dartington Foundation Day celebrations from 1969 – a lone Leonard presiding over them, in brown bowtie and yellow shoes, beneath the courtyard’s gigantic swamp cypress, a few months after Dorothy’s death – the swell of nostalgia was more powerful than any collective emotion I’ve ever known in front of any recorded entertainment. Gleeful shouts emerged from the dark, as older audience members recognised themselves or their friends. Such strong local affection had not come quickly to the Elmhirsts, though. In the twenties they won little favour by refusing to let the south Devon hunts ride on their land. By agreeing to pay agricultural workers the minimum wage, which most farmers in the South Hams region steadfastly refused to do at the time, they sparked a minor Devonshire rerun of the Peasant Revolt that had famously taken place across England around the time of the Hall’s construction. Reverend Martin, the village rector, felt personally attacked when the Elmhirsts did not attend his services. He wrote to Leonard, complaining of nudity he had witnessed on the estate, including ‘a young woman, thought to be in her twenties, very well-developed, wearing nothing but the scantiest pair of drawers’. By the late sixties, the Trust’s public relations officer had amassed a bulging file of anti-Dartington comments in the local and national press, including ‘a sort of nudist colony, free love and all that’, ‘it’s run by the BBC’ and ‘Communists trained in Moscow’.

Here, on top of a hill in Devon, 230 miles from the capital, twenty miles from any major population centre, the counterculture had been happening, decades before the counterculture was even a thing. Those loose handmade outfits I was always seeing worn up the hill, behind my back garden, those hushed conversations I heard about foraged diets, self-exploration and spiritual well-being? They didn’t begin here in the twenty-first century, or even during the era of the Flower People; their association with Dartington stretched right back to the interwar period and Dartington’s links to the Fabian Society. When my dad visited on one of the first hot days I experienced at the Magic House, and insisted on sunbathing topless, I worried a little, protective about my tenancy, and keen to be on my best behaviour in every way. I didn’t need to. Dartington’s association with nudity was long and illustrious. After a new CEO took over in late 2015 and began to slowly inject new life into the estate, one of the sure signs of Dartington moving back in the direction of its former self was that the fol- lowing summer the amount of skinny-dipping in the river markedly increased.

Even in the ‘quiet’ period of those first couple of years, there was plenty of stuff going on in the Dartington Gardens: meditation, frightfully well-spoken nocturnal teenage rapping sessions, martial arts, dance, yoga, throat singing, post-foraging summits, tightrope walking, squat- ting, blanket-based plots to reinvent society. One day I ascended the hill and took up a stranger on his offer of a Korean massage, which involved him freeing my upper body of toxins by karate chopping me about the neck and shoulders while performing a kind of beatboxing that sounded not dissimilar to the noises my friends and I made while playfighting when we were eight. After- wards, I felt loose and relieved, although much of the relief possibly came from no longer having to stifle a giggling fit.

During my time at the Magic House, my mum, who is such a keen gardener you assume she’ll leak pure green blood when she cuts herself, taught me a new horticultural term: ‘garden escape’. As well as the scarlet pimpernels, clematis and euphorbia that had blown over the hedge from next door, I inevitably experienced other, different kinds of garden escapes. Faded when I first moved in, the PRIVATE signs on my gates were more striking after I went over them myself with white paint, but strangers still occasionally wandered through the garden of the Magic House – sometimes because they didn’t spot them, or sometimes just because they were nosy, or belligerent. One May weekend when my friends Rachel and Seventies Pat were staying, Pat and I popped out and left Rachel in the garden playing her guitar on the step in front of the Crittall windows. Coming out of a creative reverie, she looked up to find a fey man in a kaftan standing in front of her. ‘I’m ever so sorry,’ he explained. ‘I seem to have wandered off course and lost the rest of my t’ai chi class.’ One winter, a boy of sixteen or so living on the estate repeatedly walked through my garden on his way to school, in clear view of the living room window, without any apparent inhibitions. ‘But it’s really muddy over there!’ he protested when I gently explained to him that it was, like, y’know, my house and stuff, and that it might be an idea if he fucked off and didn’t do it any more. As annoying as it was, here his trespass seemed somehow less of a violation than it might elsewhere. At Dartington, after all, the earth was a common treasury for all.

The under-25s who had grown up in the Totnes and Dartington bubble often had a particular anointed aura about them that I’d not quite seen anywhere else. Their life surely had many of the usual agonies of adolescence, but from the outside, from April to October, it came across as one long, hugging and drug party, alternating between the river, the woods and the beach. They were as extremely sheltered as any extremely educated and unusually worldly young people can be. If they came across as arrogant, which they frequently did, it was usually in the politest, gentlest way, although things got marginally edgier down by the skate park on the other side of the station. ‘You look like John Lennon!’ a youth once shouted at me there, strutting a bit and showing off to his mates as I walked past – an observation that warmed my heart not just with its high level of inaccuracy but with its civilised nature, especially when I compared it to remarks I’d received in the corresponding area of the previous market town where I’d lived, such as the memorable ‘All right Poncey Scarf, I bet you take it up the arse’ and ‘SHOES!’

