The Gallery Without Walls: a TV Personality Bought My Grandparents’ House

The view of Lake Dregwater from its south bank was named the second best view in all of Britain after Salisbury Cathedral. But my grandparents had a better view of the lake from their garden. And it beat Salisbury Cathedral too. Mountains led away to my right. The ridge of the Devil’s Whetstone tapered slightly as it led into its neighbour, the blunt crag of God’s Gallows. Firs bordered the lake below. Rustic cottage roofs ornamented the middleground: the bars, inns, and farmhouses of the village. Sheep-riddled farmland sloped up to the foreground of the garden, where two large elms framed the entire scene.

It was a desirable spot, the Old Rectory, white house on the hill, jewel of Weeping, visible from all around the lakeside. Tourists came in the spring to see the lily of the valley in the Untold Hollow. They stayed at the nearby youth hostel, and all day they walked up and down the road to the side of the house. I read my book in the garden, the envy of all.

Inside the house had some great vistas too. I called it Weeping Gallery because dozens of my granddad’s paintings hung all over the walls. He had begun painting after his retirement at 50. His earlier watercolours were semi-realistic, almost architectural, informed by his career as a draughtsman. His later paintings, still watercolours, became more and more impressionistic, as better suited the form. He developed Parkinson’s disease in 2013, but his already scrappy style didn’t suffer. He painted landscapes mostly: Morecambe Bay, the Half Dome in Yosemite, and a lot of Weeping, naturally. Weeping was the gallery without walls.

On top of the Bleeding Crag, you could see Lake Ichor, Dregwater and, on a clear day, Eepersip’s Kettle: pocks in the earth’s surface. The scene shrank you to miniature. Storybook paths winded through gnarled Tim Burton trees and patches of heather and mother-die. Ghibli-esque grass swayed in the wind. Rain ran from peak to lake in dozens of rivers and rivlets, trickling over rocks, under Pooh-stick bridges. God rays shone among the forests. Tom Bombadill sang and skipped over the meadows. Jemimah Puddleduck waddled down the country lanes. And in some spots in the woods, where lime green moss covered the trees, from behind the bushy ferns and jagged rocks, the Jurassic park dinosaurs buzzed and clicked and ululated all around you (and I, apparently, could only enjoy nature as it related to various media). The landscapes weren’t as dramatic as those of Scotland, but they were the best in England; Cumbria was Diet Scotland.

My granddad was a large part of Weeping village. Literally, he was 1/120th of its population. He put up bird-boxes throughout the forests. He and his brother Richard once fixed the chapel roof dressed as Laurel and Hardy, to entertain/confuse the passers-by. If you’ve ever been to Weeping, walked along the roads, my granddad was the man shouting from his car window, “I’ve got a BMW and you haven’t.”

One spring, when I was young, my grandparents fish-pond filled with hundreds, possibly thousands, of tadpoles. The pond was so full — around 90% tadpole, 10% water — the tadpoles had no space to swim. They writhed around on top of one another like a single, undulating, Love-craftian mass. Their tails slapped on the surface, making a collective clicking sound. My granddad scooped them out into buckets, a seemingly endless amount. He kept coming back and filling more. He drove the buckets, slowly, 40 yards to the river at the bottom of the hill, and dumped them in.

A few years ago, my grandma lost mobility: nerve damage in her feet, water on the spine, or something. And living where they did, in bumble-fuck nowhere, employing a carer was too costly and/or impractical. So, they searched for a nursing home. My grandma was bounced around from home to home and hospital to hospital as they tried to diagnose her, her deteriorating mobility and also her growing confusion. The change was quick. She had always been a little funny, always thinking out loud before she could filter out the more confused thoughts, saying any old thing to fill the silence. But it got markedly worse. She kept asking me how school was going. I was 32 years old.

She went to hospitals in Maryport, Salford, Wigan. I visited her in Wigan and picked up the book at her bedside. From the blurb, it sounded like a generic crime novel. And she said as much. On the inside cover, under the publishing information, in shaky, almost illegible handwriting, my grandma had written herself a reminder: I am in Wigan Hospital.

She was finally moved into her permanent nursing home, in Wigan, and my granddad moved into a flat on the same premises. He put the Old Rectory on the market, valued at £800,000. He had bought it around 1990, when it was a shell of a house, for £30,000. But its location made it priceless. We all said he should sell it for more. A couple of years prior, a man had come knocking. He represented Prince Hamzah bin Hussein of Jordan, who offered £1m for the house. My granddad had declined.

The nursing home cost a thousand pound a week. If you wanted to get old, you needed to get rich first, or you’d end up in a state home where they beat you and left you sat in your own piss and shit for hours.

