THE BLACK SWAN

I hope readers will forgive for writing about my house and my home.  Some twenty years ago I brought my family down from Pennine Yorkshire, where they felt very much at home, and we settled in South Mimms. It says a lot for people here that we were made to feel welcome very soon, and were treated with interest, not suspicion: in Yorkshire we had been incomers or even off-cummed-uns.  Our neighbour in the North had moved down the hill from the next village eighty years previously and he still felt an incomer, not really accepted.  What hope had we?!  But South Mimms was more generous, and we stayed – until the children grew up and left home, and my wife died.  So here I still am, at home.

We were looking for a family house, which might also house my Mother.  We had always liked interesting houses, and the Old Post Office caught our eye.  It hadn’t been a Post Office for twelve years at that time, and its successor in Blanche Lane, opposite the Village Hall, had also ceased trading. We were told it had once been an inn, and our surveyor named it as The Black Swan. Our surveyor was a bit wrong (what does one pay for, after all?).  It had actually been called The Prince’s Arms.  My wife rather liked the idea of sleeping in the Prince’s Arms, but by the time we found out it was too late. We had settled for the surveyor’s name, which is also very appropriate. The Roman poet Juvenal said that a perfect woman was a rare bird, like a black swan.  We chose to overlook the insult to the female sex implied in this, and preferred to think that “The Black Swan” was a perfect sort of name, for a special place.

Quite how special, we were to find over the years. It took us a while to adapt the place to our own tastes and needs. This was made more challenging because it is a Grade Two listed building, in a conservation area in the Green Belt. Any sort of change needed planning permission. The house itself is over six hundred years old, or at least the central part is. We were visited early on by an acquaintance who used to advise the GLC on timber-framed buildings, and he read the building history by crawling around in the roof.  He told us that the outside two bays had been built in 1600, judging by the shape of the bedroom ceilings, and that the frontage onto Blanche Lane had once been half timbered, and jettied out over the street. In about 1790 this was replaced with brick and the roof was altered to continue over all four bays and connect with the cottage next door.

Since we moved in a number of people have told us their memories of it as the village shop and Post Office.  Folk memory is an interesting phenomenon. If we put all these recollections together, the shop must have changed its layout a lot of times!  And perhaps it did.  It housed a butchers, and in the main front room there are still hooks hanging from the blackened beams – only the butchers is said to have been in the other front room…  It was “licensed to sell Tobacco and SNUFF” as it says in a lintel we found in the outhouse, and reinstated over the back door. At one time the Telephone Exchange lived in what is now my dining room, and like all village exchanges, it provided a local information service. “I could put you through to Mrs Jones, but I’ve just seen her getting on the bus, so I suggest you ring back later”.
 

The beams in the lower rooms and the two end bedrooms are exposed, which looks very “olde worlde”. You can see what this looked like because Kathleen Hale, who lived at Rabley in the middle of the last century, depicted the shop in “Orlando’s Camping Holiday”, one of her books about Orlando the Marmalade Cat.  In her autobiography she describes lazy afternoons drinking at the Guinea in Ridge (whose home brew was very strong) and cycling down to the Post Office for cigarettes.  The same book shows an idealised South Mimms, with a more or less recognisable St Giles Church. People have asked why I don’t re-open the shop.  But alas, rural Post Offices and shops are just not viable today.

A year after we had moved in, the cottage and Mission Hall behind it came on the market, and we bought them, to reunite the Postmaster’s cottage with the larger building.  The Mission Hall was semi-ruinous, and we got permission to turn it into two dwellings.  To pay for this we let the properties out as holiday lets.  My friends were very sceptical. “Who on earth wants a holiday in Potters Bar?”  You’d be surprised! People come here because it is near London, and other tourist centres in the South-East.  We had reinvented the former inn as a welcoming place for travellers.  The weird thing was that, if there were vacancies, we only had to say so, and the phone would ring.  It was if the Black Swan had a “house spirit”, which needed guests to welcome, and was calling them when it needed company.  Of course, this is ridiculous – only it’s true!
I now share my home with people who sometimes revisit and become friends, and get to know other folk in the village.  What a home to have!
 
William Marsterson, November 2007