The home Heather loathed

13 April 2012

Of all the lurid allegations made by Heather Mills McCartney against her husband, there was one splinter of nastiness that lodged in the memory.

Towards the end of the 13-page legal document detailing a catalogue of alleged physical and verbal abuse, Heather told of an horrific incident during which she was forced to drag a semi-comatose, drunken Sir Paul up a flight of stairs.

She claimed that recent surgery had left her unable to wear her prosthetic leg. Instead, she was forced to crawl agonisingly upstairs on her hands and knees, displaying almost super-human strength.

Heather: he beat up Linda as well

It is a disturbing image - all the more extraordinary for its setting. For three decades, Sir Paul ,s rural home in the village of Peasmarsh, near Rye, East Sussex, had been his retreat from the glare of fame.

But for Heather, it had come to symbolise the darkest depths of her four-year marriage. For her, the sprawling farm was the setting of violent outbursts, threatening behaviour and demeaning verbal assaults. She even began telling friends that her husband - who famously never liked alcohol - developed a taste for Martinis.

According to one friend: "He'd have his first at 5pm and then get more and more morose and difficult with each one."

Even in the early days of their married life, it was clear Heather could never have fitted into Sir Paul's rural idyll. From the moment he bought the original 160-acre plot in 1975, he was determined his home should be the antithesis of everything he disliked about his own celebrity, and, presumably that of his second wife.

Street-wise style

For 30 years, Sir Paul has cherished his modest family home, so inextricably linked with memories of his first wife Linda. But Heather, with her taste for the high life and her dislike of playing second fiddle to her predecessor, grew to hate it with equal passion.

But what is it about Sir Paul's Sussex refuge and its history that so intoxicates him and repels Heather?

Blossom Wood Farm was no rambling English manor house. Early visitors had to traipse down a dirt track through woodland to get to a small weatherboard and glass construction with an oasthouse behind.

It soon became apparent that Sir Paul and Linda - who had married six years previously - were determined not to stand on ceremony. The Peasmarsh locals were used to seeing the couple around the village, dressed like hippy travellers in scruffy, crumpled clothing.

Linda became involved in village fetes and jumble sales, and the four McCartney children - Heather, from Linda's first marriage, Mary, Stella and James - were sent to the local comprehensive.

When the dilapidated cabin became too small to house their menagerie of cats, dogs and chickens, Paul set about building a bigger, four-bedroom house, which became known as Peasmarsh.

David Litchfield, an old friend and the former editor of Ritz magazine which Linda worked for, recalls: "While Paul was rich enough to hire a world-class architect and spare no expense in creating the ultimate in rural luxury, it wasn't his, or Linda's style.

"Instead, he sat down at the kitchen table and designed the family home himself - a rather plain, red brick house with no extravagant features." The new home reflected Sir Paul's determination to stay close to his working-class roots and, in the words of one acquaintance, appeared "like a glorified council house".

Everything about life at Peasmarsh reminded Heather of her grim past in the North East. She'd had to claw her way out of poverty and doesn ,t have the same sentimental feelings about working folk and their traditions.

It was at Peasmarsh, Heather claims, that Sir Paul demanded she prepare two dinners every night - one for their daughter Beatrice and, once she had gone to bed, another for the couple.

"Everything about it must have been at odds with her aggressive, street-wise style," says David Litchfield. "The spirit of Linda is built into the very fabric. When Heather came along she didn't want to stay at Peasmarsh," says another friend.

"It wasn't her. It wasn't chic or sophisticated. I think it was too in the middle of nowhere for her.

Increasingly desperate

"Most of the rooms were quite small, with wood fires and plain wooden floors, apart from the kitchen which was pretty big, with high ceilings and a flagstone floor. I remember there was a mug tree in the kitchen to hold all the mismatching mugs."

Another frequent guest adds: "Paul wanted a small house. Paul and Linda were close and wanted the family to be close too.

"The kitchen was Paul and Linda's favourite place ) it was the hub of all the activity. When they entertained it was always in the kitchen and always very relaxed."

This bohemian lack of extravagance reflected Paul and Linda ,s desire to give the children a grounded yet carefree environment in which to grow up.

Their Rolls-Royce was given up for a more practical Volvo estate. The rooms became littered with books and toys and the children often charged through the house with mud on their shoes, pursued by countless pets.

"It wasn't long before the interior of the house had developed a somewhat "rustic patina" says David Litchfield. "There was no specific style or period. I just remember lots of neutral colours and comfortable but mismatched furniture. Guitars were everywhere - leaning against the wall and hanging from it.

"Having abandoned all jewellery, make-up and leg shaving, Linda was in her element developing her role as a vegetarian earth mother.