“We’ve still got the memories, my granddad said. “They can’t tax those.”
“They would if they could,” I said.
“They would,” he agreed.
Once, when he got tired, my older sister took a phone charger and pretended to plug it into his head.
“Charging Granddad,” she said.
To which he quickly replied:
“Everyone’s charging Granddad.”

Out his window were no lakes, and beside the lack of lakes were a lack of mountains. Instead, there was a bookmakers, and a little beyond that, on the other side of a busy roundabout: a McDonald’s.

“Getting old is crap,” he said. “It’s no way to live. I should have married Ann. She’s a year younger than Barbara, but she can still walk. Do you take this walking woman?”

We joked about holidays to Switzerland and throwing the elderly off suicide precipices, Ättestupu, like in Midsommar.

The pandemic hit, and once people remembered the elderly, a few months in, care homes closed. We could only visit my grandma by sitting on the lawn outside and shouting up to her on the first floor balcony. But the downstairs resident complained, so we couldn’t even do that.

As soon as my grandparents moved out of the Old Rectory, the house fell to ruin. The upper ceiling crumbled, and the bath fell through the floor. You often hear about old married couples dying within one week of each other. The first one goes, and their surviving spouse dies of heartbreak soon after. Maybe it was the same with houses. It was no longer a home, just bricks and mortar. So, it gave out a death-rattle and collapsed.

Nevertheless, it was bought a year later, by a well-known TV personality. Or rather, it was bought for him, by his wife, as a birthday present. And she tried to haggled down the price. I won’t reveal the celebrity’s identity, only that he was a professional driver. Or, perhaps more accurately: a professional crasher. My granddad had long ago sold his BMW, and he was even featured in a BMW enthusiast magazine.

I’ve been back to Weeping since. I stayed at the youth hostel. And as I walked up the road to the side of the house, I peered in, and noted all the changes the new owners had made: an extension to the foyer, an electric car charger on the wall. They had gutted the kitchen just to replace it with a near identical one. It was still the white house on the hill. They hadn’t painted it hot-rod red, plastered it with Red Bull stickers. They didn’t drag race around the country roads, killing sheep.

But they did enter, gung-ho, into local politics. A debate was under-way in Weeping: car parks or no car parks. Tourists visited in large numbers and, with nowhere else to park, cars lined the narrow roads, creating a hazard. Some people wanted to pave paradise and put up a parking lot. They said it was for safety, but actually, those people couldn’t point to a single accident, and they were probably getting their palm greased by somebody or other. Mr X, celebrity car-crasher, aligned with those people. And that made him few friends in Weeping.

My granddad died on the very night The Event happened. Maybe the two were linked. On the news that evening: floods in Weeping. They hadn’t reached the white house high on the hill, but they had come closer than ever, half-way up the first storey of the Bridge Inn. And the flooding coincided with another phenomena, the marching of the frogs, two plagues for the price of one. Out of the flood-waters they hopped, up the hill to the Old Rectory. The news had a biologist explain it.

“A homecoming,” she said. “Some species of frogs return to the place of their birth, so they can mate and die. This particular species live for around fifteen years.” That would have been about right.

“The frogs set upon this house,” the newscaster continued, and there on screen was the Old Rectory. “Witnesses describe an almost biblical scene, hundreds of frogs leaping up hill, entering the garden via the gate behind me. They overran the pond and garden, where they remain still. The house-owner was unavailable for comment. My understanding, from talking to the locals: the house is more of a holiday home. The owner may get a nasty surprise when they return.

“The frogs, but more so the floods, put a halt on construction of a car park nearby. As our viewers may be aware, a controversial car park is being built in Weeping, a little way down the road. Or, I should say, building was due to commence today. But supply trucks had difficulty passing this way, their route blocked by the frogs and the rising waters, which was an obstruction welcomed by protesters.”

If any of the the construction workers were religious men, met with those floods and frogs, they may have viewed it as a dark omen. They may have thrown down their hard hats and crossed the picket line.

On seeing this broadcast, my granddad had smiled and passed away, painlessly.

That’s not how it really happened. I don’t know if the celebrity took any side in the car-park debate. The frogs didn’t march back up the hill. My granddad suffered a stroke and spent the last week of his life in Salford Hospital, unable to move or speak.

Two years on, lock-down restrictions have eased everywhere but nursing homes. So, we haven’t yet been able to take my grandma back to Weeping, to scatter my granddad’s ashes. But the last time I went, I saw the chapel roof in disrepair, and the last of my granddad’s bird-boxes had fallen down in the storms.