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After reaching halfway up the wall, the three gardeners stood back to look at their work.
The bottom half of the drainpipe had come off in their hands once the ivy had been cut sufficiently, so they dragged it behind some bushes like thieves concealing loot.
From where they stood, at the edge of the flowerbed, they could see how the ivy had tucked in further at the points where the drainpipe had been screwed into the wall hundreds of years ago.
These holes would have been the ivy’s first port of call in shaping itself into the wall, slowly suffocating it.
The reason for the presence of the two immense knuckles up top was simple, as Ray finally concluded, looking at the wall.
The knuckles had come about because the areas where they had formed used to serve as windows for bales of hay to be posted through for the horses.
The Trust closed these off about one hundred and fifty years ago, preferring to use the windows from the front, having had the ground cobbled.
Rebuilt with inferior products and without the use of bricks and mortar, these back windows were blocked with a mixture of things that had rotted easily, giving the ivy the freedom it required to take over the area without being noticed.
The ivy took refuge in these alcoves with vim, concealing its ever-growing presence in a way that even the sharpest eye was unable to detect any signs of damage.
The stables were left in a state of disrepair for around a century until the fifties, when the gutters and drains must have been painted and minor repairs were carried out internally to use the space as the old gardeners’ mess.
Without the need for horses, new machinery was stored away in the hangar on the edge of the estate alongside old project vehicles and broken machinery, which were left rusting, laying neglected. It seemed almost incomprehensible at the time that the horses would no longer be there, but they were an expensive folly for the rich and had no place on the estate, where, although admired by the masses and their children who paid good money to visit the estate and enjoy the wonder of the Trust’s space and opulence, they could not justify themselves financially and were deemed surplus to requirements. Besides, cars had become the new toy for the rich to play with and exhibit.
In the sixties, a prudish, bourgeois man took over as park manager. A business-type, this man sought promotion at any cost and was under strict instruction to all but run down the estate as it was only losing money for the Trust.
The Kneesup estate would have to take a back seat, creaming money only from those in a position to use the place as a wedding venue or conference centre.
The masses would have to go to some other National Trust estate for their borrowed sense of serenity and splendour. There were plenty of others for them to visit.
This new man’s first economy push remedied the glaring problem of the head gardener, who proudly employed ten men, which the park manager, Forbes, saw as five too many, especially when all the new machinery that the Trust had paid for was doing most of the work.
Five men lost their jobs and the gardeners’ mess was closed to make way for a gift shop which only came to be in the nineties.
The stables were closed down ‘until further notice’.
When the stables were eventually converted into the gift shop, the building contractor failed to notice the knuckles of ivy from the back wall, which was left as it was.
As this building contractor had tendered for the job and won on price alone, his budget was very tight, and so he did little to try and identify the knuckles. Even if he had found them, he would have made sure they were covered up before the Trust saw them.
The interior was tacked out in plasterboard or replastered ‘where necessary’, and the electrical work was badly scamped.
The plumbing was unfortunately attached to the very places where the ivy knuckles were growing, which was why the problems had continued to baffle the Trust, although they hadn’t even thought of checking the back wall from the outside. It plainly hadn’t occurred to anyone for a hundred and fifty years that the invasive properties of nature might be the cause of all the recent problems, slowly crippling the stable wall.
The gardeners’ mess was transferred to the side of the old cottage and constructed by the gardeners that remained in employment to ‘make them feel at home’, Forbes had said. That was in 1963.
As you may recall, Ray joined the Trust in 1982, by which time the lovingly made shack of flimsy wood strips and corrugated iron was on the verge of collapse.