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beans and wearing bandannas. Different games, different people. Never me
on my own. Always exploring.
    One
late afternoon I had been playing a particularly complex game in which I was an
ambulance, the ambulance driver, the doctor and the patient when I came to a
halt by the tracks. It had been hot all day and the river looked inviting. I
was too scared to swim but I put my bike down under a tree and stepped out on
to the shiny track. It hung over the water but the metal was still hot. Even
through my sandals. I took my time. I found if I was careful and balanced with
my arms I could make my way slowly across the river. The water was calm below
me and before I knew it I was into the woods over the other side. That was when
I saw the Burroughs House.
    I guess
it was beginning to fall down in those days. The world hadn’t yet gone
history-crazy, running around preserving everything more than ten years old in
aspic. The theme-parkization of the world hadn’t started yet. No one knew about
the past as a money spinner. The waterfront was so overgrown that I hadn’t seen
the building from the other side. It was breathtaking. I was ten. I didn’t
know about architecture but I knew that I had found a palace. What I didn’t
know was that it was an exotic Venetian palazzo, an Italian Renaissance villa.
To me, what stood before me was a Sleeping Beauty draped in ivy and long grass.
A princess’s place. They’ve made it into a museum now and not surprising. It
was incredible. Two hundred feet of terrace in green and white variegated
marble ran along the whole of the back of the building. Thirteen steps, the
width of the terrace, ran up to the enclosure of terracotta balustrades.
Between the terrace and the main house lay what was left of a formal Italianate
garden. The careful squares of grass had long since spread, tentacles of green
capturing the attention of the tiled walkways. A group of rather Bacchanalian
men with horns held up a long-rusted fountain. A statue of a fat man stood
above them in the middle of a half-shell, his weight sitting heavily on his
left buttock as he looked over his shoulder in a slightly camp manner.
    In the
evening sun the building seemed to be made entirely of gold. A cream edifice
with every inch of every corner picked out in gleaming terracotta brick. It was
an architectural fantasy. At once beautiful and barmy. It was part-Italian,
part-French Renaissance, part—baroque, part-art deco, part-madness. An American
whirlwind tour of Europe in one building. A kind of ‘If this is the east wing I
must be in Paris’ building.
    Above
my head an outside staircase rose to a sixty-foot-high square tower encased in coloured
glass and topped by brilliant red barrel tiles. Four Muses swathed in flowing
robes kept guard on each corner, watched over by a selection of cat and parrot
gargoyles. The coloured glass was repeated in all the Moorish windows of the
second floor and all along the western façade. The centre section of the house,
overlooking the gardens, had seven pairs of french doors glazed in a rainbow of
rich colour. Handmade bricks in shiny yellow, blue, green and ivory finishes
flung diamond patterns across the walls. Everything which could have been
filigreed or ornamented was. There was absolutely nothing plain about any of
it. I followed the building round to the front and found the door ajar. With
the idiocy of youth and made bold by loneliness, I entered.
    The
door opened straight on to an immense two-and-a-half-story roofed courtyard. I
was inside the tower. The central room rose to a coffered, cypress-wood ceiling
which framed the inner skylight of coloured glass. I could just see ornamental
paintings of mythological figures and signs of the zodiac which covered each
octagonal section of the ceiling. From the centre, a huge chandelier hung down
on a great iron chain, its loops of crystal suspended like a Folies Bergères
headdress. Spectrums of light rained down on the black-and-white-tiled