On weekends and during summer holidays, the Taylors would escape the hustle and bustle of London and retreat to their country home, Little Swallows, on the edge of Cranbrook, Kent. Little Swallows, a sixteenth-century gamekeeper’s lodge nestled on the Great Swifts estate, which belonged to Elizabeth’s godfather, Colonel Victor Cazalet, was named for the family of swallows that nested under the eaves outside Elizabeth’s bedroom window. (Much more cheerful than its previous moniker, “The Haunted House,” as it was known in the neighbourhood and in Jeffery Farnol’s 1910 novel, The Broad Highway!)

The house, which hadn’t been lived in for years, had no electricity or bathroom. The Taylors solved that problem by converting the dairy into a bathroom, and had water pumped from fifty miles away to make it functional. When it was complete, Elizabeth and her brother, Howard, carefully painted the letters of the alphabet on its Wedgwood blue floor.

“There was a fireplace in every room,” Elizabeth recalled in Nibbles and Me. “It was like going to bed in fairyland with the windows all wide open and the firelight flickering on the ceilings and walls, and outside even at night the birds would still sing.” The rooms, with their leaded casement windows, were furnished with antiques found at auction, including an old captain’s table and brass bedframes in the bedrooms. The old coal cellar was even converted into a pub, a wood-paneled room christened “Ye Olde Rat Hole,” where visitors could sit down on old beer kegs and order their drink of choice.

“It was so beautiful, like a little house out of a Walt Disney film nestled against a lovely woods that was almost like a bird sanctuary,” Elizabeth explained. “All year around the woods back of our house were carpeted with some kind of wild-flowers, except for just a few weeks during the winter.” Elizabeth loved nothing better than to ride her pony, Betty, a gift from Cazalet, over the Great Swifts estate. “There were hundreds of acres to roam over and a farm of sorts. My brother and I made pets of all the animals—pet rabbits, pet turtles, pet lambs, pet goats, pet chickens. It was my idea of real bliss.”

In addition to being a successful art dealer, Francis Taylor also seems to have had a green thumb. He spent a great deal of time cultivating a traditional English country garden at Little Swallows, planting herbaceous borders and elm, linden, and fruit trees. A stone fireplace was even transformed into a barbecue, ideal for preparing summer meals.