All of this could, of course, be seen as the cultural contrails of the Elmhirsts: a direct result of the people they’d initially attracted here, those who’d settled here permanently, the people who’d been influenced by those people, and the offspring of both. The alternative Sands School in nearby Ashburton was founded in 1987 by ex-pupils and -teachers from Dartington. According to the parent of a pupil there whom I met, the school had only one rule, which was that nobody was allowed to throw a fridge out of a tree. This was apparently in contrast to the period prior to the day when a pupil had thrown a fridge out of a tree, at which point there had been no rules at all. In one piece of fairly well-known Dartington folklore, a Sands pupil had reportedly phoned Childline to complain when her parents had forbidden her from going to a rave in Haldon Forest, near Exeter.

These were the same children who listened to drum’n’bass behind my garden hedge on summer nights, which I did my best to drown out with records by Funkadelic, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Bonnie Koloc, Buffalo Springfield and Tim Buckley. One quiet, flawless night in 2016 I was standing on the opposite side of the Gardens, the best part of a quarter of a mile away from my record player, on which it was still possible to very clearly hear Buckley’s Happy Sad album playing, and watching a badger scuttle into the undergrowth just as a hot-air balloon eased overhead through an unblemished sea-blue sky, when my phone rang in my pocket. It was a friend from town and he sounded excited. He asked me to walk farther up the hill, from where, he assured me, I’d be able to see the crop circle he’d just made in a field on the opposite side of the valley.

‘But don’t aliens make them?’ I said.

‘Noooo,’ he replied. ‘That’s far-fetched nonsense. The aliens just send down psychic waves to me so I can make them on their behalf.’

For years, I’d had a yearning to write fiction about alternative societies, hippie life, communes and the occult, but on my best day, with all the will in the world, I could not have made a fraction of this life up.

Yet I hadn’t really come here for any of this. A central factor in the distilled nature of life around Totnes and Dartington is that for the best part of a century it has been a place people relocate to not just because of what’s there but because of the lifestyle it promises, which of course then makes it even more distilled. But I hadn’t moved there for the culture; I’d moved there because I’d fallen in love with the surrounding countryside and was going out with a girl who lived less than half an hour away. I spent a lot of my time at Dartington feeling like the biggest garden escape of all, something a bit ragged around the edges that had blown in on the breeze then grown, a weed amongst wildflowers. I didn’t talk the talk and I didn’t wear the cultural uniform. ‘So are you working for Dartington?’ more established residents of Totnes would typically ask, when they found out where I lived. ‘So how come they let you live there?’ they would often say, when I told them I wasn’t. ‘I don’t know: it’s a mystery!’ I’d reply. The monthly rent of the Magic House was beyond my original budget and, because of this, I’d initially imagined I’d only be able to stay there a year at most. But somehow I managed to keep going. A year passed. Then another. Then another. I realised the House had changed me: I felt calmer at my core. I was a never-going-back vegetarian, as opposed to the slightly half-arsed one I’d been when I arrived. I’d finally taken the plunge to go independent and give up writing for the national media, rather than just telling myself I would, and had begun to enjoy my work more than I had in my entire life. I looked different to when I’d arrived and felt more me, physically: browner, wirier, greyer in the beard, but happier, on the whole, with my appearance. I began for the first time to be beamed a very vivid psychic picture of my distant future self, still here in four decades’ time, even browner and wirier and greyer and calmer, still walking back down the wildflower path shivering from the river or the cold lido, no longer just a ragged northern blow-in but as much an integral part of the furniture as the lady who rented one of the semis on the other side of the Hall and knew everything there was to know about bookbinding and unicorns. Would the estate have finally decided to replace the Magic House’s terrible, repeatedly malfunctioning boiler by then? I hoped so. My future vision was not set in stone, but it was a definite path that appeared eminently possible. ‘The Gothic House? That’s where the very old man lives, in the middle of all the plants. They say three of his four cats are now in their late forties. He has had them since the time when polar bears and phones still existed.’

Cover shot from ‘Hairy Argument’, Ralph’s and my unsuccessful collection of psychedelic folk-rock duets.

On the evenings when I walked up into the Gardens, the cats would often follow me: not The Bear, who knew his limitations and did not leave the boundaries of the Magic House’s garden, but invariably Roscoe and usually Shipley and Shipley’s brother Ralph. If you were going to get away with looking normal walking a cat anywhere, it was here. Shipley and Ralph would stick close by my side, but when we headed back Roscoe would typically stay on without us, looking for a clarinet player or shamanic healer to cop off with. If it was August or late July, music would float over from the studios and offices behind the house, where musicians were rehearsing for the Dartington International Summer School, the classical festival that had been held annually here since 1953. In the same buildings could also be found the studio of Soundart, the experimental community radio station where, once a fortnight, or once a month, or sometimes just when I felt like it and there happened to be a slot free, I broadcast a two- or three-hour radio show. The first time I made a show for Soundart, I was directly preceded by the station’s beekeeping show, presented by a beekeeper called Dick who, when I arrived, was making a heartfelt apology on air to his bees, having decided he had spoken unkindly about them earlier in the show. During the subsequent month I was scheduled after a very youthful man who was hosting a Scotch-egg-eating contest. I asked him how long he had been DJing on the station. ‘About a decade,’ he answered.

