Back on the road we soon joined the holiday traffic heading into Porthmadog. We dug out the directions that the agency had given us to find the cottage. They were really funny involving exotic place names like Pwllheli, Llanbedrog and Mynytho. And instructions like “Follow this road until you come to a tractor workshop on your left – Dafydd Glyn Jones, Seithbont Garage”, “carry on until you come to the Rectory”. We found the rectory OK, but drove up and down the narrow lane a few times looking for the steep road track down to our cottage. We just kept missing it, which was easy to do as the fog was really thick and we could see nothing around us. The lane was really narrow and it was totally impossible to turn around.
I dialed the number of the landlady on my mobile phone. No signal. We pulled into the rectory to ask for directions. There were two cars parked there and two wooden doors with no bells (back doors? Where was the front door?). David went out into lashing the rain and knocked on both doors with his knuckles. Nothing. I started to remember a horror movie I had seen as a child where an entire village was enshrouded in fog. A visitor stumbled on the village and was made welcome there only to find out later that all the residents were flesh eating zombies. Then there’s Silent Hill. Shudder! In a good horror movie we knock at the “wrong door” or the landlady turns out to look like Mrs Danvers.
We knocked at another house. We could see into the sitting room and a very old lady and a middle aged man in a vest were sitting on a tatty sofa. The place was littered with papers. The man opened the door. The house smelled of cats and dirt. Even though we were standing there in the pouring rain, I hoped he wouldn’t ask us in. He took our address and directions without smiling or saying anything. It turned out that he knew the house and amiably pointed us in the right direction – back the way we had came down that narrow lane again. We thanked him and ran back to the car.
Back we went down the lane. This time going really slowly so that we wouldn’t miss the track. We found it and began to drive down until it became too steep and slippery so I pulled into a kind of layby and we walked the rest of the way down.
We found the house. 200 year old Welsh cottages always look sweet and welcoming from the outside, but this one looked really creepy in the fog. We went into the garden and called “hello”. Nothing. We tried the front door. Locked. We went round the back and found the door unlocked. In we went. The smell of damp hit us. Hello? Nothing. Back outside. We heard a small voice with a posh English accent “Hello! Hello!”. The landlady! She was about 4ft tall, hunched with sore-looking varicose veins over both feet. Her grey knotty hair hung limply around her shoulders. She came running out of a hole in the hedge. It turned out that through this hole is the garden shed where she lives. It was a peculiar setup.
She showed us around the house. It was like something out of a museum. Ancient wooden furniture, low beamed ceilings, scary old pictures everywhere. This couldn’t be further away from our life in Japan. As we were leaving, a man with a flat cap knocked on the door and asked if it was our car blocking the lane. Woops. He didn’t seem to mind that he had had to walk all the way down the hill and back up again. I was relieved that we had another neighbour. A rich one too apparently who drove a BMW off roader. I had to park in the lay by on the main track and our landlady came up with her jeep to collect our stuff and drive it down to the cottage. Once we unpacked the car, she disappeared into the fog and we haven’t seen her since. We tried to give her the money for the electricity, but she said there was plenty of time for that. Was there something we didn’t know? She knew we wouldn’t last the 2 weeks for instance?
Back we went down the lane. This time going really slowly so that we wouldn’t miss the track. We found it and began to drive down until it became too steep and slippery so I pulled into a kind of layby and we walked the rest of the way down.
We found the house. 200 year old Welsh cottages always look sweet and welcoming from the outside, but this one looked really creepy in the fog. We went into the garden and called “hello”. Nothing. We tried the front door. Locked. We went round the back and found the door unlocked. In we went. The smell of damp hit us. Hello? Nothing. Back outside. We heard a small voice with a posh English accent “Hello! Hello!”. The landlady! She was about 4ft tall, hunched with sore-looking varicose veins over both feet. Her grey knotty hair hung limply around her shoulders. She came running out of a hole in the hedge. It turned out that through this hole is the garden shed where she lives. It was a peculiar setup.
She showed us around the house. It was like something out of a museum. Ancient wooden furniture, low beamed ceilings, scary old pictures everywhere. This couldn’t be further away from our life in Japan. As we were leaving, a man with a flat cap knocked on the door and asked if it was our car blocking the lane. Woops. He didn’t seem to mind that he had had to walk all the way down the hill and back up again. I was relieved that we had another neighbour. A rich one too apparently who drove a BMW off roader. I had to park in the lay by on the main track and our landlady came up with her jeep to collect our stuff and drive it down to the cottage. Once we unpacked the car, she disappeared into the fog and we haven’t seen her since. We tried to give her the money for the electricity, but she said there was plenty of time for that. Was there something we didn’t know? She knew we wouldn’t last the 2 weeks for instance?
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