We are in London for the week, exploring museums, and taking a break from books, laptops and the internet (Hmm… in theory) to give everyone a rest before an intense term of school, work and writing, respectively.

We really loved the bird collection in the Natural History Museum today.

But being in London—we’ve rented a house in posh Kensington, walking distance from the V and A—with the hum of traffic persisting now at 23.32 reminded me of how much I love living in the country.

We live in Garsington, on a dirt, access-only road, surrounded by fields, and you can walk for miles on country footpaths, through pretty, even idyllic countryside.

What is so special to me about where I live is the silence. You cannot hear traffic, something which is quite rare in residential England, people tell me. The peacefulness of the location is the first thing visitors remark on when they get to our house—(and the house too is peaceful, much prayed over!)

* * *

When we moved to England from the US we were worried about what housing we could afford. We had a beautiful house in the US, but in 2006 when we were house-hunting, English houseprices  were 4-5 times what American houseprices were. (I don’t know what the recession has done to property values in both countries). I do know that our large, beautiful house in beautiful Kingsmill on the James, a posh, gated community would buy a small, modest house, probably a semi-detached one, in Oxford.

I felt I needed peace, quiet, solitude, space. Time to start praying.

                                                                           * * *

I had a specific prayer list for the house I wanted, and I drew it up in 2004, and consistently prayed for that house from 2004 until we bought it in 2006. I had read a book by Glenn Clarke called I will Lift up my Eyes, which mentions the importance of specific prayer.

So I made a dream big list of ten things I wanted—at least an acre (but more really) to have a huge garden; a separate detached house or apartment or cottage in that acre  in which I could go and write (the kids were both under 10 when I started praying); a pond or ponds; a stone wall with roses growing on it; a stream around the garden.

We looked at one house which met some of those criteria, but it was in one of the worst parts of Oxford. A doctor friend of house told us that all the stuff was stolen from the ambulance while he went in to make a house call. And the way some of the people there looked at us made us scared. So we didn’t look at it again, even though the house we looked at had a “holy” well mentioned in the Domesday Book, how cool is that?

                                                                                 * * *

When I saw a pictures of the second house, I was in love, and knew that this was it. It had an apartment in the grounds in which I write, two ponds, an old orchard, a vegetable garden. And even a stone wall with roses growing up on it. Beautiful, well-maintained. Wow. So exactly what I had been praying for. And an acre and a half of a garden!!

And here’s a recent picture, though it’s far bigger now since we’ve built a 30 sq. metre conservatory

It’s flower-filled here after my birthday party!

Of course, we couldn’t afford it—not at all, and I bravely and foolishly told Roy I could come up with some business ideas to pay the mortgage. (All our disposable income pretty much went on the girls school fees then!)

And, what a journey that was, starting a business with no business background whatsoever—in being thrown out of my depth and so having to learn  to listen to God, in learning to think big, in learning to take risks, in being creative. In learning that nothing is impossible with God.

We’ve often thought we were foolish to blithely buy a house we couldn’t then afford. We bought it through an independent mortgage broker in 2006, who filled up the self-certified mortgage form for us,  while being as wildly optimtistic and imaginative as Perrault or Grimm.

If the business hadn’t taken off, we might well have lost the house (or pulled the girls from school. We’d have done the latter, though some of our friends who had children in the same school, said they’d rather lose their houses). The credit crunch and recession was built on this kind of lending, with the emotions leading, reason following up in the dejected rear-guard.

                                                                               * * *

But for now, we live in the quiet country, perfect for someone like me and Roy who basically want to be contemplatives in the world.

And we live in the dream house, or the house that prayer provided.

And I have paid the price, in four and a half hard, very overwhelming years in which I put my calling to write on the shelf, and published other people’s books, and put my nose to the grindstone to pay for my dream house, and the dream education for the girls.