‘So how old were you when you broadcast your first show?’ I asked.

‘I’d just turned ten,’ he said.

After moving to a much bigger studio as part of the new Dartington regime in 2017, Soundart also briefly broadcast live wildlife discos where the audience danced, or more often sat, to old archive sound-effect records and other, more experimental sounds. At the one I attended, the fire alarm in the building went off, but we all took well over a minute to realise this, having thought the noise was just part of the set. My position at the radio station was voluntary but if I was lucky I received payment in fruit and veg. Locating my diary from 12 June 2015, I see that for that week’s show I was paid the impressive sum of one apple, one large broccoli floret and two courgettes, which I deemed to be more than fair.

Eventually, irresistibly drawn in by the innumerable greens and yellows and reds and oranges I saw every time I walked past, I enrolled on one of the introductory horticulture courses at School Farm, the organic allotment down the hill on the other side of the Hall. Here I learned how to delicately handle cotyledon leaves, puddle in a bed of leeks, tie the correct knots in the string holding up climbing tomatoes and not choke at the rotting nettles in our organic feeds, which everyone agreed smelled like used nappies. I ended as barely less of a bumbling novice than I had been at the beginning but it was pleasing to think that some of the tomatoes and lettuce that turned up at The Green Table, the estate’s phenomenal new cafe, later that year had been given their first nudges towards adulthood by me. I had gardened before I went to Dartington, in the most basic sense, but being there made me want to do so more creatively. I made myself part of my garden, enjoyed getting its grass and soil and seeds and weeds on me, reshaped it, used its wild mint to make tea. I stopped going to the hairdresser’s. I didn’t have a hairstyle. I had hair. On some days, it had zero caterpillars in it. That was about as good as it got. I planted foxgloves and cordylines and ivy-leaved toadflax. Enhancing the green circle around the house for the benefit of a future I might not be part of never occurred to me as a waste of time; I was just being good to the Magic House, in a way that seemed only correct, since the Magic House had always been good to me. Friends began to refer to the house as if it was a person, easy-going and selfless, a positive influence to be around. Two couples who looked after it for me while I was away separately reported that they’d not been getting on beforehand but felt easy and harmonious after their stints there. Wildlife flocked to the house’s goodness through the gaps in its edifice. Educated moths seemed to view it as an exclusive gentlemen’s club. I arrived downstairs one morning to find a song thrush casually perched on a picture frame, unperturbed by my presence. One evening a colony of several hundred flying ants moved into the boiler room and the entrance hall. I dealt with the situation by leaving the back door open to the night, putting Neil Young’s 1969 debut album on the turntable, and letting them get on with being flying ants. By the morning, they were gone. The boiler remained just as faulty.

The abstract painting my mum did of the Magic House during my final year there says a lot about the place’s character. She chose to focus on the Gothic, ecclesiastical-looking side of the building, but there’s nothing dark or ominous about what she came up with; it is orangey and earthy and verdant and welcoming, redolent of the finale of winter when lots of amazing events are happening just under the surface of the soil. There is something very optimistic and progressive about it, very 1925, very Dartington. I wanted to write about the house’s unique personality, and Dartington’s, but something was stopping me getting directly down to it. The place hadn’t quite had enough time to ferment in its spot inside me. I also had the additional concerns that come with living with a minor celebrity: something which I’d been in denial about, but had recently been forced to face up to more honestly. Around a year before my move to Devon, I had started a Twitter account for The Bear called Why My Cat Is Sad, which had taken off, gaining him around 330,000 followers, and more than twice that number on Facebook. Intended to support the books I’d written about his life, it played on his wide-eyed soulful looks, every tweet featuring a new photograph I’d taken of him accompanied by a new, preposterous reason why he was sad. For example, to accompany a photo of The Bear looking small and sweetly forlorn next to a camp bed, some toilet rolls, a pack of Uno cards and a ukulele, I used the caption ‘My cat is sad because he has been sitting here trying to hitchhike to Glastonbury for hours but nobody will pick him up.’ The Bear’s placidity and stillness, and the fact he spent a lot of the day following me around and staring deep into my eyes, made photo- graphing him in a variety of scenarios an easier task than it would have been with 99.9 per cent of other cats.

I enjoyed being creative with the tweets but saw the whole enterprise for the bit of nonsense that it was, as did the majority of the people who followed The Bear’s daily adventures online. A minority, however, took it more seriously. People sent me photographs of cats that had been run over by cars, and messages announcing that they were coming to my house to kill The Bear. A group of young journalists discussed the party they would have when The Bear died and was no longer on Twitter. Some people told me I was exploiting The Bear, by putting his photographs on the Internet, as if they viewed The Bear as a cat who had strong moral views – which, admittedly, in the patently absurd online persona I’d invented for him, he was. A man in Eastern Europe wrote to ask if he could pay me several hundred pounds for his girlfriend to spend an hour with The Bear. I said no, just as I did to other ways to make money from The Bear, besides selling a small amount of cards and calendars featuring his face, which enabled me to buy him even more cooked chicken than I already did, which was a lot. I was careful on the Internet not to mention precisely where I lived, or photograph the Magic House in a way that made it instantly recognisable, but even so, to my knowledge, by 2016 at least three sets of people had come to the Totnes area to try to ‘find’ The Bear. The Bear himself remained blissfully ignorant of all of this, sleeping much of each day away beneath the sentinel yews, having the occasional cuddle with Roscoe and slurping up the stagnant, mossy water in the old grey can near the back door, which I could only conclude was some kind of elixir for eternal life.

