The people who populate Thrumpton Hall: A Memoir of Life in My Father’s House are eccentric English folk, but not in that lovable way so familiar to Americans from British television sitcoms. In fact, they are for the most part so pathetically dysfunctional that I initially couldn’t bring myself to review this offering by the prolific author Miranda Seymour.
But because I was once in love with a house myself and the requited love that Seymour’s father had for the eponymous manor and its park in Nottinghamshire is central to Thrumpton Hall, I decided it was worth a go.
You can be the judge.
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My love house was as simple as Thrumpton Hall is sumptuous.
A cabin made of chestnut logs dating to the 1690s, making it the oldest house in the area, was razed to build the earliest part of my house in 1715, a mere 84 years after Thrumpton Hall. This section is made of gorgeous Belgian bond brick, in fact the brick used as ballast on the ship commissioned by the owner to bring his Welsh Baptist family to the British colony of Pennsylvania.
Two additions were built of beautiful local black granite later in the 18th century and the last was a clapboard addition off of the kitchen that I date to the mid 19th century judging from the type of nails in the joists. While my description of the house may make it seem large, it probably was no more than a relatively cozy 1,500 square feet or so.
My love affair began as a teenager when I pedaled my English bike into a verdant valley a few miles from my family’s home through which run the three branches of a creek. They converge behind the house, which I found quite by accident. I was immediately smitten by its broken down beauty and isolation.
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