Chapter 2: My Manor

Meeting the polo trainer at Ingols Hall, a man called Redman Durcet, was a very interesting thing that happened in my life and, whether he cares to admit it or not, I know that I was a very interesting thing to happen in his. This is the gentleman who finally tipped me over the edge at the end. That is worth remembering, because he was also, out of all the people I met, the person I grew closest to, which may indeed say something about human relationships quite apart from our political opinions. When I first met him, I was quite shocked, because we had only just arrived at Ingols Hall, and the production crew said there was one of the staff on the five hundred acre plot and his partner who were coming round for a glass of champagne or wine. We had a choice of both to offer them, all on Armada TV's expenses ticket. They were to come round and have a drink with us, I was told.

'Oh,' I said, 'when's that then?'

'In a few minutes,' they said.

This was all very shocking but a lot of things ran like this through the week, it was quite a shooting-from-the-hip kind of experience. Things were just dropped on us. We had to then suddenly adjust. This was quite exciting, but we then had a house call from this quite short, very well-mannered and quite humble young girl, Adelaide, and a quite thick-set, tall gentlemen who was her partner. I would have said he was probably near enough my age, so there was some considerable age gap between them; about twenty years I would say, possibly that much. She had recently given birth and the fact that they had a young baby was something very familiar to Kiran and I.

'We're new parents too,' I said, our child being two at the time.

They sat down. They were really nervous. There was an immediate air of suspicion, about what the hell was going on and I was expecting them to give us a full account of what we were expected to do and for them to have an agenda laid out for us. In the same way, we had prepared an agenda for our lifeswappees, at our end, plus people to guide and tutor them in our lifestyle and look after them. My immediate impression of this couple was that however pleasant they were and however determined we were to be pleasant to them, they were either not prepared or not capable of giving us any information about what we were supposed to do at all. In fact they were looking to us.

'You've got to decide what to do,' he said. 'You're in charge now.'

I actually thought they might perhaps be quite low-paid. I wasn't even told what his job was at first. I did not realise he was the polo trainer. I think that later came out in conversation in the same evening. That was his job and that was it, so all the rest of it, from ground staff to business transactions, from meetings outside to agendas within the estate, none of these were either of any concern to him or anything he knew about. My god, I thought, how strangely decentralised this seems to be at the top level. How stupid as well.

Surely we should be made to feel comfortable. We might feel a bit vulnerable. I assumed this might happen at the other end. Make sure that the person knows where they've got to be and what they have to do. It should not be about being a parental guide for them all week, but at the very least, at the beginning someone ought to set things out and then draw our input into it. It then occurred to me that the poor, if not unpaid, or voluntary work sector of our society that we came from was in fact a lot better organised than the multi-million pound system that these extremely rich people lived by.

Admittedly we had been shown an introductory film just after we arrived. This accompanied a booklet with Gerard's weekly agenda. Although Armada had shown us brief film of Gerard telling us not to fuck his business up & he had been shown film of me telling them not to worry & that they should have a laugh & get into our life-style neither film gave any specific instructions. Nor did the booklets they provided both couples.

The interesting thing about the polo trainer was that I found an air of frostiness about him. His wife seemed surprised at how pleasant we were. Kiran made a bee-line for her, discussing the similarities between our recent experiences of having a child, keen to make eye-to-eye contact. I think Adelaide felt quite unsettled and a bit strange at the fact that we were treating her as an equal, and that we were not belittling them because we were somehow unruly. Neither were we acting with a cap-touching attitude. They were just like anybody else you would bump into in a café or a pub or anywhere. At first.

We were now in Ingols Hall. This was in one of the living room areas. All of this was being filmed, as was everything else. There were two camera men and the director, who was also the producer and one of the cameramen was an executive producer. One of the other cameramen was, I think, also a researcher. None of them did only one job, again that's a cheaper way to and therefore an easier way to get a job in the corporation.

Anyway, we found out what we were expected to do that week: game-shooting, a fox hunt and the running of a multi-million pound set of business ventures, in all their unenviromental glory. So, we were already getting our backs up a little bit, but we were still being very pleasant to these people but then they reacted rather sharply, which gave me the impression they actually did not know anything about us. They had not been briefed by the film crew at all. We were surrounded by stuffed animals, a dead fox staring at me while I was talking to them all the while and I just thought we had to hit the issue straight away. It was all being filmed so if we just did pleasantries that would defeat the object of the whole exercise.