The Bear was a cat who peaked in old age, becoming more mellow and plump after an anxious and scraggy early life. Looking back at photos from his seventeenth and eighteenth years, I am startled anew by his amazing plushness, his neatly packaged, compact bulk. It had only been during the months directly prior to my move to Devon that he had begun to look his age, his fur getting less sleek, his spine feeling more brittle, his eyes losing their brightness. I’d worried he wouldn’t survive the six- hour drive to his new home, but Dartington soon made him young again, or, at the very least, young-old again. I have no doubt that the Magic House extended his life, although I’d feared it would do precisely the opposite. He’d been mutating into an indoor cat prior to the move but his new habit was to stay out in Devon’s frequent rain, coming through the cat-flap with sparkling eyes and a drenched coat, then delighting in the ritual of having his back towelled dry by me and warming up next to the log fire. Some suggested his new love of rain was a mark of senility; I thought he had merely got wise to the way the liquid that poured from the south Devon skies could make him flourish, like everything else in the garden. By the time the trees were fully green in 2016, as The Bear approached his twenty-first birthday, Roscoe’s fur regrew over her scars, Shipley made his unfathomable recovery from kidney disease, and the now almost fifteen-year-old Ralph lounged among daisies and buttercups looking not a day over five, I had arrived at the conclusion that I was living with four Miracle Cats, in a Miracle Place.

It is only now, looking back at my diary, that I realise how many genuinely trying events had taken place in my life in the short space of time between December 2015 and March 2016. As well as Roscoe and Shipley’s narrow survivals, I’d lost the entire 23,000-word manuscript of the book I was writing. I’d thought I was over the rela- tionship I’d left the previous year, realised I wasn’t, met a couple of blatantly wonderful women who liked me, got thoroughly irritated with myself for not being capable of liking them back in the same way. The sky was oppressive and full of coal. But spring re-dignifies you, especially at Dartington. Inspired by The Bear, I put a lot of rain on my own fur, and it appeared to work. Myopic checkout operators sometimes asked me for ID. By May, the whole of the TQ9 postcode looked young again. In town, I played a game I called ‘Old Person or Young Person’. This involved me trying to guess whether the person in front of me on the street was an old person or a young person. I frequently got the answer wrong. Teenagers around Totnes often dress not dissimilarly to their parents, who are often more than a typical generation’s span older than them, but – to further confuse matters – tend to look younger than they are. People in their fifties and sixties often have long, thick manes of hair and look slim and toned, so it was only when you saw their healthily lived-in faces that you realise they were no longer in the prime of youth. Billowy skirts, tie-dye, chunky jumpers and ponchos abounded. Even in summer, everyone looked cheerfully woven. It was a look that went beyond just clothing. In the post office, I queued behind women wearing big fishermen’s jumpers full of leaves and burrs who answered the verbose existential questions of small children tugging on their yoga pants. ‘HUGGING HOUR!!’ announced a sign in the marketplace. ‘Have you had your fourteen a day?’ Another poster advertised an upcoming course for the niche, devil- may-care sector of the population who had always yearned to learn meditation and archery simultaneously.

‘Lick my organic cheese!’ shouted a rejuvenated Shipley at the front gate, as I arrived home, weighed down with bags of food and cleaning products from the supermarket, which, if I was fully committing to the Totnesian lifestyle rather than just being an accidental garden escape, I would have boycotted. I worked hard and rewrote what I’d lost. But also, in the refined, easier picture memory creates, my friends and I did nothing but swim, watch bats, listen to folk rock and burn logs in my fire-bowl in the Magic House’s garden. October arrived. ‘Trick or twat!’ shouted Shipley, at the gate. November elbowed its way in behind it. ‘All the leaves are brown, and the sky is an overwhelming bulbous cock!’ shouted Shipley, at the gate. A few yards behind him, as fat rain fell, The Bear, now finally legally old enough to drink in America, slept soundly, in a plant pot.

