The owner and resident of one of the two oldest, continually inhabited houses in Britain tells the story of her mother-in-law’s epic restoration of the 900-year-old home to its original Norman state. The home is now a beautiful, tangible record of times past, and a tourist attraction in eastern England.
“For hundreds of years of its life, it was lived in by tenants,” Diana, 82, told The Epoch Times. “Not very often was it lived in by the owner, so people didn’t change the house at all; they didn’t spend money on it as it wasn’t theirs.”
Lucy’s dedication to restoring the manor’s original structure is something that resonated with her daughter-in-law. The only significant changes that remain are a beam erected in the 1300s, and electricity installed in the late 1930s.
“[There are] not many Norman houses left,” Diana said. “You can imagine people coming in through the front door, you can imagine them sitting on the windowsill if they were wanting to do anything that needed light, because, of course, they had no lights. That’s what makes it so unique, that it has not changed.”
Born in 1892 in Southport, Lancashire, Lucy was one of six children. After losing her father at 7, she and a sister were sent to the south of England to finish school in hopes of neutralizing their northern accents. “In those days, you had to speak pure English with no accent,” said Diana.
Lucy studied English literature at Somerville College in Oxford until World War I broke out. She left college to train as a nurse and spent the war years tending to patients at a military hospital in France. She married a childhood friend, Harold Boston, at the end of the war and the couple made their home in Liverpool. But Lucy was devastated when Harold left her in 1935. She fled to Europe to recover.
“She ended up living in Austria. And then it looked as if Hitler was going to take over Austria,” Diana recalled. “So she came back and lived in a flat in Cambridge, while she tried to find a house that was going to do her for the rest of her life. Somebody told her one day that there was a house in Hemingford for sale, so she got into a taxi and came straight out ... they got a very quick sale!”
Around 600 years after being built, it was doubled in size and made into a grand house with an elegant Georgian facade, a renovation that lasted just 70 years until a fire broke out in 1798. Diana said the “very thick” original stone walls protected the original structure.
Lucy first saw the manor many years before she bought it, while punting on the river with her brothers in 1916. Diana claims she fell in love and thought of it often.
After snapping up her beloved property some 24 years later, Lucy lent her unique skills to its restoration. A keen gardener and talented seamstress, she planted trees, irises, and roses in the manor’s two large gardens with the help of horticulturalist and rose expert Graham Stuart Thomas, and decorated the bedrooms with handmade quilts.
“During the war, she made simple patchworks. Everybody did; it was a way of using old clothes, really the beginning of recycling. She brought two patchwork bed covers, which she used on the beds upstairs, and discovered that they fitted exactly,” Diana said.
Lucy even made her name among artists for a unique design, named “Patchwork of the Crosses.”
Today, Diana continues to display Lucy’s work in the home and employs a gardener, Kevin, and his granddaughter to help with the upkeep of the gardens.
Diana says Lucy’s music room “hasn’t changed in 900 years” and going into that room is “like walking into the past.” “You can almost feel all those people who’ve been in that room before you, it’s very atmospheric,” she explained.
The room was of huge significance to Lucy, who used music while nursing in Austria to provide stress relief for patients and staffers. “She had with her a gramophone and some records, and she found a room that was usually empty,” said Diana. “She put up a notice that said, ‘On Wednesday evening at eight o’clock, I will be playing records in this room. Anybody is very welcome to come and listen.'”
And people did come, including those who were wounded and those who worked at the hospital with her. They all sat around mostly on the floor to enjoy calming classical music together. It worked so well that Lucy did the same thing back in England during World War II, holding music sessions at the manor for airmen from nearby RAF Wyton; it became so popular that Lucy hosted sessions twice a week.
Lucy’s gramophone remains in the music room to this day.
Describing the theme of the series to The Epoch Times, Diana said: “Lucy really wrote about what happened. In 1947, there was a very big flood, and a lot of houses in the village had water in them. She couldn’t get out of the house for a week, so that gave her the idea [of a little boy arriving] very dramatically in the dark, by boat, right up to the front door.
“Gradually, in the story, he meets and becomes friends with children who lived in the house 600 years ago.”
Diana said that Lucy, who passed away in 1990 at the age of 97, is remembered by her loved ones as a “knowledgeable” woman who loved to host parties, and loved music, poetry, and paintings. Today, Greene Knowe Manor is Diana’s home, and is open to visitors from all over the world.
Diana, who grew up on a farm in Kenya and moved to England at 18 to become a teacher, has four children and 10 grandchildren, all of whom enjoy her unique, historic abode. Upkeep is expensive, Diana conceded, so she hosts guided tours, summer performances in the garden, and employs an actor to tell ghost stories in the winter months.
“It’s a very welcoming house, people come from all over the world,” she said. “People care, people love to come here because of the atmosphere, which is extraordinary; people love seeing something so old [that was] lived in, because mostly, we only see ruins.”
