“You feel it too?” I ask. “That illusive sense of the past owners?”
“Not that, but yeah, a sense this must have been really something.”
When I look around, what I see isn’t only the wilderness, but the ghost of what used to be. We continue walking along the narrow crazy paving that skirts the garden towards the south wing of Kendric House. Right at the end there’s another entrance. Osian produces a key and unlocks it.
The heavy wooden door opens with a long creak worthy of a horror movie. Osian grimaces. “I’ve oiled these hinges but they’re beyond repair; they’ll need to be changed. Come on.”
We climb up some back stairs. Very dirty although not with old encrusted dirt but debris left by recent building works.
Osian leads me up past the first two floors to the third. “This wing is higher than the rest. Most of Kendric House only goes up to the first or second floors.”
“I think Evan mentioned the wings were designed by different people.” I pant the last words. Climbing all those stairs at Osian’s pace leaves me out of breath. Whether he still plays tennis or not, he’s very fit.
“This would have been the servants’ quarters.” He finally stops at the third-floor landing.
The corridor here is much narrower, the ceilings lower. And unlike our wing, the doors into the bedrooms are much closer together. Smaller rooms, I guess.
Unlike the other floors, this is clean and smells of fresh paint.
Osian opens the first door to show me a bedroom with a small double bed, a desk, an armchair and coffee table and a wardrobe. This is the only room that’s fully furnished; the others – some a little smaller or a little bigger – are still bare. All in all, there are eleven rooms, all with their own tiny ensuite shower rooms.
“We still need to complete the wiring. I also want a small service kitchen at the end of the corridor, so someone staying here doesn’t need to go all the way down to the main kitchen every time they want a cup of tea.”
“Is this going to be a hotel?”
“No…” Again the small hesitation I heard back on our balcony. “It’s accommodation for my – erm – residents.”
I stare at him and wait for an explanation.
“I’m going to be running what you might call courses.”
Of all the things I thought he might say, this is the last. “You’re running gardening courses?”
He shakes his head. “You’ll have heard of things like yoga retreats and residential meditation courses. You know, the kind of thing where people spend a month, sometimes longer, in some ashram in India or Thailand.”
I nod.
“I am doing the same. But with planting instead of chanting.” His previous hesitation fades; instead, I hear a note of real pride in his voice as he glances around the bedrooms.
“Go on,” I say.
“Have you heard the expressionDod yn ôl at fy nghoed?” His accent takes on that Welsh lilt and the un-English stress on the ending of words.
“Dodnoy…” I try to mimic and fail.
“Dod yn ôl at fy nghoed,” he repeats, as if he has another voice, deeper and more melodic. “Translated literally, it says return to my trees. It means to find mental balance and unwind, to find peace.”
We stand in the middle of the cold corridor, and his eyes shine with warmth. “You see, there’s been considerable research into the effects of gardening or farming on psychological wellbeing. Take, for example, someone who feels they’ve hit a brick wall.” He starts ripping newspapers from the windows, letting in early morning sunlight.
“For people who feel as if they have nowhere to go, planting something and waiting for it to grow can give them a sense of purpose. When you watch a plant sending up leaves and flowers,or fruit, even a potato, a spring onion… it feels like success. It can bring back hope.”
I agree. Oh God, how I agree.
My own life proves it.
How often have I thought that when the rest of my world is a disaster zone, only gardening brought me peace and satisfaction? I don’t tell him all this; my autopilot comes to my aid.
“How many of these workshops do you plan to run?”
