Toad Hall Recall

 I've become weirdly obsessed with Alan Garner's purchase of his house, Toad Hall. Garner is the celebrated author of The Owl Service, among many, many others. He's a very good writer and is still working at 91. He lives in Alderley Edge which is now the playground of footballers and soap actors - a Northern celebrity enclave, where the likes of me couldn't afford a flat white never mind a flat. Posh Spice used to live there. It's that sort of place, a glitzy Hollyoaks. But that wasn't always the case. In the past it was a simple rural village full of simple rural villagers: craftsmen, farmers, people being ducked in ponds, the terrified victims of a skimmington, full of tradition, ritual, legend. The full folk horror scenario, like everywhere was before rich people turned up and ruined it. Garner's family had lived in the area since the fourteenth century. 

Garner, born in 1934, was the first of his family to go to university, briefly at Oxford. He returned home convinced he had to write. He took up teaching but abandoned it, because it interfered with his writing. He became a manual labourer, but was largely unemployed. 

Then, in 1957, aged 22, he bought a house. 

Wait. What? 

He bought a house? This over-educated, itinerant odd-job man? This Shelley figure? How? 

First time buyer, something of a doer-upper

I didn't know. He always talked about it in the vaguest terms. Garner is a flagrant auto-mythologist (as well as being a more general mythologist). He walks in destiny. In the documentary I saw about him - he went to school with future Jesus Robert Powell - he wanders about like a rural Ian Hendry in a cheesecloth shirt with a big leather belt over it, telling us he first started writing stories by projecting them with the power of his mind onto the ceiling of his bedroom, while he was a feverish child. He tells us he writes a novel by reverse engineering it from the last word. I'm sure he does that. It doesn't sound like a total hassle at all. And he tells us he bought the house because "he had to live there". 

The house cost £670 in 1957, which sounds laughably cheap in 2026, when that wouldn't get you an annual gym membership (fuck off, David Lloyd, no I don't want to come back), but is about £21, 000 today, according to a calculation I've made. I am an unreliable mathematician, my conclusions often wobbly and off-kilter. Wrong, is the word, really. Which is a shame because I'm about to do a few more calculations. Apologies, but I must lay this ghost. 

When I was 22, I was living in my parent's attic after a disappointing educational career, and doing occasional illustrations for Dazed and Confused magazine. I wasn't riding about the countryside on a bicycle like Alan, looking for a Tudor building I could move into. It wouldn't have occurred to me. I was trying to kickstart a stalling career. Garner was looking for a place in which he could write. He hadn't written anything yet. He was looking to live in a conducive environment. It was all arse about tit. 

I finally found out his explanation in a copy of World of Interiors Magazine. In the interview, Garner says he was 22 "and looking for somewhere to live. I had certain criteria. One was that it had to be an old house and, ideally, a timber-framed house, because that was very much part of my childhood - old beams and rough surfaces - nothing polite."

He finds a dilapidated Medieval Great Hall. Criteria met, Alan. 

He continues: "I told my parents "I've found the only place that I can live" and my father disappeared to the pub."

I sympathise. 

"When he came back, he had the money."

What? Has he KILLED a man? 

"He'd been paying a penny a week to a friendly society called the Independent Order of Odd Fellows and they would give me a mortgage."

So there it is. His dad sorted him a mortgage from a "Friendly Society" on the strength of his penny a week subscription. The past is truly a strange place. 

It's unnecessary because, its a mortgage - Garner took 15 years to pay it off and he says this as though that's is an inordinately long time to pay off a mortgage - but I thought it might be fun to work out how long it would take Daddy Garner to pay off the loan on a penny a week. I'll show my working so you can see exactly where I went wrong, but I think I've got it right. There were 240 pennies in a pre-decimal pound, meaning it would be over four years before the first pound was paid off. The full term of the loan where everything is paid off is just under 75 years. That's without any interest of course. 

Anyway, mystery solved. His dad sorted it. Three years later Garner published The Weirdstone of Brisingamen with Collins, and it was a hit, and he could afford to put running water in. 

I was in my mid-fifties by the time my first book came out. You win this time, Alan. Maybe that's what you have to be like to be a writer, a successful writer. Bullish, focused, ridiculous. Succeeding. Shaving in a rain barrel. Typing in mittens about wizards.