Day 41 - Lovely gravel, lovely ramp.

Setting up the house for opening was difficult. The building was a private residence, so we had to bring out our paraphernalia each day. We didn't have the luxury of a museum where the ropes and stanchions and druggetts could be permanently placed and left. We also didn't have anywhere in the house to store them, so they had to be loaded up onto a balance-truck (two wheels in the middle, and weight evenly distributed over them - bloody difficult task in a hurry at the end of the day) and pushed through the gravel to our sheds round the back, where the whole caboodle would be stored till the following week. It was most certainly a balancing act. First we removed the home-made wheelchair ramp from the front steps, inverted it and laid it over the handlebars of the truck. It was very heavy, being constructed of marine ply and chicken wire to increase grip. Then we rolled up all the druggetts (that's felt matting to protect the carpets for those who are unfamiliar with the word), and collected the lead-weighted ropes and stanchions, and very carefully we would arrange them on top of the ramp. Last of all would come the desk, behind which our more numerate stewards would sit and greet visitors and sell guidebooks. For simplicity's sake, I stopped them selling postcards and other knickknacks which had cluttered the scene in previous years.

When I had arrived for my interview before taking the job, I had been shown round the house, and was alarmed to see that the hall table at that time was a scruffy trestle table with an old cloth draped over it. This really let down the presentation of the house, being the first piece of furniture the visitors saw, and looked very amateurish, much as similar furnishing in the tea-room at that time also created a poor impression. Whilst checking the inventories during the winter, I had discovered a nice compact desk in the attic which wasn't being used, so I proposed to use that as our Entrance Hall desk. It had the advantage of having two drawers to hold some of our necessary accoutrements. Would you believe that the same people who were prepared to let us open with a trestle table that would have looked more appropriate in a village hall displaying champion marrows, now had objections to my using a Victorian desk in a surrounding of Regency furniture? I had a strategy for dealing with this, and it didn't involve diplomacy. I just ignored them. They hardly ever came to the property anyway, and as long as the visitors were being well-treated, then I felt I was doing my job. I have a suspicion that if I had followed all the instructions I was given, I would have failed to make the property viable, which may just have been the objective. Who knows? It turned out as it did, and there's nothing that can be done to reverse it now. And, finally, I don't think anybody would want to, with hindsight. For that they must in part thank one stubborn bastard who didn't know his place.

Anyway, having loaded up said truck, we then had to force it through six inches of gravel and take it round the back. It usually took three of us to get it started, and two of us to push it, because the gravel was so thick. The same problem inflicted itself on our mowers, which invariably clogged with stone as we tried to shove them through it to reach the front lawn. The fact is, there was actually little wrong with the stone-impregnated tarmac underneath, but the occupants of the house had decided that it would look nicer if there was raked gravel there instead, and had had lorry-loads of it dumped there when nobody was looking. They gave their own gardener, who maintained the walled garden on their behalf, leave to intrude upon our space and rake the new surface. Well, we certainly weren't going to do it, so we didn't argue. After years of negotiations, I eventually gained a concession allowing us to remove some of it to make life easier for us. There was enough spare to fill in the two cattle-grids by the public entrance, with a substantial pile left over. Filling in the grids prevented experimental juveniles jamming themselves up to the buttocks between the bars, making our jobs much less fraught. The cattle were still wary of the obstacle, but kids could only go ankle deep, which meant that we no longer had to fetch pinch-bars to widen the gaps to release them. Although some of them, I would admit, I would gladly have left there in the middle of the road like the last skittle in a bowling alley, rather than allowing them to rampage through the borders with their dads playing hide-and-seek all over our lovely plants. The toddlers who were encouraged by their dads to walk on top of the box hedges had to be forgiven, as they were too young to know any better, but I would happily have embedded the parents in a cattle grid to make the point. Just an aside, but feelings run high when you care.

Lovely gravel, lovely ramp -

Ooh! And look at those climbers! I'll have something to say about them in due course.