I have left the old people's home and taken a winter let in Dartmouth in order to finish a book. In order to write one, that is. This is my fifth week here.
The let is a converted boathouse with a garden at the bottom of a long and ancient flight of steps. The outside is thickly covered with sodden ivy; inside, the walls are leprous with dampness. But the fireplace is efficient and spacious enough to keep a bonfire going. In front of the house the river Dart widens prettily into a sheltered anchorage from where crusaders used to set sail.
During my first week here I kept a fire going by burning my books two or three at a time. After carrying numerous boxes of them down the steps, then arranging them somewhat ostentatiously along vacant shelves, it had occurred to me that they were becoming a bloody nuisance, an affectation even, and I fed them to the flames without regret. Soft and hard back editions of Waugh, Wodehouse and Woolf; Hazlitt, Hardy and Hemingway; all went up the chimney as black confetti and glutinous smoke, drifting across the mouth of the river and out to sea.
Any more than three books at once tended to clog the fire, which I revived by squirting liquid furniture polish on it. I also discovered that dried seaweed burns surprisingly cheerfully and used this as a fuel to supplement the books. In this way I burned my way through all my books except Shakespeare and the works of Ian Fleming. As I have now used up all my literature, I keep the fire going with driftwood gathered from the foreshore at low tide.
Driftwood is my latest passion. Poking around for pieces at low tide seems to me a refreshingly innocent and healthy pastime. Logs which have fallen into the sea and floated halfway around the world are remarkably beautiful things. Smooth and pale, contorted into wonderfully unnatural shapes, they seem to come from another world. Instead of burning the more striking pieces, I lean them against the living room wall where I can run my hands along them and watch their appearance change as they dry out.
For a while I coveted a huge, weirdly shaped log of driftwood lying just above the tide-line on the opposite bank of the river, about 200 yards away. Stark white, and resembling the ossified skeleton of some mythical beast, it is a distinctive feature of the scenery-so distinctive that its removal could demoralise and disorient those elderly residents enjoying the river view. However, I decided that I simply had to have it and, armed one evening with ropes and a bow saw, I launched my canoe from the slipway, intent on towing the log back across the river and adding it to my growing collection.
Unfortunately after only a few strokes, and for no apparent reason, I capsized. The shock of finding myself upside-down in cold sea with my boots on made me abandon the enterprise for the foreseeable future. Worse still, when I finally struggled back to the shore, I realised that my keys-door keys, car keys and keys to the ferrets' cage-had fallen out of my pocket and into the river. When I regained some of my composure, I noticed that the man in the boathouse next to mine had been watching me from the comfort of the armchair in his bay window. He was looking down at me and drawing meditatively on his pipe.
For several days afterwards, I fished assiduously for the keys from my canoe with a child's magnet on the end of a crab line, but I had no luck. Sometimes, looking up suddenly, I would catch my neighbour and his wife standing at one of their windows, watching me impassively.
I found my boathouse in the classified ads of the local paper, which I had been scrutinising for several weeks. A very dispiriting fact about accommodation ads is that an otherwise upbeat little paragraph about a jolly and affordable flat within walking distance of pubs and charity shops will invariably end with the depressing caveat: "No children, pets or smoker" or "Sorry, no DSS." Sorry my arse.
To my new landlord's great credit there was no such nonsense about his advert; and in the flesh he was not only agreeable to my smoking and having small boys around the house at the weekend, he was positively enthusiastic about it. He did draw the line at pets though. However, because he lives far away and says that he will give me two days' notice if he should decide to visit, I spared him the tidings that my prize-winning hob ferret, His Royal Highness King Suliman the Magnificent-plus his mother, his aunt and his half-sister Dot-would live with me for the duration of my tenancy.
I concealed the ferrets' cage in a recess in the sea wall. It took them a while to get used to their new marine environment. To occupy them, I put a live crab in their cage, but they shrank from it and chattered in alarm.
The first time they broke out of their cage, I only noticed when I heard hysterical shrieking coming from the boathouse next door. When I went round, the woman was standing in her kitchen, hyperventilating. The ferret was on a table in the lounge. "Whatever is it?" she gasped when I had retrieved him.
"This," I told her, holding him up for her inspection, "is His Royal Highness King Suliman the Magnificent."
