User contributions are not fact checked and do not represent the official position of Historic England. I took the liberty, when I was passing, of walking up the dear old drive, and I saw that you are running your car. com 20020122 Like the Harry Potter series, Merry Hall will have you clamoring for more if you're the least bit interested in how the English have fun and garden too. Sometimes this realization comes by chance; he may be standing in a Georgian doorway, and the sun may shine on it, and he may look up and suddenly perceive that he is standing in a frame that is as perfect as a melody by Mozart.

First in a trilogy, "Merry Hall" is the account of the restoration of a house and garden in post-war England.

Those rare moments when he either admits the interlopers into his home or finds they’ve breeched the gates themselves, he is of course subjected to a passive aggressive lecture criticizing all the changes he has made. A later trilogy written between 1951 and 1956 documents his travails renovating Merry Hall (Meadowstream), a Georgian manor house in Agates Lane, Ashtead, Surrey, where Nichols lived from 1946 to 1956. As an enthusiastic Downton Abbey fan and all things English, I'm not surprised I found Merry Hall humorous and entertaining. Whilst Nichol's memoirs are rooted in reality, he always brings to them a sense of the absurd, the eccentric and the fantastical, ensuring that they are as readable as they are informative. I was somewhat consoled by the thought that with so much sunlight and regular rain, it's no wonder the entire country is one big garden.

I happened to be passing Merry Hall the other day and ventured to peep through the hedge, and I noticed that the kitchen garden was brimming with the most wonderful vegetables.

The garden was surrounded by a variegated holly hedge which Beverley and his partner, Cyril got rid of by setting fire to it.