In my heart of hearts, I knew that what had happened to The Bear and Shipley that summer could only be an encore, albeit a glorious one. The Bear was seriously old now, and seriously deaf. He weighed little more than a parrot and spent long intervals meowing at walls. I drew his Twitter account to a conclusion, not wanting to turn it into a picture board of his decline. In autumn, he developed a large and putrid abscess in his ear. He recovered, but not long afterwards the vet found a tumour between his jaw and eye socket. Yet The Bear did not seem unhappy. He retained a good appetite and, from time to time, still permitted Roscoe to sleep on his back. His unretractable claws and dainty posture made him appear to tap dance through the three rooms of the Magic House that were carpetless. Sometimes, he’d try to scratch an itch with his back leg but, due to his arthritis, not be able to reach, scratching thin air instead. If I was around, I’d try to find the spot and scratch it for him. I never quite got the right place. Every time he woke up he looked even more wide-eyed than the time before, as if pulled by a finer and finer thread back into reality and increasingly bewildered by his continuing hereness. I’m pretty sure I know the exact moment he died because at about 2.40 a.m. I woke with a full-body jolt that felt like a benevolently intended electric shock and the Magic House felt very different to how it had ever felt before. A few hours later, as the lazy winter sun was finally beginning to rise over the line of bare trees overlooking the Magic House, I arrived downstairs and found him on his side in the hallway, lifeless. It was 16 December 2016: a year to the day since the second of Roscoe’s life-saving operations. I wrapped The Bear in the towel I’d recently been using to dry him after cleaning his increasingly matted fur, and buried him in the garden. I wanted to dig a grave for him under the one of the yews he’d like to sleep under so much, which would have suited The Bear, what with the folkloric links between yews and immortality, but this winter had not yet been as wet as the previous three and the ground was too firm. Instead I buried him on the opposite side of my house, near my shed, close to some self-seeded verbascum. I dug the hole deep, recalling that badgers had made their setts near here in the past, then remembered that there were virtually none of them left now, because they’d been culled by sorry excuses for humans.

I had been alone during the final hours of The Bear’s life, and – although I had friends nearby whom I knew I could look to for support – opted to continue to be alone during the few hours that followed. I struggled, as I knew I would, with an emptiness in the house, where a small comical, loveable and apparently deeply thoughtful pres- ence once was. There was a part of me that felt that by burying him only mere hours after I was stroking him in his favourite spot on his chest and making him purr, I had in some way thrown The Bear away. I knew it was an irrational thought but also, in the circumstances, probably not an unusual one. Also not unusual, perhaps, was the way my mind tended to dwell on its more upsetting final images of him. In fact, maybe it was an important part of acknowledging what had happened. Mixed into the ache in my chest, there was a feeling that, above all, something here should be celebrated: a longevity so extreme and death-defying it made you laugh, a unique character, and an end that could have been far worse. Many would argue that kindness isn’t in a cat’s nature but if there was ever such a thing as a kind cat, it was The Bear. To my knowledge, he had never killed or even attacked another living being. When other cats – and, on the odd occasion, seagulls – appeared keener for food than him, he willingly moved aside. When I was poorly or sad, he seemed to know, and would move in closer. After seeing the poorly state he was in on the night before his death, I had steeled myself and decided that the next morning I would take him to the vet to be put to sleep, that it was the best course of action for him, the only course of action. But I utterly, utterly dreaded it. That he saved me that particular agony might be viewed as his final act of kindness. I was compelled to match it with one of my own. Experiencing tunnel vision, with soil from his grave still on my hands, I grabbed every bit of cat food in the house and garage, loaded it into the back of my car, drove to the pet-food shop in the village and then the supermarket, bought enough sacks and sachets and cans to fill the remainder of the boot, then drove the whole lot to the Animals In Distress shelter, five miles away, in Ipplepen.

The relationship between Shipley and The Bear had changed markedly in their last year together, Shipley no longer his tormentor, but undergoing a transformation into a tolerated, mouthy sidekick. In the weeks leading up to The Bear’s death, I often found them sleeping in the same spot, sometimes with light fur-on-fur contact. From the moment The Bear died, Shipley’s health went dramatically downhill again. He stopped swearing at me when I entered the gate, no longer followed Roscoe and Ralph and me up the hill into the Gardens, drank and drank and drank, picked at only the squelchiest parts of his food, and soon became as scrawny as he had been the previous winter when he’d been kept in on fluids at the vet’s for several days. One Saturday in February I returned home from a misty walk on the Dorset coast to find him unsettled and agitated, struggling to support his back end. Despite his obvious discomfort, he managed to greet me with a hoarse swear-yap, and I fed him, gave him two of the five pills the vet had advised he should take every day, and treated him to a cuddle in his favourite position: on his back, on my lap. He purred and air-padded in a faint way but felt a little limp. Half an hour later he vomited and started to act more unusually, walking in constant circles, unable to settle. While I was on the phone to the vet’s out-of-hours emergency line, he collapsed on his right-hand side on the carpet in front of me, his eyes glazing over. I placed him gently on a blanket in a cat carrier and rushed him to the surgery, fearing he might no longer be alive by the time he arrived there. The nurse attached a catheter to him and got him settled in a kennel and we waited for the vet to arrive, which took just over twenty minutes, although at this point I had lost almost all sense of time as a concept. The vet told me that Shipley was still alive, but his heart rate was very fast, his temperature was very low and he was unable to get up.