'Well,' I said, 'it's quite odd that your boss has chosen to do this. I'm probably more surprised he has than I am surprised we have. We didn't want to do it but we felt that, if certain things were put in place, we would be prepared to, and one of those things was to be swapped with people from the diametrically the opposite end of society, as far as possible in terms of political opinion and economic power and they've done it and the incredible thing is we've walked in here and there's stuffed animals everywhere and you seem to be part of the hub of the British fox-hunting establishment and we're anti-hunt!'

His face was a picture. I would love to see the footage of it. You could have heard a pin drop. He must have been trying his best not to spit his wine everywhere. This delighted me. This is why we have come, I thought. This is fantastic.

'Oh, anti-hunt,' he said, 'well this should be an interesting week.'

'Right on,' I said. 'It'll be interesting to find if there are actually any bridges available between us. Obviously you've been drawn so close to us in terms of political method recently, because of the banning of fox hunting, yeah?'

He looked a bit worried about this.

'You've been having to demonstrate and act in the same way that we've been acting over issues that are completely the opposite from anti-hunt,' I said, 'from CND to anti-Poll Tax demonstrations, anti-Criminal Justice Act demonstrations anti-Iraq War demonstrations, and now you're having to demonstrate, and that's interesting isn't it? Because you used to think demonstrations were an unethical way to behave.'

He seemed quite invigorated by this, but still humourless but we were getting there, we were getting there, we were stirring the soup.

'I'll take you out on a hunt one morning if you like.'

'That should be interesting,' I said.

'We have to leave quite early, these days, about half five. Are you able to get up at that sort of time?'

So there was already this "you're-a-lazy-hippie-scumbag-but-we're-robust-country-folk" attitude.

'You know,' I said, 'my body clock is all over the shop at the best of times so I'm often awake at half five, whichever end of my cycle it is, and I certainly shan't be sleeping much this week. But surely you can't take me on a hunt, because surely that is illegal?'

Then he came out with the choice comment.

'Well, Craig,' he said, 'it is illegal.' By this time he was acting the way coppers normally do and addressing me by my first name. I do not think I had even heard his name properly up to this point.

'What we do,' he said, 'we read the items of the law that's been passed in Parliament to the hounds and if the hounds choose to ignore the advice, then, who are we to stop them? It's the hounds that are breaking the law.'

'You're joking?' I said. 'It all goes on just as normal, and you pass responsibility to the hounds?'

Well, I thought, baby steps, baby steps. It is no good going for his throat straight away because then communication will break down and we won't get the maximum amount of dialogue between us to try and find out what's going on in the world today, but I thought, 'you bastard!' to myself. It was typical of the upper classes to scapegoat their animals, which is in effect what the man was doing, perhaps without even realising that that's what he's doing.

I could see Kiran's face, I had to keep my eye on her because at any time she could blow and she was keeping her eye on me because at any time I could blow. She looked like she wanted to punch him and I know her well enough to know that she did! It was like, oh right, but if we break the law because we smoke cannabis or we break the law because we have an unlicensed event, we're scumbags who don't respect the law, but here we have friends of the judiciary quite able to break the law and not see a problem in that even when they use the law as their absolutely solid inflexible interpretation of how to behave in society. I mean, we thought, this is great. Off we go!

It was not that we were in there with them, it's that they were in there with us. That was how I suddenly felt. We're in, I thought. We have got our foot in the door of the castle and we have managed to slide in with our Hoover and we have managed to sell it to them, even though it will self-destruct and spray dust and dirt all over the building. I was thinking of Hassan-i-Sabbah, the head of the Assassin cult in the Middle East in the 11^th & 12^th century. He always said it was ridiculous to take a castle by ladders. That was far too labour intensive. He took his first castle by being a cranky old geezer who wanted a job in it. He went in through the front door and within three months he had incited the whole of the military inside the castle walls to rebel, topple the ancestral, aristocratic head of that particular barony, manage to have him ousted and then he replaced him. That then became his HQ for the rest of his life. It is about stealth and subversion. So it was suddenly as though we were in the manorial hall, like the Pagan was in the Roman villa, suddenly allowed to see it from the inside. It was quite the most remarkable thing that has ever happened to me and quite the most remarkable thing I could imagine on any documentary or reality TV show that covered the state of British society. Here they were having to play host to a couple who, to all intents and purposes look like their Nemesis, and are! So we had all got to be really nice to one another. I'm not horrible to anyone, but here I was faced with a man who is going to see me as the enemy.

