Open the door and there’s a big green velvet curtain to keep the living room warm, in granny’s bedroom a pretty dressing table set decorated with pink – maybe purple? – flowers. A potty tucked discreetly under the bed.
No bathroom. The toilet is outside in a whitewashed washhouse. At bedtime the grandchildren are marched dutifully across with a big red torch until a rabbit appears in the field on the other side of the hedge. And they’re off…
“Freedom! That’s what it was. Freedom to do what we wanted.”
Memories fill the room. Memories and laughter with three grown women, Mary, Anne and Marian, sitting round a table in a room that didn’t exist on their weekend visits to their grandparents at Pond Cottage more than 60 years ago. [Press play to join them.]
[Music: Morgan Szymanski and Tommy Perman – Canción de la Luna (Homage to Debussy)
Get a bulldozer?
“Get a bulldozer.” Sir David Montgomery of the Kinross House Estate. who sold us the ten acre site delivered the advice kindly, not altogether joking. But we didn’t. Though we have sometimes wondered if it might have been easier to start from scratch, over the last 30 years we have built, and rebuilt, extended outwards and upwards and by 2023, when we finally moved in, Pond Cottage was perhaps three times bigger than the ruin we saw in 1993.
Hence my nerves as I waited to meet the three grown up grandchildren. I didn’t know what they would make of the changes to their childhood home from home. They couldn’t have been kinder.
“It’s lovely…”
In fact Anne and Mary have been here before at different stages of our home-making. It’s Marian’s first time since she played here with her older brother Jimmy – the very same ‘JCB Jimmy’ Louden who has been a vital part of our restoration projects over three decades: building the road, dredging the pond, excavating flood defences, helping Ray service the wind turbine…
I place a recorder on the table but first we look at the photos they’ve brought and sift through our collection – the snaps we gathered at the start of our adventure in an age before the smartphone. There’s a younger Jimmy smiling from our scrapbook, and a younger me with Ray at the ruined front door. There’s little girls smiling with granny and grandad at the gate in the 1960s.
We pore over old ordnance survey maps which seem to date the existing pond in the early 20th century, but there’s also the older 19th century Mill Pond now long since returned to wet woodland. The maps raise tantalising questions about the mill, the ponds, the cottage, the woodland, the first people to live and work here.
We knew the cottage was built around 1920 when Kinross House estate, for many years the biggest landowners in the area, bought the Hattonburn estate. But we didn’t know much more than that. Until now.
I start the recorder. What do they remember most? [Press Play to find out]
[Music: Morgan Szymanski and Tommy Perman, Track Moonrise (Luna de la Rosa)]
There’s no script, no plan. Just a flow of memories and a lot of laughter. Mary, Anne and Marion describe a different childhood world and yet there are echoes of the games my grandchildren play when they put down their iPads – long live mud kitchens, building dams in the burn, and chasing rabbits!
‘I wish Dad could see it’
The memories are full of social history, they stir a need to know much more about the network of ponds fed by the stream, the stories hidden beneath farmland and magnificent old trees.
Right now, listening again to the extracts I chose with my son Bobby I’m enjoying the warmth and energy of the voices. Such affection and respect for the hardworking lives lived by their grandparents and parents. After grandad James Patrick died in 1961, granny Mary moved out and the cottage fell empty.
It’s touching to discover their son, also James Patrick [Mary and Anne’s father, Marion’s uncle], knew about the cottage’s decline. He had been born and brought up here, eventually became the village blacksmith (we have found horseshoes possibly made during his apprenticeship) and in his old age had been saddened to discover the old place was derelict, vandalised and daubed with graffiti. But there was a happier twist.
“We came snooping,” says Anne with a laugh.
“Dad had picked up that the cottage was up for sale. He said something like, ‘I think this is the old house’. So it’s so nice to see what you’ve done… I wish Dad could see it, he would totally love it” [Press play to come ‘snooping’]
[Music: Morgan Szymanski and Tommy Perman, Track Moonset (Pine Spectrals)]
We have a great deal more to explore and discover and I’m hoping these generous storytellers will be back. Apart from anything else, I can’t believe I let them go without capturing a photo of three smiling women by the new front gate!
Thank you to Bobby Perman for editing, sound mixing and adding music
Thank you Tommy Perman and Morgan Szymanski for allowing extracts from their beautiful album Music for the Moon and Trees composed at Pond Cottage in 2019.
