It was one of those defining moments when everything changes. Until then I had led a fairly rootless existence, but I had just lost my newborn son. Our search for a graveyard led us to Capel Curig. My husband Simon, whom I had met during a production of Macbeth — in a prison where he was serving nine years for armed robbery — had spent a happy time in the village as a boy.
My father was worried: I needed to bury a child, but did that call for buying an abandoned church to watch over the grave? I knew it might help fill the emptiness, however, and the protective stronghold of sandstone and brick was soon mine, for £54,000. I chose to ignore the lack of electricity and plumbing and the water running in streams down the walls. We camped amid the pews, an ex-con and a hugely pregnant aristocrat waddling backwards and forwards to the public loos with her sponge bag. Many friends thought that, addled by grief, I might as well be burying myself in Siberia.
But eventually I felt confident enough to borrow £100,000 and after searching for a builder, found myself with a choice between two. A chauvinistic one-man band unable to discuss anything construction-related with a woman, and some upmarket crooks (I learnt later). I chose the more sophisticated outfit, but almost immediately an acrimonious dispute halted work. It’s hard to convince some people they are years too late to get their hands on the family money. At last count, the project has already swallowed £280,000 — although with the mud bath outside the front door, the forlornly neglected timber and gaping holes where windows should be, it doesn’t look it.
After a series of disasters with builders, Simon decided he would do the work himself, but rapidly plummeted into depression and cheered himself up by sleeping with the au pair. I didn’t regard his tonic so blithely and we split up, tried again, split up and tried again.
And that was the story so far. But life has a way of taking you by surprise, doesn’t it? At first, life at the church was pretty uneventful. Salvaging our marriage took priority, and I was absurdly thankful for the sporadic days when a power tool was picked up (usually by our four-year-old son).
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But I snapped when Simon said he was too busy to attend a meeting with the planners at Snowdonia national park. Whenever I have to see them, a blanket of fear and anxiety descends, as relations between us are hardly congenial.
So my husband and I were mid-argument when a polite chap came round. He explained that he was also renovating a chapel and had popped over to compare notes.
The handsome stranger was oblivious to the tension and began talking mullioned windows. As he strode around calculating weight-bearing loads, he seemed irresistible. I had my children and four others clinging to my leg, my hair was wildly askew and my clothes were smeared with jam: every inch the harassed earth mother. Ignoring the din, I fluttered my eyelashes to convey that I was approachable, knowledgeable and — under the jam — devastatingly attractive. He soon zoomed off in his convertible.
But a few weeks later he came back. I was home alone and we exchanged life stories over coffee. He’d spent the past 20 years yachting around the world. Why give that up for the noose of renovation, I wondered? However, he seemed happy to look over my plans and that, coupled with workmanlike builder’s hands and nice Italian shoes, made my heart skip. He said he’d help, and attempting nonchalance, I breathlessly replied: “That would be lovely.”
Lady Alice Douglas’s column on her church renovation will appear fortnightly in Home