Wealden Times | WT262 | March 2024 | Kitchen & Bathroom Supplement inside

Above left: Sarah Jane’s office, where she
writes her songs Above right: A corner
of the sitting room is home to part of the
couple’s record collection and a copper
sculpture made by Sarah Jane’s sister in
law, Adaesi Ukairo Right: A painting
by Mark’s father, artist Charles Pulsford,
hangs above a sideboard in the perfect
tones of green for the sitting room
Until Sarah Jane’s itchy feet
reactivated. “Four years ago I turned 60,
which is a time for reflection,” she says.
“I felt like I’d met my people when I
lived in Hastings before and I wanted to
come back. Mark agreed to the move.
“We saw this house just as we
put Mark’s place on the market and
it was perfect for us. It had been
converted from a shop and had this
big front room, ideal as a gallery for
Mark’s work and for performance, for
mine. Upstairs there was an en suite
bedroom all ready for Airbnb, which
was something else we wanted.”
But then, as so often with the
heartbreaking ins and outs of property
transactions, the house was suddenly
taken off the market. They kept looking.
“We looked at 50 properties and then
three months later I had a call from the
estate agent, saying this one was back on
the market and I was able to tell them
that we’d had an offer on our house
the previous day. So we immediately
offered the asking price to secure it.”
With its former uses first as a pub –
“back in the day when there was one on
every corner” – and then as a shop,
priceless-magazines.com 32