January 28th 2002 - We finally leave Devon

The following is an extract from the orginal manuscript of 'When Sophie Met Darcy Day' published by Harper Collins

Thankfully the horses didn’t travel too badly and everybody arrived to Wiltshire in one piece. Michael and I unloaded the horses and put them into the new stables. They all greeted each other and soon settled down to their hay. We popped Angie, Monty, Big Ears and Noddy into their new barn, which they then explored with interest, and put the the hen houses into the poultry barn. It was over, we had moved everyone and they were all safe and well. We kept our wellies on in the kitchen,(a leak in the bathroom had flooded the cottage) made some tea and went to bed.

The next few days came and went in a flurry of activity. We sorted out the feed shed but soon realised that the boiler wasn’t up to cooking the barley and linseed, it was taking far too long, and using up too much electricity and we had to change the horse’s diet to ready prepared sacks of feed. We couldn’t turn any of the horses out into the fields because we had to put up new fencing, so we decided that they could go into an adjacent barn, the floor of which was covered in deep sand. The horses had settled in well and although they were pretty perplexed about going into a barn for a buck, kick and a roll rather than going out into fields, they got used to it. Red was perfectly happy in his new barn, although he would have to get accustomed to being turned out into a small paddock as opposed to wandering in and out as he had in Devon. Angie and Monty with Big Ears and Noddy explored everywhere, they too, were happy in their new home. I managed to get hold of the eejit who had flooded the bathroom and kitchen and he fixed the leak. I then had a problem with all the soaked linen, duvets, and blankets together with the curtains that I had planned on asking my mother to alter for the cottage windows. I bagged up the curtains and put them outside the door, Michael mistook the bags for rubbish and put them out for collection. I never saw them again. In between making sure the horses were alright, I made some sense of the cottage. The old stove at the end of one of the downstairs rooms was a nightmare, it ran on oil and it was supposed to be able to heat the rooms as well as cook. It was called Stanley and it couldn’t do two things at once; we were constantly faced with a choice, food or heat?

That winter was the wettest I could ever remember, every day was dark and windy, and we began to worry that we had moved somewhere that never saw the sun. We began to question the name of the farm ‘Rainscombe Hill’, and prayed that it hadn’t been called this for a reason, but of course, it would have been.