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On the day this story began, it was a Monday morning.
Ray was on the bus to work.
Terry arrived at work and parked his dark blue Polo next to the old stables, converted in the nineties to make way for the main gift shop.
The staff-parking area where Terry parks is a ten-block puzzle of white lines for people to park in.
Signs for this and signs for that perched on quaint little boards sunk into the grass at the edge of the parking area, saying ‘please do this’ and ‘please do not do that’. The funniest request is ‘Please Be Mindful Of Animals And Children When Parking. Thank You.’
When Terry’s hungover or just plain angry, he has been known to park a wheel or two on top of or even slightly over a white line. On each of these occasions, he has received an informal (unnamed) note from one secretary or another (whose space he may or may not have invaded) to park in a more orderly fashion or risk a penalty.
One time, he inadvertently toppled one of the little signs by parking over the end-line and nudging it with his bumper. He was docked £30 from his wages but quickly made up for it, and more, by pinching some prize seeds, a few hammers and some tins of wood-preserver that he later sold at a car-boot sale.
Rob had arrived, too, having walked the three miles from town, saving on bus-fare and taking in the day.
Ray always arrived about five minutes after Rob, who knew very well that the kettle had to be at least warm by the time Ray got in.
On one occasion when Rob was late with the kettle, Ray gave him a difficult, laborious task, which neither wanted, but lessons had to be learnt, as Ray said.
That Monday morning, on the stroke of eight, Rob got to the shed just as Ray was alighting the bus at the edge of the estate.
This gave him ample time to put the kettle under water and get it boiled.
Terry came in to the shed and, without saying anything other than ‘hello’ under his breath, went over to a worktop at the far end of the room to look at the worksheet, which Ray always puts there on Friday evening for the week ahead.
Once he’d read the state of play, he set to fetching a selection of tools for all three to work with till teatime at ten-thirty.
‘What’s today, Terry?’ asked Rob, referring to work.
‘We’re trimming the ivy round the back of the old stables this morning and weeding and burning over by the river in the after,’ replied Terry.
Rob had the water in the old hairline-cracked teapot just as Ray walked into the shed.
‘Hello, lads,’ he said, taking off his jacket, hanging it up and replacing it with a long brown smock as always.
‘Alright, chef,’ they said back.
I say ‘shed’ because it’s mostly made from very light wood and covered over by corrugated iron, and ‘chef’ because that’s what the lads like to call Ray.
Set against the sidewall of a small, unused cottage quite far away from the main house of the estate, the shed was built in the seventies and ‘modernised’ in the eighties.
What actually happened was that Ray took the position of head gardener in 1982 and requested that the shed be knocked down as it was on the verge of collapse. Back then, the rainwater dripped through holes in the rusted iron sheets. The lack of heat was damaging the nurturing of some seeds that Ray had in mind for the summerhouse.
Apart from that, the weight of all his tools, which had found their places but really needed to be set out along walls, had bent the so-called structure into odd shapes.
The Trust accepted that something needed to be done. Ray had proved himself more than capable as head gardener and they didn’t want to lose him for the sake of a shed, so they enlarged and modernised it by adding a section that turned the corner of the cottage wall to make the shed into an L-shape room.
They rewired and put water to it, steadying the structure of the shed’s delicate frame with proper timber joists and tacked insulation boards.