Two options were open to me: treat Shipley’s condition very aggressively with fluids and medication and hope it might help; or the other one. The vet asked me about Shipley’s behaviour before his collapse and, with the extra evidence of my answers, said it was likely he had suffered an embolism. I asked the vet several questions about the likelihood of Shipley having a good and comfortable life, if they were able to lift him out of his current pain. Upon hearing the answers, I made the choice to have him put to sleep. He was brought into the examining room so I could say my last goodbye to him. I kissed him on the head several times and told him how much I loved him. He looked directly at me with apparent recognition and seemed far more aware of his surroundings than he had half an hour earlier, which made what was happening both worse and better: worse because I suddenly questioned, again, whether I was doing the right thing, and better because I wanted him to be conscious enough to be aware of just how much he meant to me. I wanted what he saw at the very end to be someone who’d adored him every day since he first saw him leaping boisterously over a garden pond in Essex in autumn 2001. He died at the exact moment that dusk turned to dark. As I drove away from the surgery, I burst into proper tears – full, uncontrollable tears, that barely allowed me to see the road ahead – for the first time in years.

I had anticipated that Shipley’s death would hit me harder than The Bear’s, and I was correct. I have loved all the cats I’ve lived with in varying powerful ways, but the line separating Shipley in the period immediately before his death from Shipley not being here any more was much thicker than the line that separated The Bear in the period immediately before his death from The Bear not being here any more. The Bear was never very cat-like, a little furry island of Almost Cat who did his own thing, and in his final months that island had drifted farther out to sea. Shipley, though clearly in pain, was still shouty, demanding, boisterous, right up to the very end. He was a cat who seemed to need me much more than The Bear did. Much like Ralph, Shipley would be always seeking you out in the house, wanting to know what you were doing and whether he could join in. The space he occupied was huge and I was going to notice that space for a long time. Many cats love boxes but Shipley’s love for them was more ardent and impatient than most. Any time I brought one home and emptied it – and very frequently before I’d had chance to empty it – he’d be inside it within seconds, swearing his head off. Even if he’d been in a deep sleep somewhere in the bowels of the house when I opened the front door, his boxdar would kick in and he’d quickly locate the cardboard. Before I went back to the vet’s to collect his body, the vet nurse on duty, Catherine, had asked me over the phone if I wanted to bring his carrier to put him in. That might have seemed more dignified to some but I don’t think Shipley would have viewed it that way. I asked her if, instead, she had a cardboard box she could put him inside. We probably tell ourselves all sorts of nonsense about our pets’ thoughts in order to feel better in times of grief but I had a strong belief that, with his particular predilections, Shipley would have preferred this method of transport. After I refilled the hole with earth I noticed the slogan on this box: ‘Understanding your needs. Innovating the solutions.’ If Shipley was a person, he’d no doubt have been the kind who wouldn’t be able to resist remarking on the idiocy of a slogan like that. ‘Corporate cock sponge!’ I could almost hear him meow, in typical insurrectionary disdain. I buried him behind the pond, on the opposite side of the house to The Bear, just on the off-chance Shipley decided to become his torment- or again in the afterlife. Both would fertilise the good Dartington soil and spend eternity in this place of culture: the intellectual and the punk poet.

A week after The Bear’s death, during our Christmas meal at her place, my friend Hayley found a potato – almost certainly grown at Dartington – with a mark on its skin bearing an uncanny resemblance to a small, neat cat. It was a quick turnaround, but we decided it was The Bear anyway.

I had spent a large amount of time looking after, and worrying about, both of these cats, ferrying them to and from the vet’s, medicating them, cleaning up after them, waking up in the early hours to check on them, cancelling trips because of them, which meant that, after their deaths, life became more carefree, but also didn’t, because of the guilt that I felt about their deaths making life more carefree. Another vibrant, technicoloured spring was in motion. Daffodils then primroses then bluebells grew around Shipley’s grave. One of the cordylines I’d planted less than two years before had already grown as tall as the ceiling of the Magic House’s ground floor. Roscoe was fully recovered. Ralph was about to turn sixteen but still looked five and had hair like a young Kurt Russell. More was going on in the evenings at Dartington: gigs, courses, talks, tightrope walking, conversations. My friends and I took glasses of wine and beer back from the White Hart to the Magic House’s garden and lit outdoor fires. Singing and guitars happened sometimes. Phoebe, one of Dartington’s employees, came down from the Hall with a shruti box, an obscure instrument from the Indian subcontinent whose miniature mournful bellows soundtracked our friends Emily and Seema’s solemn burning of some phone bills, payslips and insurance documents from 2013. Skinny-dipping stats were up again on the previous fiscal period. The deer-park wall restoration was completed and deer were reinstalled beyond it. The giant owl that made steam and travelled in a line at ground level called out into the evening and sometimes the smaller mortal owls called back. The new cafe, The Green Table, was rarely less than heaving, full of delicious, locally grown food, and contained beautiful 1960s furniture salvaged from the student canteen. Dartington’s new CEO, Rhodri Samuel, not only had good ideas and obvious passion for his job, but a detailed and respectful knowledge of the Elmhirsts and Dartington’s past. One of his upcoming projects was to restore High Cross House, the biggest of the flat-roofed buildings on the estate designed by William Lescaze in the 1930s, which had been sitting empty and damp for almost half a decade. I got talking to a printmaker in the cafe and ended up learning printmaking in a studio behind the Hall on printing presses older than the Elmhirsts. I swam and walked and consumed beer and cider and crisps and local salad in the sun and rain and didn’t lose 23,000 words of a book.

