As soon as she’d moved into the manor house, Auntie Annu bought a flock of sheep. A fence was put up on the posh side to make a pasture for them, and because the fountain pump was broken, the basin became their trough. The sheep were Auntie’s lawnmower. Their enclosure was moved to different sides of the house as necessary.

Extra Great Manor breathed. There was room for everything, everything went together and you could open the doors wide. The rooms looked cosy even without furniture, but every now and then Auntie would buy something, like a chandelier.

When winter came, the timber walls gradually surren-dered to the chill. The windows frosted over, though there was lichen between the panes. It was cold in the manor house. Auntie closed off most of the rooms and retreated to live in one downstairs corner, to avoid heating the whole house. She made up a winter bed for herself in the Yellow Room and lived just there and in the kitchen. You went into the house via the kitchen door. The Red Hall, the other downstairs rooms and the upstairs became a cold store. Auntie Annu sealed the doors with wool and taped up any gaps. Finally, she hung woollen blankets and old quilts in front of the doors and carried all the wool rugs into the Yellow Room.

People said Auntie was crazy to live in a place like that in winter without proper heating. She should install a heating system, or at least hire a caretaker to clear the snow. But Auntie liked heating up the tiled stoves, and claimed it was handy to be able to store milk on the floor.

In spring, the manor house groaned and creaked. The warmth brought the timbers to life and got the house’s blood circulating. It sounded as if someone were walking about all the time. This didn’t scare Auntie Annu. ‘Extra Great Manor is just stretching its limbs,’ she’d say. The groaning and creaking went on till warmth spread throughout the structure. Then the house settled down and the sound of steps upstairs went away.

When a house is young, you have to look after it as if it were a child. It needs adjusting, patching up, care and main-tenance. But when a house is, say, two hundred years old, it can look after itself. Everything that’s inclined to rot has already rotted. Everything that’s inclined to sink and split has already sunk and split. You just have to live in it nicely, which means living as people have lived there before.