Wylding Hall Read Free Page B

first night, before going to his room. And Les was kind of stalking them, so she’d know. I suspect they wanted privacy, off on their own where no one could hear them. Julian—so well-mannered, quite gallant. Old-fashioned. I’m sure he thought he was doing the others a favor, quietly disappearing into the shadows with his lady-love. But it had the opposite effect, as such things do, especially when you’re young and living in close quarters. It made everyone suspicious. A real daisy chain: everyone in love with the wrong person! The only ones who got what they wanted were Julian and the girl. I can’t think of a single commune from those days that survived. All those utopias undone by sexual rivalry, and who didn’t do the washing up!
    So no, everyone pretty much stayed in the main part of Wylding Hall, which was more like a farmhouse and quite lovely. Slate floors, a high-ceilinged, whitewashed central hall with the original oak beams and fireplace, windows that looked out across the overgrown lawns to the Downs and woods beyond. That became the rehearsal room. They’d all meet there whenever they woke and stay there all night, sometimes, playing. Electricity had been brought in after the war. It hadn’t been updated and was a bit dicey, but it did for the amps and guitars. Down the hall was an enormous old kitchen with an ancient gas cooker, a long trestle table, mismatched chairs. Gas refrigerator that wobbled whenever you opened it. I’d checked everything out before I rented it to make sure it worked. Which it did, barely.
    There was a toilet room and a bath downstairs, and upstairs a number of bedrooms—seven, I think, in that wing. The furnishings were rather sparse, but everyone had a bed. Some of the rooms had a desk; some had a wardrobe or chest of drawers. One had a great, huge chair that was almost a throne—Jonno took that one. Julian’s room had a proper desk looking out a window, with a beautiful view of the Downs to the west.
    That’s where he wrote “Windhover Morn”—you can see the photograph on the gatefold sleeve of his desk, with his notebook and that mess of music sheets and pens and pencils and his guitar on the bed. Such a beautiful view that was.
    Ashton
     
    My favorite part of the house was definitely the rehearsal room. That’s where everything came down. We’d wander in by ones and twos; everyone was usually up before noon. Then we’d jam or listen to whatever song Les or Julian had been working on. Some days, we’d get so caught up in playing that we’d forget to eat. Didn’t forget to drink, especially Will. We had all our equipment set up in there: little PA system and all our guitars. Will’s mandolin and sitar and god knows what. He even taught himself to play the viole de gambols, a true sign of a man with too much time on his hands. Jonno’s drum kit. There was a beat-up old upright piano pushed into a corner. First thing we did was drag that out into the room. Julian used to play it: “Greensleeves” and John Dowland, songs that weren’t composed for piano, but Julian played beautifully.
    And you know, that piano was tuned perfectly. From the very beginning, I thought that was weird. Had someone come in to tune it? That would have been extremely odd, considering that absolutely nothing else had been done to the house to keep it up.
    There were other weird things, too. Like the house always smelled of woodsmoke—fresh woodsmoke, like someone had a fire going in it somewhere. We’d been warned against doing that, as the chimneys hadn’t been cleaned in decades. At any rate, it was summer and far too warm for a fire. We’d open windows, burn joss sticks—no matter what we did, it still smelled of woodsmoke. The rehearsal room less so than the rest of the house.
    And there was the Bird Room: this little corner room in the back of the house, near the old wing. Not much bigger than a closet, with an eyebrow window high up, facing west. I was looking for a loo