This house seems to attract visitors. Which is fortunate when you run a B&B. But it also attracts other visitors. Mike has mentioned the mouse nests and he also removed five bin bags of old bird nests from the attic before the roof insulation was put down earlier this month.
But the visitors I am referring to are the human kind who come on a sort of pilgrimage. Regular readers of this blog will know that we've managed to trace back the history of the building going back more than 250 years and we know the names of the previous owners and have three photos on the dining room wall of the house when it was a shop with all the employees outside at three different times in the last century or so.
What we have less detail on is what happened here when the property was owned by Percy the retired vicar and his first wife. Although we have some written artefacts (a book of photos and prayers for the village), a few copies of letters amongst the deeds which were often copied onto the back his sermons and the letter to his former parishioners; we don't know much else about what happened here.
And this is where the visitors will come in handy. Some months after we moved in Mike and Claire where here when Percy's son and his wife called at The Old Bakery whilst on a visit to the local churchyard and they were pleased to see how we were restoring the house. But nothing particularly unusual about a family member visiting us.
This summer we had a knock on the door late one morning as we were in the middle of a changeover between guests and outside stood an elderly man and woman. Initially I thought they were Jehovahs Witnesses and was about to politely tell them I wasn't interested when the gentleman explained that he was Percy's best man many years ago and was on holiday in Norfolk and had wanted to take one last look at The Old Bakery.
We invited them in and sat and chatted to them both over a cup of coffee in the garden and learnt that both they and Percy and his wife had been on missionary work in Africa in their younger days and that Percy had bought The Old Bakery as a holiday home in the 1970's before retiring here. He mentioned that he was going to try and find Percy's memorial plaque in the local churchyard. This is something that Claire and Mike had found so Claire drew him a map and Mike lent him Percy's garden shears so that he could neaten things up a bit. They returned a short while later, pleased that they had found the plaque and even happier that all around the plaque the grass has been neatly maintained. Which was just as well as the shears were rather blunt and his best man joked that he would be having a word with Percy about that when he next saw him. His best man is 90 and felt that this would be his last trip to The Old Bakery and he was quite emotional about re-visiting the place where Percy had been so happy.
A couple of days ago the phone rang and an elderly lady asked it if would be possible to pop in and see us that morning as she had lots of connections with The Old Bakery. We invited her over for a cup of tea and she explained that she now lived in Norwich and as she no longer was able to drive she had persuaded her son to drive her over to the house. She had been part of the healing groups that met here in the 1980s and had taken part in lots of services in the chapel (now our office). We gave her a guided tour of the house and talked about the changes we had made, the letter that we'd recently found (we gave her a copy) and have promised to send her some photos of the house. She had bought her camera with her but after taking one picture she discovered that she had run out of film.
Over a cup of tea we mentioned that we had no idea what Percy looked like and that we would like to have a photo of him if she had one. She thought about who she knew that might have one and then remembered that there was a video of Percy taken at The Old Bakery which was about the work that he was doing and that had been shown on a local t.v. programme.
We have extended an open invitation to her and her friends and hope to learn more of Percy and the life of The Old Bakery in due course.
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