Camilla bought their place in the Burnhams when she discovered she was pregnant with her third child – following a heavy après sesh at La Folie Douce in Megève. Realising they’d never ski again as a family of four, and with memories of the Costa Smeralda fading like an over-exposed Polaroid, she convinced Johnnie that getting a holiday cottage made financial sense. ‘Because they’re virtually giving away buy-to-let mortgages.’ And as Kirsty Allsopp, who went to the same school as Camilla but was at least ten years older, always says, it’s an income stream.
With Cornwall getting a bit common and the Freuds colonising Suffolk, Camilla opts for windswept Norfolk, picturing the kids dressed in matching miniature fishermen’s smocks by knapped flint walls while hollyhocks bob gently about their heads.
The cottage was an impulse buy, bought unseen, fuelled by raging first trimester hormones and a ghastly estate agent who told her it was going to best and final offers. When she freaked that they were overpaying, Johnnie rolled his eyes behind the Financial Times and told her to pull herself together.
And so, for just shy of half-a-mill, they acquired ‘Curlew’s Nest’ (swiftly renamed the more U ‘Curlew’s’), a three-and-half bedroom bolthole with shared septic tank on the wrong side of a coastal A-road to the village high street and quay.
While others flex Puglian Trullis on Instagram, Camilla flexes crabbing and Saltwater sandals, declaims the joys of smoked fish from the deli to her 57 followers and hints that she knows Lady Glenconner – ‘Oh yes, she’s only in the next village, just the best fun’. (She makes the whole family go to church in Burnham Thorpe after seeing her mention on The Graham Norton Show that she sang in the choir there.)
Yes, one of the kids would always vomit on the endless winding lanes on the drive down from Queen’s Park, and they spent an awful lot of time at the Sea Life Centre in Hunstanton when it rained, which was quite often. The relaxed weekends she’d envisaged with friends were rather fraught, as guests had to sleep on the self-deflating airbed in the sitting room, the hot water always ran out and Camilla would have a nervous breakdown trying to cook for ten in the galley kitchen while Johnnie took everyone off to The Anchor. A visiting child would invariably wet the one bed missing a mattress protector. (Privately, Curlew’s is known as ‘The Grottage’ amongst those who’ve experienced Camilla’s hospitality.)
As the kids grow and acquire wetsuits and paddle boards, they really need a wet room but there’s no space and so there’s always a sulphurous tang in the house. She assumes it’s the mud flats, but then again, it might be from the shared septic tank.
And they never did realise any rental income, not after the horrible review that cow left her on Air BnB. Camilla had to go online to refute it: ‘Yes, the mattress was stained, but it didn’t smell.’ But with lockdown, Curlew’s comes into its own. Camilla posts pics of big, blue East Anglian skies with the hashtags #blissful and #blessed. And no, the locals didn’t chase them out with pitchforks, although someone did scratch the bonnet of her Range Rover Velar (she suspects one of the horrible retirees from the East Midlands with their cockapoos and ‘pardons’).
As for an income stream, Curlew’s has been remortgaged so many times, to keep Inigo & co at St Semolina’s, they’re almost in negative equity. Now Johnnie is muttering about having to pull them out and send them to the – shudder – local academy (Miss Marcia Blaine’s it isn’t) – it might be time to sell up, though she hasn’t noticed Johnnie scrimping on his annual boys’ trip to St Anton.
Since the bloody district council jumped on the 100 per cent increase for second homes, they’re paying north of £500 a month council tax. With the hike in the mortgage and bills, it would probably be cheaper to take a villa in Provence. At least it would stop the children’s whining. Inigo now flat-out refuses to come, while the girls trail sullenly along the high street, bemoaning the lack of bubble tea shops and wi-fi with which to watch make-up contouring videos on TikTok with Camilla’s expensive Charlotte Tilbury products. Persephone shrieks that she’ll throw herself off the quay if they make her go to a state school. Only little Merlin still enjoys the crabbing, but he will only wear Crocs not nice sandals, which don’t work so well for the Instagram shots.
During one of these painful perambulations, Camilla can’t help but clock that every other cottage seems to be for sale. But the Grottage has to go, and as she is clearing up for viewings after Inigo’s end-of-A-Levels weekend with his mates, she discovers a used condom while stripping one of the stained mattresses. Camilla feels a fierce spurt of maternal pride as she drops it into a binbag full of empty BuzzBallz and funny-smelling cigarette butts.
On the way home, Merlin vomits at the turn-off to the Fakenham road and they have to drive the remaining two-and-a-half hours with all the windows down. And it’s raining again.
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