Number Twenty-Eight

This piece was written from a prompt about place from Oxford Centre for Life - Writing.

From their suggestions I've chosen a place to which you will never, or can never, return.

There is a word in Irish: “cumha” which has many meanings depending on the context: nostalgia, loneliness, longing, homesickness, sorrow (specifically at parting.) A friend told me that it is similar to the Welsh word “hiraeth” which is similarly untranslatable; the word containing strata of implied feeling, implying not just that something or someone is longed for but that the longing can never be assuaged.

My grandmother’s house was sold after her death in 1983. My mother and her remaining siblings had been consulted about the sale, as my grandmother’s will had included a very tactfully worded request. “…that, if it is agreeable by the majority, the house be sold and the proceeds used to allow for the purchase of separate dwellings for my daughters with whom I still reside in the aforementioned property.” Had my grandmother not been a master of grace and tact, that sentence would have ended: “because if that doesn’t happen, they will probably end up killing each other.” My middle-aged, unmarried aunts had a relationship alarmingly similar to the sisters in the film “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” and likely survived only because they both worked full-time and the house was large enough to prevent them from crossing paths too regularly. However, it was accepted that this area was likely to reduce because the house was beginning to do what all old, large houses do without regular financial investment: fall to bits. It had stood in a state of shabby gentility for decades and despite the house-proud nature of both my aunts, there was little that could be done cheaply to hold back the effects of the elements on its exterior and only so much that cathedral-grade furniture wax could do for its interior. Even that - with its pleasing aroma of sanctity - could not miraculously repel the advancing hordes of woodworm voraciously chewing through the oak wainscoting. It had once been suggested that the wainscoting could simply be removed, but apparently this was met with agreement from one aunt and a theatrical gasp of horror from the other. There was not to be a majority decision, as my dissenting aunt felt her elderly and ailing mother should not be bothered with something like this. The wainscoting stayed. “For want of a nail…” my mother said to me. “For want of a nail?” I asked, pretty sure that from the sound of it, the situation required more than one nail to put right. “The kingdom was lost” said my mother with unusually grim finality.

The decision to allow the warring sisters the proceeds of the house was a unanimous one. My mother had lost her husband and her stepmother 10 days apart, so I don’t think she had the strength to mourn the loss of her family home as well.  I don’t remember her saying much about it. We didn’t know it then, but my grandmother’s funeral was the last time any of my immediate family would set foot in the house. The house sold quickly; my older aunt Eileen decamped to another county to be closer to her beloved Wicklow mountains and rivers and Sheila bought a house near her former home; a modern build into which she shoe-horned most of the gigantic Victorian furniture; a beautifully wrought overmantle mirror loomed gothically over her tiny living room fireplace, threatening death from above every time so much as a box of matches was removed from the mantelpiece. She seemed happy in her new house though, relieved of the increasingly demanding care of an elderly house beset by so many ailments. My siblings and I mourned our father, our grandmother and our grandmother’s house quietly, reminiscing occasionally, out of our mother’s earshot.

In January of this year a colleague who drove past the house every day on her way to work told me that the house had gone on the market. I looked it up and there it was, listed on an online site.

The site had culled the description from the National Archive of Architectural Heritage website, on which it is also listed. “Terraced three-bay two-storey former house over raised basement, built c.1850…now converted to apartments. Brown brick laid in Flemish bond to ground and first floor. Replacement uPVC windows and replacement door and fanlight. Of particular interest are the ornate cast-iron boundary railings, the work of a skilled artisan.”

There were hints of the current state of the house in that description, quietly heart-breaking only to conservationists and anyone who personally remembered the house. I already knew that “now converted into apartments” was polite, formal, architect - speak for “mucked around with in order to jam in as many paying tenants as possible.” Reading “replacement uPVC windows” made me set my jaw, as I remember the perennial battle my aunts had gone through trying to get permission to replace the draughty - and when the wind blew in a certain direction - very leaky original sash windows. They never were granted permission to change them. The fanlight had accidentally been irreparably broken by a badly aimed sling-shot by one of my uncles in 1946, a month after my grandfather died - which had caused quite a row at the time - but at least it meant that it had been spared being ripped out and sold by the new owner.