It was exciting to live in this revitalised Dartington, but I was still entranced by the estate’s more neglected corners: Aller Park, the old, empty school building, right at the head of the valley, with the phantom swimmers of its abandoned outdoor pool; the arcane ruin in the woods above School Farm. When I walked around Foxhole, a vast empty early twentieth-century building which had once been student digs, faded, peeling gig posters were still on the walls and the images of the pupils I’d seen larking around on silent early 1970s Super 8 films felt close enough to touch. For each of my summers at Dartington, part of my standard playlist had been Mark Fry’s Dreaming With Alice, a little-purchased, now very rare acid folk album from 1972, which sounded, at times, like a less needy Donovan, and struck me as a very Dartington record. To my delight, I discovered it actually was a Dartington record: Fry – now better known as a painter – had recorded the album in Italy, but written much of it as a teenager living in one of those very rooms I’d peered into at Foxhole, on a guitar he’d made himself in a Dartington carpentry class. All of Dartington’s ghosts struck me as very benevolent – well-meaning spectres who still loved the earth, even in death. There was a legend about a Woman in White, who would only appear to presage the demise of a resident at the Hall. This worried me slightly, as there were no longer any residents at the Hall, and it could be argued that the nearest thing to one was either me or the tenants of the cottages on the other side of the courtyard. I don’t think I ever saw her, unless her sartorial penchant was for kaftans and her favourite habit was to play the penny whistle in broad daylight under a swamp cypress.

In late August 2017, I woke at 3 a.m. to the sound of church bells drifting through my open bedroom window. I sat bolt upright, with a little shiver. There were two churches on the estate: the ‘new’ St Mary’s, close to the main road at the bottom of the hill, built in the late nineteenth century, and the old St Mary’s, behind the Hall. I’d got to know the bells just a little at the new St Mary’s lately, pulling on one of the ropes attached to them during an introductory campanology lesson I’d been given by the church’s head bell ringer. There’s an addictive rhythm to bell ringing, an elusive sweet spot to be hunted out, and soon you begin to see the bells turn over in your mind’s eye. It dispelled a notion that I knew was untrue yet had always lingered in my mind, that a church is a bit like a wound clock, or even a sentient being, and is able to ring its bells all on its own. In campanology you also get a new appreciation of the size and power of the bells. Even so, I knew there was no way that even at their loudest, with the wind blowing in the right direction, the bells of the new St Mary’s could possibly be so audible in my bedroom, a mile away. The old St Mary’s, meanwhile, was now only a ruined thirteenth-century tower, a church which had not rung out its song for a 140 years or more. The night felt thick and deathly still. ‘The witch is coming through my window,’ sang Mark Fry, in my head. I sat up for a while, listening to unidentified creatures rustle behind the hedge, behind Shipley’s grave.

I discovered a disappointingly logical explanation a few days later: some drunk members of the Dartington Summer School had managed to get access to the tower above the Hall that night, discovered there was a bell up there, and decided it would be a shame not to check it was still working. I rang the same bell a week later, in broad daylight, having been given a tour of some of the lesser-seen parts of the Hall, including Leonard Elmhirst’s old study with its secret door, which it is said he put into use when he was feeling antisocial and Dorothy had visitors. I also got chance to go up to the top of the tower of the old St Mary’s, where before I’d only seen jackdaws and three trumpet players who’d serenaded me the previous August as I walked past leaning gravestones which stood against a wall, like chairs pushed to the edge of the room to make way for an event. From here, the highest viewpoint on the estate, you got a new appreciation of just what a vast project the Elmhirsts had undertaken here in the twenties, taking all the ruined buildings and overgrown green spaces around and transforming them into utopia. I looked for the Magic House off to the south, but the dense leaf canopy of high summer gave the impression that it had used its magic to totally vanish.

Everything became a little ragged and feral after that; summer had shed its belt and stopped tucking in. Nature’s wisdom teeth started playing up again. I’d been friendly with many of the Dartington cattle, often stopping to let a Jersey or two lick my palm as I walked through their green and gold playground, but one day in September when I was passing through the field leading down towards the Magic House from the old badger setts, a herd of assorted breeds charged me. I turned to face them and ran a little at them and they backed off, before redoubling their efforts, and I leapt the wall at the end of the field, inches out of the reach of the leader’s horns. I had an idea for a new book swimming around my head: a different kind of book, not a very Dartington book. Hares – so rare in Devon – were one of its underlying themes. I was trying to decide whether to write this book, or a different one that I also wanted to write. I was on the phone to a friend, talking about this precise dilemma, when I walked out onto my wet autumn lawn, tatty with dead wildflowers at its edges, and found a freshly dead hare at the lawn’s exact centre. Shortly after, I heard a rumour, first from a tree surgeon friend, then from Mary, the lady who lived on the other side of the Hall and who knew all there was to know about unicorns, that part of the new redesign of the Gardens was likely to involve the repurposing of my house. ‘You need to tell them how important you are, so they’ll let you stay,’ she advised me. But I wasn’t in the business of telling anyone how important I was. It had never been my style. Besides, I was the blow-in, the accident. A week later, I opened my front gate and found another hare, as dark as the sky above, dead, on the tarmac.