I’ve learnt learned that

yes, dreams do come true,

and yes, it is God who makes them come true,

and yes, he often makes them come true, as a free gift, because he loves us,

and yes, he sometimes lets them come true though our blood, sweat, toil and tears, because a life too easy makes us flabby, physically, mentally and spiritually!

The Shop Of Ghosts by G. K. Chesterton

Nearly all the best and most precious things in the universe you can get for a halfpenny. I make an exception, of course, of the sun, the moon, the earth, people, stars, thunderstorms, and such trifles. You can get them for nothing. Also I make an exception of another thing, which I am not allowed to mention in this paper, and of which the lowest price is a penny halfpenny. But the general principle will be at once apparent. In the street behind me, for instance, you can now get a ride on an electric tram for a halfpenny. To be on an electric tram is to be on a flying castle in a fairy tale. You can get quite a large number of brightly coloured sweets for a halfpenny. Also you can get the chance of reading this article for a halfpenny; along, of course, with other and irrelevant matter.

But if you want to see what a vast and bewildering array of valuable things you can get at a halfpenny each you should do as I was doing last night. I was gluing my nose against the glass of a very small and dimly lit toy shop in one of the greyest and leanest of the streets of Battersea. But dim as was that square of light, it was filled (as a child once said to me) with all the colours God ever made. Those toys of the poor were like the children who buy them; they were all dirty; but they were all bright. For my part, I think brightness more important than cleanliness; since the first is of the soul, and the second of the body. You must excuse me; I am a democrat; I know I am out of fashion in the modern world.

. . . . .

As I looked at that palace of pigmy wonders, at small green omnibuses, at small blue elephants, at small black dolls, and small red Noah’s arks, I must have fallen into some sort of unnatural trance. That lit shop-window became like the brilliantly lit stage when one is watching some highly coloured comedy. I forgot the grey houses and the grimy people behind me as one forgets the dark galleries and the dim crowds at a theatre. It seemed as if the little objects behind the glass were small, not because they were toys, but because they were objects far away. The green omnibus was really a green omnibus, a green Bayswater omnibus, passing across some huge desert on its ordinary way to Bayswater. The blue elephant was no longer blue with paint; he was blue with distance. The black doll was really a negro relieved against passionate tropic foliage in the land where every weed is flaming and only man is black. The red Noah’s ark was really the enormous ship of earthly salvation riding on the rain-swollen sea, red in the first morning of hope.

Every one, I suppose, knows such stunning instants of abstraction, such brilliant blanks in the mind. In such moments one can see the face of one’s own best friend as an unmeaning pattern of spectacles or moustaches. They are commonly marked by the two signs of the slowness of their growth and the suddenness of their termination. The return to real thinking is often as abrupt as bumping into a man. Very often indeed (in my case) it is bumping into a man. But in any case the awakening is always emphatic and, generally speaking, it is always complete. Now, in this case, I did come back with a shock of sanity to the consciousness that I was, after all, only staring into a dingy little toy-shop; but in some strange way the mental cure did not seem to be final. There was still in my mind an unmanageable something that told me that I had strayed into some odd atmosphere, or that I had already done some odd thing. I felt as if I had worked a miracle or committed a sin. It was as if I had at any rate, stepped across some border in the soul.

To shake off this dangerous and dreamy sense I went into the shop and tried to buy wooden soldiers. The man in the shop was very old and broken, with confused white hair covering his head and half his face, hair so startlingly white that it looked almost artificial. Yet though he was senile and even sick, there was nothing of suffering in his eyes; he looked rather as if he were gradually falling asleep in a not unkindly decay. He gave me the wooden soldiers, but when I put down the money he did not at first seem to see it; then he blinked at it feebly, and then he pushed it feebly away.

“No, no,” he said vaguely. “I never have. I never have. We are rather old-fashioned here.”

“Not taking money,” I replied, “seems to me more like an uncommonly new fashion than an old one.”

