Boys On Bicycles and Lathom Hall

We had no idea when we clambered into Lathom Hall as fourteen year old schoolboys that we were trespassing in what was left of one of the “finest Palladian houses in the country”, as Catherine Ostler informed us in the Daily Mail last week.

We also didn’t know that the last Earl of Lathom had been a hopeless hedonist who held dodgy parties there, orgies, I suspect, where guests dressed up as babies and were wheeled about in prams. We wouldn’t have understood if we had known…and, to be honest, it still seems a pretty odd thing to do to me. And we had no idea that he’d had to sell the entire estate in 1925 to pay off his vast debts.

The only thing my friend John Rimmer and I knew when we cycled up the long drive to what remained of this grand country house in 1955 was that it represented a local Lancashire mystery that just had to be explored.

For two boys growing up in rural West Lancashire, the very name Lathom Hall was heavy with romance. This was where the Countess of Derby and her family had been besieged by Roundhead soldiers during the English Civil War in 1644, after which the original Lathom House, more of a castle really, had been torn down, stone by stone.

The house we crept into had been built on the same site in great Arcadian style eighty years later. Unfortunately, by the time we got there, the main building, along with the vast landscaped garden, a Gothic dairy and hunting lodge, had, once again, been flattened. Two large wings, however, still faced one another. One was already derelict and being used for storing farm equipment, but the other was probably in much the same state as when left by the money squandering earl.

I don’t remember how we got in. We wouldn’t have broken a window or anything, we weren’t delinquents, but somehow we found a way, possibly through the cellars. Then we nervously began to creep around this once elegant palace, with its high ceilings and elaborate cornices, each room leading on to the next.

It was the staircases that excited us most as we made our way, scared stiff, up the building through dusty, echoing bedrooms and on up through the attics to a little tower with a domed roof, that stood symmetrically identical to another on the facing wing.

And that was where we found our “treasure”, a couple of large, ornate copper fingers, bent and  twisted and lying in rubble, presumably all that was left of what had been a clock tower.

Technically, I suppose, we were stealing, but we didn’t think of that as we took the fingers home, polished them until they shone, and then put them in the museum I had in a room next to my bedroom.

This was how John and I spent our school holidays, one craze following another, as, the following year, we went digging for Roman coins in the banks of a stream not far from Lathom Hall.

There, knee deep in water, we’d spend days like gold prospectors, digging out the soil and silt before sieving it through a riddle all the time looking for the small, dull grey discs we knew to be denarii. Over several holidays, one freezing in the snow, we were rewarded with a haul of over thirty coins before we lost interest in that particular pursuit and took up caving.

We didn’t tell our parents much about that particular escapade, but, knowing that a network of tunnels had been dug in the sandstone rock a few miles away, we set out to explore. Attempts had been made over the years to block the entrance to the caves but by sliding on our stomachs into a crevice between the rocks we managed to get inside, and, with torches, scramble off into the pitch blackness.

I’d die of fear if asked to do that now, or if any of my children had been so foolish, and I was relieved to learn later that the entrance to the tunnels had been concreted over. But we were fifteen. It was exciting, more exciting than the chicken farm we attempted on another holiday, where most of the chickens died, or the mushroom business we tried which would probably have poisoned us had it worked.

I’m not one of those people who think that today’s teenagers are missing out on excitement, in that their lives are stuffed with computers and electronic toys, rather than the self generated adventures of my youth. John and I grew up in totally different times and circumstances, when there were an awful lot of bleak, rainy days, too, when we just didn’t know what to do. Teenagers will, in every age, find useful and exciting ways to spend their holidays if they want to.

I’m just grateful to have been young when two boys on bicycles could roam freely, in every sense of the word, through their holidays, following hobby after hobby. Those memories have never left me. In fact that day nervously creeping through the rooms of Lathom Hall turned up, slightly disguised, in a recent novel I wrote called Kill For Love, in which an investigative woman TV reporter breaks into a Palladian mansion, just as John and I did all those years ago.

As they say, memory is the best gallery of all, and jolly useful to a writer.

Footnote: Studying the area on Google Earth it looks to me as though the building John and I broke into is still standing, probably converted into swanky flats or offices now.

Kill For Love is available as an eBook on Amazon