Larches Cottage

(Above: Larches Cottage c 1990)
Formerly part of the Brooklands Estate and has had various names,including Laurel Cottage by which it was known in the 1930s when Ada Nicholson lived there.  The account below was written by its current owners

Larches Cottage – a recent history

Larches Cottage, on the footpath behind Carricks Brook, was originally part of the much larger Ashburnham Estate. It then became part of Brooklands, Upper Brooklands Farm and cottages, (variously known as Collins, Everndens, Rapsdown and Bakers). It was sold as a separate property in 1952.

Angela Keeley remembers that the cottage was lived in by a Mrs Nicholson in the Second World War. Ada Grace Nicholson was a botanist and artist and received royalties for her work. Angela Keeley remembers being told that her father was a doctor and that she had an Indian nurse when growing up who gave her enormous amounts of salt! Her father luckily stopped the practice. The children in the village thought of her as a witch and she often played the part by travelling to Battle with a broomstick and pointed hat, according to her GP, Dr. Kenneth Brown. He had a number of other stories about her too.  He told Doug that the garden was beautifully kept by Mrs Nicholson and a gardener, but that the house was in a poor state of repair and the wind blew in through gaps in the windows. Tiki Kaye remembered that the Dallington children thought that she was a German  spy, since during the blackout, she would leave her curtains open!

Another story from a retired postman, Bill Wickens, who came to the cottage along the footpath from the end of Bakers Lane, was that he sometimes had problems with her. She received regular royalty cheques in the post. When one was expected she would look out for the postman and was often seen hiding behind the curtains of the small window that looked up the footpath but would not answer the door. The postman, receiving no answer to his knock at the door and having no-one to sign for the registered letter, would have to take it back to the Post Office in Heathfield. By the time he had got back to the Post Office, she would have telephoned to complain that her registered letter had not arrived and would demand that someone came out to Dallington to deliver it! Why she kept-up this pantomime is not clear. When we first moved to the cottage in 1987, the address was still Bakers Lane, since that was the way the postman came in those days. It caused awful problems with deliveries since there is no vehicular access from the end of Bakers Lane to the cottage, so we eventually changed it. Some friends of ours, who we invited to dinner, did try once to drive down the bridleway – before it was repaired – and almost came to a sticky end. We wondered why they were so late!!!

Dr Brown visited Mrs Nicholson several days before she died, and found a sign above her bed saying that if she were to be found dead, to instruct the gardener to shoot the cat! For some reason the cottage was down as Laurel Cottage in the electoral register for 1939.

The cottage was sold as a separate property by the then owner of Brooklands, Margaret Bertram, in 1952, to Alfred Robert and Dorothy Hetty Bailey from Horam. According to June and Graham Cooke who were visitors to the cottage in 2003, the Baileys were one of the first people to buy and ‘do up’ properties to sell. They did this to several cottages in the locality.

We received a letter in 2003  from the daughter of the Baileys, Mrs Beryl D. Gower, who gave a description of what the cottage was like. She wrote:

‘…my father was a quantity surveyor and seemed to be very happy regarding the primitive conditions – a deep well, no elec(tricity) or gas, there they were coping until he made a few changes, but so amazing to us as a family. The woods provided them with logs, and the only thing they had delivered was coal. My father had to walk to the main road to collect their milk! My 2 sons loved the cottage and had great fun there; there was mother with an old iron, oil lamps…she loved cooking.. on a Rayburn cooker and some device for heating water. ‘

The Baileys sold the cottage to Dorothy Reynolds (the well-known actor and author of ‘Salad Days’) in 1956, and the story is taken up by Sally Wright, who used to live at Highlands Rose Farm in Bakers Lane (she was a great friend of Angela Keeley). She visited the cottage on a weekly basis for insurance purposes, to fill hot water bottles to air the damp cottage, collect the laundry box for Battle Laundry, set mouse traps, open windows and/or put the fire on for 2 hours. She said that Dorothy Reynolds and her husband Angus McKay (also an actor) loved the place and garden. It is thought that Dorothy wrote the musical ‘Salad Days’ here in the peace and quiet of the cottage.

Dorothy Reynolds acted in a wide number of plays including Somerset Maugham’s ‘The Constant Wife’ as Mrs Culver, ‘What Every Woman Knows’ by J M Barrie, ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’, (Muriel Spark), ‘40 Years On’ (Alan Bennett) and a string of other hits. Her husband Angus McKay is remembered for his television roles in ‘Rings on Their Fingers’, ‘Steptoe and Son’, ‘Crown Court’ and  ‘My Son My Son’ amongst others.

It was Angus who sold the cottage on Dorothy’s death to John and Linda Apps in 1978. John Apps was a carpenter and cabinet maker and installed the hardwood windows and porch that are still in place today. And in 1987 the cottage was sold to us, just before the great storm of October 1987. We enlarged the house – doubled it in size, and the plans were prepared by David Jeremy, architect and also inhabitant of the village, husband to Judy Jeremy.

Another amusing incident some while ago, was that Doug spotted two people outside the cottage, one of whom was relieving himself against the tractor shed! It transpired that the two were friends of Angus McKie and had been at the pub for lunch before walking to the cottage to scatter his ashes in the woods here. They remembered coming here and that Angus had been very happy in the cottage.

Stella Bellem and Doug Edworthy