“I never have,” said the old man, blinking and blowing his nose; “I’ve always given presents. I’m too old to stop.”

“Good heavens!” I said. “What can you mean? Why, you might be Father Christmas.”

“I am Father Christmas,” he said apologetically, and blew his nose again.

The lamps could not have been lighted yet in the street outside. At any rate, I could see nothing against the darkness but the shining shop-window. There were no sounds of steps or voices in the street; I might have strayed into some new and sunless world. But something had cut the chords of common sense, and I could not feel even surprise except sleepily. Something made me say, “You look ill, Father Christmas.”

“I am dying,” he said.

I did not speak, and it was he who spoke again.

“All the new people have left my shop. I cannot understand it. They seem to object to me on such curious and inconsistent sort of grounds, these scientific men, and these innovators. They say that I give people superstitions and make them too visionary; they say I give people sausages and make them too coarse. They say my heavenly parts are too heavenly; they say my earthly parts are too earthly; I don’t know what they want, I’m sure. How can heavenly things be too heavenly, or earthly things too earthly? How can one be too good, or too jolly? I don’t understand. But I understand one thing well enough. These modern people are living and I am dead.”

“You may be dead,” I replied. “You ought to know. But as for what they are doing, do not call it living.”

. . . . .

A silence fell suddenly between us which I somehow expected to be unbroken. But it had not fallen for more than a few seconds when, in the utter stillness, I distinctly heard a very rapid step coming nearer and nearer along the street. The next moment a figure flung itself into the shop and stood framed in the doorway. He wore a large white hat tilted back as if in impatience; he had tight black old-fashioned pantaloons, a gaudy old-fashioned stock and waistcoat, and an old fantastic coat. He had large, wide-open, luminous eyes like those of an arresting actor; he had a pale, nervous face, and a fringe of beard. He took in the shop and the old man in a look that seemed literally a flash and uttered the exclamation of a man utterly staggered.

“Good lord!” he cried out; “it can’t be you! It isn’t you! I came to ask where your grave was.”

“I’m not dead yet, Mr. Dickens,” said the old gentleman, with a feeble smile; “but I’m dying,” he hastened to add reassuringly.

“But, dash it all, you were dying in my time,” said Mr. Charles Dickens with animation; “and you don’t look a day older.”

“I’ve felt like this for a long time,” said Father Christmas.

Mr. Dickens turned his back and put his head out of the door into the darkness.

“Dick,” he roared at the top of his voice; “he’s still alive.”

. . . . .

Another shadow darkened the doorway, and a much larger and more full-blooded gentleman in an enormous periwig came in, fanning his flushed face with a military hat of the cut of Queen Anne. He carried his head well back like a soldier, and his hot face had even a look of arrogance, which was suddenly contradicted by his eyes, which were literally as humble as a dog’s. His sword made a great clatter, as if the shop were too small for it.

“Indeed,” said Sir Richard Steele, “’tis a most prodigious matter, for the man was dying when I wrote about Sir Roger de Coverley and his Christmas Day.”

My senses were growing dimmer and the room darker. It seemed to be filled with newcomers.

“It hath ever been understood,” said a burly man, who carried his head humorously and obstinately a little on one side–I think he was Ben Jonson–“It hath ever been understood, consule Jacobo, under our King James and her late Majesty, that such good and hearty customs were fallen sick, and like to pass from the world. This grey beard most surely was no lustier when I knew him than now.”

And I also thought I heard a green-clad man, like Robin Hood, say in some mixed Norman French, “But I saw the man dying.”

“I have felt like this a long time,” said Father Christmas, in his feeble way again.

Mr. Charles Dickens suddenly leant across to him.

“Since when?” he asked. “Since you were born?”

“Yes,” said the old man, and sank shaking into a chair. “I have been always dying.”

Mr. Dickens took off his hat with a flourish like a man calling a mob to rise.

“I understand it now,” he cried, “you will never die.”