Our home for almost 30 years now, Old Bank House was built in 1875 by the Sheffield Union Bank (later the Midland, now the HongKong and Shanghai Banking Corporation!) to provide banking services to the growing market town of Penistone (‘Attendance on Thursdays, 11-3’).

Massively built, with 20-inch-thick walls and a heavy front door, it was clearly intended to project an aura of permanence and solidity. However, by the turn of the nineteenth century the bank had presumably outgrown its Pennine foothold, and moved (today’s HSBC until recently occupied an equally-impressive but somewhat larger premises 300 yards away in the town centre; it has now closed). Since then, it has mainly been a private home, although it did see a number of years’ service as a doctor’s surgery.

Having grown up in the nearby coalmining town of Barnsley I had developed a deep fondness for Penistone and particularly its so dramatic yet accessible surroundings. Notwithstanding emigration to Canada, occasional business trips and holidays frequently found me gravitating back to this little town of less than 10,000, with its cinema, Thursday market, ancient church and lovely setting; and as the walk from the railway station to my favourite pub took me along the High Street, I often used to wonder about the imposing building opposite the library. Looking at the elaborate white-painted woodwork of the gable ends and eaves, a full storey higher than the neighbouring houses, and imagining myself perched atop a shaky ladder with a paintpot and brush, I would thank my lucky stars that it wasn’t MY house!

Many years later, having uprooted my long-suffering Canadian wife and our young family, by a quirk of fate we found ourselves the proud possessors of that same stately pile, and Evelyn immediately initiated an ambitious campaign to put right the decades of benign neglect and botched DIY from which it had suffered. Six years, a whole horde of builders, plumbers, electricians and painters, and unnumbered cups of tea with milk and two sugars later, the work was largely done, mercifully without my having to climb more than the barest minimum of ladders . . .