I am now struck anew by just what little time there was between me enjoying the best summer of all in the Magic House, and my departure in December of the same year. Months later, people were still asking me why it happened. That rumour about what the estate were planning to do with the house is not sufficient explanation. ‘I’d take that with a pinch of salt if I were you,’ a long-time Dartington affiliate had cautioned me. ‘They’re always proposing stuff like that, and it usually doesn’t happen, or takes years to.’ Eighteen months after I left, the Magic House remained tenanted as a residential property.

Imogen Holst, the legendary composer who lived and taught on the estate in the 1940s, summed Dartington up as a heaven on earth you felt you could live in for the rest of your life, before you realised that to go on learning you had to leave. I lived in utopia and would surely never live in another place so sublimely removed from the everyday yet so rich in culture and community spirit. But the word utopia comes from the Greek word ‘outopia’ which translates as ‘no place’. Did I want to live in utopia all my life? Wouldn’t that be a little like living a life without mistakes, where every decision you made was tediously and mind-numbingly correct? I had become a big fan of mistakes over the years and headstrong, impulsive behaviour had worked out pretty well for me. One of the problems of getting older, though, is that Experience happens and, no matter how much of a headstrong, impulsive person you remain, it will insidiously begin its work on that side of you: in the back of your head where resides the chorus of voices that disapprove of your headstrong impulsive behaviour – individual and real, or nebulous and societal – this choir of sensibleness will be joined by a new voice, which you might recognise with some dismay as your own. This can be frustrating. By late 2017 it felt like a long time since I’d made a major headstrong and impulsive decision that could be widely criticised by others. So I decided maybe it was time to do something about that.

Snow began to fall on the day I left: the first I had experienced in all of my nearly four years at the Magic House. That was a weird thing about this Narnia: it was almost never white. An icy wind blew the ashes from my last, monumental fire-bowl fire over the garden. It looked messy, but they would do it good, in the long run: more fertiliser in the land of magic growth. For a fortnight I had been experiencing that same tunnel vision I’d experienced on the day The Bear had died when I took the cat food mountain to the shelter. It made me hyper-efficient and stronger than my strength. The previous day, I’d carried a king-size bed frame, alone, down to the car, gaffer- taped it to my open car boot then driven it to the charity shop, who refused it on the grounds that it was missing a safety sticker, then to the recycling centre. By 4 p.m., I had burns on my hands – from the fire, but also from an absent-minded moment with my kettle earlier that morning – my sweater was covered in ash and soil, and I was trying to find Roscoe, who was missing, while also instructing my movers on which of the outside plant pots did and didn’t need to go into the van and trying to remember how many sugars they had in their tea. In twenty minutes the Property Manager was due to arrive and do her final inspection, and I needed to clean up the last of the glass from an internal window I’d smashed with the corner of the bed frame.

As I was coming down the stairs carrying a full-length mirror and an aloe vera plant and the edge of the mirror was digging into the angry blister that was forming on the worst of the burns on my wrist, I noticed that a well-bred-looking stranger was standing in my hallway. ‘Oh hello,’ said the well-bred-looking stranger, who sounded even more well-bred than she looked. ‘I noticed you were moving out and wondered if that meant the house is up for rent again, and I was wondering if it would be a convenient time to look around.’ Somehow restraining my inner Shipley, I told her that no, it would definitely not be a convenient time to look around. Outside, weather fell, seeping down through dead brambles and soil towards Shipley and The Bear. ‘The witch is coming through my window,’ Mark Fry had sung on my stereo the previous night. ‘The winter snow upon her hair.’

The moment I know I’ve moved out of a house is usually when I start to pack the multi-sockets. They’re always one of the very last things you remove: part of that collection of straggling, uninteresting essentials that appear to take up no space in the final illusion of emptiness but in fact fill a few boxes and bring your car dangerously close to capacity. After that, all that’s left are spiders, a five-pence coin, lines of dust-fur ghosting where bookshelves once stood, a couple of screws and elastic bands and the lost lid from the beloved dried-up pen you reluctantly threw away five months earlier. Leaving the Magic House was different. The moment I knew I moved was when I shut and locked the doors: not the big front door on the Gothic side of the house, but the Crittall-style French doors, likely installed in the 1920s, on the side facing the Gardens. They made a different noise to the one they usually made, louder and more reverberant, and I heard it in the chamber of my chest as well as my ears, and it was now that I realised on a greater level that you don’t live in the Magic House twice, and it was over. I felt like a man leaving a building for the last time in a film, and that somewhere in the dark empty room beyond, which looked bigger than it ever had when it had been mine, there was already a ghost forming of another version of me who had stayed here forever. No longer in possession of the keys to any house on earth, I walked to the car where the cats – the two who weren’t staying behind with my ghost – were waiting. The freezing sky was full of good and bad, and I blew up the lane.