I clicked on the photos of the interior. It was shockingly disorientating; where was the rest of the hall? Where was the drawing room, aka the “good sitting room”? – the location of all momentous announcements and occasional terse dressing - downs? I couldn't even tell at what room I was looking.  All the plaster mouldings, the fireplaces and yes, the wainscoting, were all gone. It turned out too, that the particularly interesting ornate cast-iron boundary railings were also gone.

And it hadn't - for some reason - occurred to me that the back garden would also be gone; its beautiful, formal yet friendly flower beds and shrubs now buried under a horribly asymmetrical, jumbly extension. This was what made my eyes prickle. That garden was wondrous. The older of my two aunts used to take me by the hand and we'd walk around while she'd tell me the names of plants – forsythia, aquilegia, cyclamen, and of birds: blue tit, mistle thrush, goldcrest; a seasonally changing litany of living things. That experience and the many hours I spent there, playing hide and seek in its seemingly endless nooks and leafy alcoves has given me a life - long love of gardens. And of having my hand held.

“Memory is a seamstress, and a capricious one at that” wrote Virginia Woolf. I am often struck by that perfect analogy, how we stitch together the frayed pieces and sometimes embroider others, occasionally replacing panels of fabric entirely. I misremember lots of things - plots of books, (embarrassingly, though I always recall the atmosphere, and often the weather) the orientation of rooms in the house in which I lived until I was 5 - but I remember vividly my grandmother's house and garden. The beautiful Flemish bond brickwork of that garden wall, perfectly even except for one brick which inexplicably protruded about 2 inches from the rest, and the dark green summer house which was built in the late 1930s and was still standing - miraculously immaculate - in the early 1980s. It had long panels of glass in the doors, equally as long as the door panels beneath them. It was painted annually - the same shade of racing green. At some point the key was lost and no one could bring themselves to break the door or the glass. And so it remained locked, literally and also in time, its wide benches covered in the neatly stacked sacks used to protect plants from frost. There is something burned into my mind about those doors: on the beautifully made and still - tight joints were stark, white, striated patterns that radiated in a perfectly symmetrical sunburst. Despite its annual painting, those lines returned every summer. The summer house had its own seasonality - now part of its make-up. And now, though it's gone - of mine.

It strikes me now, that at 50 years of age, I am one of the last few people who will remember that house as it was designed. There are photographs: my mother as a small child, smiling shyly on her father’s knee, her dark ringlets shining in the sun, my grandmother - ever the Victorian - looking annoyed at having her photo taken whilst she was still in her apron, my uncles, lined up in their tennis whites, looking handsome and vital, me smiling mischievously in the garden in front of the living room window, my aunt laughing uproariously on her sun lounger, my older aunt, serenely beautiful in her chic 1950s dress and sunglasses. I have a Woburn Abbey rose in my front garden, transplanted from that back garden.  I am fairly confident that the façade will endure without further molestation. The interior may even be made over to resemble its original lay-out. But I’m not sure it will ever have that atmosphere again. Some things can’t be replaced.

I sometimes wonder if it is haunted now; if a kindly looking woman is ever seen standing by the front door looking for something that is, to her, bewilderingly no longer there: the list of the eight names of her children - those she bore and those to whom she acted in loco parentis after she married their widowed father, the list which she ticked off every night so she could lock the heavy, six-panelled front door for the night. Or maybe the sound of laughter is heard by the living room window which faced the back garden: a ghostly replay of my father – who was an unpredictable mix of the  saturnine and the jovial – laughing, as I’d never heard him laugh before, because my distinctly un-poetic aunt Sheila had excitedly exclaimed, almost sang: “My lord! Look! There is a mistle-thrush in the snowy pyracantha!” - the sound of her laughter and his, mingling, calling into being a long-lived family in-joke.

August 9th, 2020