"From around lunchtime, a strong smell of marijuana would pervade the house but there was never any evidence of alcohol. Only once in all the time I knew Paul did I ever see him drink and that was after some particularly stressful family crisis when we shared a bottle of Scotch."

Sir Paul began buying up chunks of surrounding farmland in an increasingly desperate bid to protect his privacy. The estate grew steadily from 160 to 933 acres, but the former Beatle was far from profligate, despite his £725million fortune. On occasion, he could seem almost parsimonious.

Nurturing environment

When a new sofa was delivered to the house, uncovered in white ticking, no one ever got around to upholstering it. Throughout the years, it became grubbier and grubbier, until it appeared grey in colour.

The McCartneys spent only money on things that were important to them. A recording studio was built for Paul and a paddock with hugely expensive underfloor heating for Shadow and Blanket, Linda ,s beloved Native American Indian Pinto ponies.

A later guest recalled a Van Gogh painting of a vase of irises hanging nonchalantly on the living room wall.

Peter Hodgson, 40, a taxi driver from Liverpool, was invited to Peasmarsh in 1995 after discovering an old recording of Paul and John Lennon performing as The Quarrymen - the skiffle band which preceded The Beatles - in his grandmother's attic.

"Walking into the recording studio felt like walking on to the set of Star Trek," he says. "He kept his original Hofner guitar from his Beatles days in a secret panel underneath the floor. There was a small circular hook that he pulled on and a bit of the floor came up, seamlessly.

"Underneath, there was this guitar, in a Samsonite case. He took it out and it still had the original Beatles playlist taped on the back. He handed it to me and said "Whatever you do, don't drop it. It's insured for £2million."

But while the farm reflected the best aspects of Sir Paul's character, it also gave some hint of his darker side. He could be a controlling man, determined not to give away any part of himself to public scrutiny.

In 1975, when he found a public footpath ran straight past his front door, he fought a successful legal battle to move it 150 yards down the front lawn.

He also became a near-obsessive hoarder, stashing his memorabilia in every corner of the Peasmarsh estate. One of his many outbuildings is said to be crammed with several racks hung with hundreds of clothing bags, containing nearly everything he has ever worn.

As Hodgson recalls: "Paul took me into this barn and beckoned me over to a rack of suitbags. He unzipped one in front of me and showed me his original Sergeant Pepper uniform. It was extraordinary - I think he even kept pairs of old socks."

Another guest remembers that the upstairs "den", situated on an open landing area, was hung with pictures of Forties showbusiness legend George Formby painted by Sir Paul's fellow Beatle George Harrison, and a selection of antique Elizabethan-era instruments.

"When Linda died of breast cancer in 1998, the easy-going, nurturing environment she had created at Peasmarsh provided the perfect refuge for a grieving Sir Paul.

War of attrition

"He never took down all the incredible pictures of Linda on the walls," says a close friend. "They are lovely pictures of Linda outside the house with baskets of local produce and animals at her feet looking so happy and at home."

But with the couple's grown-up children now pursuing their own successful careers, Sir Paul struck a solitary figure. He spent much of his time on his own, smoking his customary cannabis joints in the draughty sitting room.

Given his fragile mental state, it was perhaps unsurprising that he fell so swiftly in love with the vivacious former model Heather Mills, whom he met at an awards ceremony just a year after Linda's death.

But after their 2002 wedding, the newly-styled Lady McCartney did not take to the rough-and-ready charms of Peasmarsh and Paul's children certainly did not take to her, despite public displays of affection.

The couple moved to a separate farmhouse on the estate, across the valley from the original cottage, so that Heather would not feel too intimidated by Linda's memory.

Sir Paul even built her a timber lodge, complete with gym annexe, 200 yards from the farmhouse so that the couple would not be seen from the public footpath. He was later ordered to demolish it by the local council because it contravened planning regulations.

When this did not prove to her satisfaction, Sir Paul splashed out £2million on a seafront Art Deco house in Hove.

But when Heather gave birth to a daughter, Beatrice, in 2003, Sir Paul was keen that she should experience the free-spirited Peasmarsh upbringing his other children had so delighted in. Heather, however, was never content there.

When his grown-up children returned home, there were no more jolly get-togethers around the big dining table. They discovered a tense, aggressive atmosphere and in the place of their beloved mother Linda, a moody and resentful stepmother, painfully aware that she was the interloper.

But if Heather couldn't survive the family home, the marriage was doomed.

"Since their split, Paul has retired to Peasmarsh," says a friend. "He loves the privacy and he feels close to Linda there. He just spends hours driving round the estate in his Land Rover enjoying the calm of the countryside. It's where he's happiest."

And with the divorce battle rapidly escalating into a full-scale war of attrition, it seems that Sir Paul will want to spend even more time there over the coming months.

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