Adelaide said very little. Perhaps she believed that it was inappropriate for women to have strong views. She looked quite offended by Kiran's brash behaviour, actually talking directly to her husband as an equal, not only because she was a woman but also because she was black. It was as though everyone was trying to paper over these huge cracks that were forming in the reality of their polite behaviour. I was thinking, don't throw your wine in her face and say "you're a traitor to your gender!" and I could tell Kiran was thinking, "please, please don't invite him outside for a punch up, I know you've always wanted to have a fight with someone from public school like that, who stands for Queen and country." It was like St. George and the dragon and I was the dragon. Very unnerving for them, but very exciting for me. Then he went off and that was it, and we thought, that was a bit strange.

We decided to explore upstairs.

This is an important point for everyone to remember. If you leave your house or your flat in the hands of people you do not know, you should not feel ashamed about keeping certain things under lock and key. There was one padlocked suitcase left in our flat. Gerard and his partner had a whole room locked up. From the outside of the hall we could see it was a big one. A lot of the more expensive ornaments and things were probably in there and certainly all documentation. At no time did I even consider or try to break into it, because I am not a thief. I am not even interested in seeing what someone does not want me to see on that level. It does not provoke me.

So, Gerard and his partner locked all their private stuff away, but as the camera crew panned around the bedroom area, we came to the wardrobe.

'Quick,' I said to the film crew, 'ring the people in Wales. Get him to look through my wardrobe and comment on my clothes' sense and I will do the same and we will do a full-on Trinny and Suzanna on one another. It is going to end in tears.'

I did not know this until I met him, but he was not prepared to do that to me because he did not consider it gentlemanly behaviour to comment on another man's clothing. I, on the other hand, pulled him apart. I relished the opportunity because I see dress as a very important indication of how healthy a society is and when everybody looks very similar to one another I get worried.

I was dying to look through his wardrobe, so I did as soon as I got there, and what I found just made me laugh so much I got the cameras in on it. Let's face it, they were only the other side of the room.

'What are you doing?'

'Okay,' I said, 'ring the other end, because it is not fair of me to go through his wardrobe without inviting him to do the same. I would love the world to see my wardrobe. That's what clothes are for, for God's sake, not to be hidden away.'

You would hide them away if they all looked the same. What is the point of having fifteen identical corporate suits? Another indication of hoarding, perhaps. Everything was grey, black, or dark grey. His ties, on the other hand, were fantastic. I made the point that these mad, psychedelic prints, these were crazy things that he had appropriated from the sub-culture without knowing it.

'It's the patterns on the ties that should be the patterns on the jackets,' I said. 'Imagine this mad, bright, yellow, Paisley design with gold, brown and all kinds of gorgeous autumnal colours as a suit, instead of just a tie! And then go to your board meeting. These suits are more paving slab than peacock.'

The film crew were in hysterics. Gerard is going to want to kill me with his bare hands, I thought, if this goes out on telly. He is going to be putting his foot through it and then suing me for the expense of replacing it, because his main telly was as big as a cinema screen.

There was none of her clothing available for us to see so she did not want Kiran to get her dirty proletarian hands on all of her five thousand pound dresses.

'That's a shame,' Kiran said, 'because she could have access to ours.'

I do not think they looked. I think they tried to ignore everything in our flat. They did not see the flamboyant punk rock couture, they did not see the fifties sub-cultural icons, the brothel-creepers, the drape jacket. They did not see the Mod three-buttoned, dog tooth jacket. They did not see the PVC trousers, the PVC dresses. I could go through the history of alternative fashion with a fine-tooth comb. One thing Kiran and I pride ourselves on is flamboyance what with her being an Asian rock chic who had a run-in with her mother as a teenager for having a picture of a skull with wings on the back of her leather jacket, with 'Angel of Death' written on it. An Asian girl in something like that? Of course I was going to marry her!

So, there was the wardrobe. Then the crew panned around the four poster bed, then looked out of the window and saw the two, one hundred thousand pound Range Rovers parked on the gritted surface in the area immediately next to the Hall. Then we saw the en suite toilet, the Jacuzzi, the bath and shower, the bidet, and all the expensive attachments to everything.

We walked out of the bedroom, down a long corridor, and there were bedrooms everywhere. Gerard has made sure that every child, both her two and his three, have a bedroom each with an en suite toilet. That is nice. I think everybody should have one room per child.

