In 1956 the writer Evelyn Waugh bought a handsome house in the shadow of the Quantock hills for £7,500. Made of red sandstone, like the red earth which surrounds it, looking down over what we grandly called “parkland” but many would call a field, it is again for sale, this time for a staggering £5.5 million.
That house is part of the warp and weft of my life, and it is strange to see the estate agent’s purple prose wound around what is, after all, just a house until it is a home.
My grandfather bought the house, Combe Florey, because his wife Laura Herbert’s family came from the area. Both her sisters and her brother lived within 20 miles and the vast cousinship of the Herberts became part of Waugh life. Laura had seven much-loved cows and a cart horse called Dinah, and later turned the two walled kitchen gardens into a market garden. I remember the great treat of going to stay with her after my grandfather’s death and accompanying her to market with her metal tubs of daffodils. We would wander round the cattle market considering the merits of cows neither of us had any intention of buying.
