The perfect holiday cottage

‘Farm cottage available, Dorset. Long or short let. £5 per week.’ I was looking for a writing bolthole, so I rang. ‘Bit off the beaten track but it’s quiet all right,’ said the owner. It was also unfurnished. ‘We can get some basics together for you.’

So, in the summer of 1968, I drove down to Dorset and my first holiday cottage. It was backed by a large wood, surrounded by fields of dairy cows and meadows of wild flowers, bordered by elms. Remember elms? God’s finest trees. They whispered in the wind.

Furniture. A deal table and chair. Cooker. Enough crockery, cutlery and utensils for one. An armchair, old and comfortable. A bed, old and uncomfortable. A small table with a mirror. Pegs for hanging clothes. And a blue jug freshly filled with garden and wild flowers.

No ‘white goods’. No TV. I took my own radio and bedding.

I was very happy, wrote most of my book, and did not feel I lacked for anything.

Nor did I eight years later and married, when we rented a French stone farmhouse, ‘partially modernised’ — bath and hot water, but an outside chemical toilet. After dark trips meant brushes with toads, bats and other terrors of the French night, and hearing nightjars, nightingales and crickets while one sat.

Holiday cottage letting is a very lucrative business now and many are popular all year round. It brings money to the local economy, and who am I to complain about second homes when I occasionally rent one myself? I have become an expert and, given the prices charged, a fussy one. For £5 a week, I did not complain about my friendly Dorset farm cottage. £500 or more a week is another matter.