The eighteen-year-old daughter's room was hunt central. It was like a radical teenagers room but the other way round, like in a parallel universe where the forces of oppression are anarchists and revolutionaries who have taken away all of her traditions. There were protest posters about supporting the hunt and there were stickers and badges. If you had looked at them for a brief moment, you might have been forgiven for thinking they were for Rock against Racism or CND or Stop the City. It amused me, as it had with Redman, that her kind of person is now having to use exactly the same kind of techniques that I have been using for twenty years in order to get heard. This is why I feared she would come at me as a zealot who would want to scratch my eyes out.

I got drunk and stoned that first night, as with most evenings while we were there. Kiran & I had deep conversations about the British class system, the unenvironmental expense of the pool and the oven came into play as well, as we paced about the conservatory on Super Skunk and a variety of drinks ranging from lager to wine to expensive bottles of champagne.

By two or three o'clock every morning, steam started to rise from the pool as the temperature outside fell. It looked like a giant unused sauna.

We had been advised by Gladys, the house-maid, that the owner wanted all the lights left on. We thought this a terrible waste of electricity so we turned most of them off in the evening. There was no way we were going to keep five children's bedrooms, two separate indoor toilets, five en suite toilets, one outdoor toilet, a master bedroom with a locked annexed door, another toilet, a foyer, a dining room with a table with places for about twenty people, a conservatory, a huge living room, a long stair-case and a kitchen with room for about another twenty people blazing in a state of constant illumination.

There were trophies everywhere. I sat holding a stuffed fox in my lap one night. I was really stoned. The dead animal looked demonic. I wondered why. I had seen many alive and they had never looked evil. The ones my aunt used to feed in her back garden were not Satanic. Could the taxidermist have moulded that malevolent grin? Does a stuffed corpse without a soul release an image of devilishness? Maybe in making it look evil, the hunt sought to justify its actions.

There were many porcelain ornaments. These seemed to involve examples of their quarry in hunting gear. Biped foxes in red jackets. Biped pheasants in shooting jackets. Could there be some link to the ancient idea that if you kill something you acquire its powers?

There was a brass polo player on a brass horse in the middle of two brass elephants placed on a ten thousand pound conference or dining table. The elephants were facing in opposite directions and the polo player looked like he was going to whack one of them in the bottom with a polo stick. The polo player was about two feet tall and the elephants were about half a foot tall, so it gave the impression that he was more powerful than the elephants. They were Indian elephants, too, so I thought it might have been meant to symbolize the British Empire's attitude to India. These statutes suggested a message to us from “the other side” about this family's attitude to race. This proved correct as the week progressed.

We rearranged the elephants so that they were behind the rider. We placed them in a position that made them look like they were talking to each other rather than split apart. In fact it made them look like they were conspiring against the rider.

There was a huge wicker basket full of champagne corks. It reminded me of one of my old band member's fondness for collecting empty cans of Kestrel Super and forming them into piles by the end of a rehearsal. The mental process seemed to be similar, except, of course, for the fact that the lord of this manor's obsession seemed to be showing off his money. At ninety-nine pence a can, a “lager pile” can hardly be described as a display of wealth.

We found two wicker hearts in the lobby. They had been turned upside down, and so, although entwined, they looked like a couple of human backsides. We returned them to being an expression of love.

Since we slept from between two to four hours a night, on average, we had plenty of time of an evening to consider our situation and plan for the week ahead.

Our daughter slept on our blow-up mattress in the master bedroom. We had decided that if she had slept in any of the other bedrooms she might well have wandered near the stairs while half asleep. We also did not want her panicked in a room that was unfamiliar and away from her parents. She was only two years old and although she has her own room and bed at home, this was a different kettle of strawberries altogether.

The house-maid told us that the head of the estate had told her that we could drink anything in the house but we decided to provide our own alcohol.... apart from what Armada laid on as a welcome when we arrived.

Gerard's riding boots stood to the side of one of the seven televisions dotted about the house. The boots were beside the TV that was to be found in front of the three piece suite that sat to the side of the ten thousand pound table in the dining room. Above this was a photo of the man and his wife. Both were about the same age as Kiran and me. He was a year older than I was, although he looked like he was at least ten if not twenty years older. She looked about Kiran's age.

On seriously considering this I gathered that he may have been robbed of his adolescence and any youthful exuberance that may have slowed down the ageing process. He certainly was no dancer.

There were two grandfather clocks. Neither of them worked. Time had, in effect, stood still.