Last Saturday my oldest friend C took advantage of a holiday vacated home and held a final hurrah at the house she grew up in; Farmfield. Her father, the legendary Bobby G, sadly passed away last summer and her mother, the glamorous Parisian Françoise, has accepted that Farmfield is too large for just her to be rattling around in and is shortly moving to a smaller home on the other side of Cambridge.
Farmfield is a stunning Georgian family home, with a beautifully landscaped garden, a koi carp pond and fields of barley to look out onto. It was Bobby G’s castle, his manor, his life and work, and, aside from the girls, his pride and joy.
The selling of Farmfield is not only the end of an era, but a poignant moment; Bobby G and Francoise were life long dear friends of my parents and I split my time growing up with C and her little sister N, between both our houses which were only a few hundred meters down the road from each other.
The most fun was had on the dirt track at the back of the house across the barley fields, where we would spend hours recreating Hollywood blockbusters with Bobby G’s camcorder. I’ll never forgive N for recording over ‘TopBike’ and ‘GirtonVille Horror’, if only to have been able to embarrass C and show them at her wedding.
C was obsessed with Jaws, and other shockingly bad 1980’s horror movies such as Amityville Horror. Before we discovered boys, insecurities, calories and cellulite, we would hole up in the den most weekends, scaring ourselves silly watching terrible special effects, indulging in pizza, homemade waffles and tubs of Häagen-Dazs.
As we grew older, the irony of C’s catholic school upbringing was never lost on me and to this day we will never know if Bobby G suspected, or even knew of, her scaling the ivy at the back of the house late at night, to meet Alex Baggaley and co. at the bottom of the garden for midnight walks… and the rest…. Or the party that ended up in a squirty cream fight and frantic industrial cleaning the next day before C’s parents returned from France. I like to think he was secretly proud of her adventurous spirit, thinking she was a chip off the old block, even if he would never admit it himself.
In more recent years, festive drinks at Farmfield always guaranteed a headache on Christmas Day morning, with the perfect hosts; Françoise bustling around the kitchen magicing up incredible canapés and Bobby G making sure everyone had a bottomless glass of champagne. Bobby G loved his music and early on in the evening, everyone would be dancing in the living room to anything from The Killers to The Kinks on his iTunes, way before digital music was accepted by anyone of his generation.
Sitting around my parent’s kitchen table the night after last week’s party, nursing a sore head of my own, we were swapping stories of Farmfield, my parents tickled at the thought of us now enjoying the same experiences they had a whole generation earlier; drunk adults dancing in their stilettos around the living room and ignoring the kids peeking through the banisters. Which lead to my dad confessing one particularly memorable evening the night before we were due to go on a family holiday to Cornwall. The red wine was flowing in excess at Farmfield and the next morning, after no doubt staggering back down the Huntingdon Road at some ungodly hour to release the babysitter, my poor mum ended up having to drive the six hours to Cornwall, with a very hung-over dad (who, by my calculations, couldn’t have been much older than I am now) and two kids in the back.
But what I most enjoyed about The Last Party, was watching C’s two children; E (7) and O (4), whom Bobby G doted over, enjoying the same run of the garden as we had all those years ago when C’s husband M reversed the small garden tractor out of the garage and the kids squealed with delight piling in the back of the trailer and being driven around the garden. At a top speed of say, 2mph.
C has promised to dig out the exact same photo of her 7th birthday with the four of us piled in the back; the biggest grins on our faces and our whole lives ahead of us. I can’t wait to see it again and relive those happy times.
Bobby G; a legend in your own time. You gave us these memories, this one’s for you.
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