The house was like the one in The Time Machine at 100 years from ‘present’, boarded up with broken windows to the upper floors. A large fir tree had collapsed onto the lawn which had overgrown the shingle drive. I saw the boarded opening to the basement where this boy became a man and, no one coming, I stuffed the brakes on. Whatever was going to happen next, this place was on the verge of changing beyond recognition so I did what anyone would and reached for my camera. Nothing wrong with a couple of snaps, a small memento of a very special time.
Stupid camera, I thought, focusing on the twigs in the hedge instead of the house beyond. The drive used to be up here a bit, a gap in the hedge, there was a stone with the house number on it and a gate...oh, no gate. Heck, no one about, I’ll just step into the garden and get a good shot of the old place.
I loved this house, I still think of some aspects of layout and design when I plan the house I’d like to live in one day. I first visited when the double height extension had just been built, with the double garage undercroft. You still had to step over a radiator marking the old external wall to get into the new bit, it was zany, I was in love, and I loved it.
Once in the garden, a legitimate boundary had been crossed, the hairs stood up on my arms, despite the heat, and the blood started to whoosh in my ears. Here is the strange lamp post, like Narnia, and over there the monkey puzzle tree where we sat having tea shortly before setting off in our Landrover, for Africa. Over by the garage there was an inspection pit, where my girlfriend’s brother played mechanic under his little Lancia and there was the back door. There was the back door...
Stepping through the back door into the kitchen, I was no longer really sane. The past erupted out of the walls and up through the floor leaving unrecognisable detritus everywhere. A strange pile of what looked like sawdust but could be puke, or a giant fungus, occupied the centre of the floor. The coloured glass window through to the dining room was missing but the poppy painted tiles and red ceramic sinks were just as they were thirty years ago.
Through the opening to the dining room I could see the 1970s silver wall paper. I sat staring at this while my girlfriend’s moody mother once interrogated us, “I can see that you’re both unhappy,” she said. She was supposedly a child psychologist, I was dumbfounded.
Drawn into all of this, seemingly without a say, and remembering that all was not unadulterated happiness in this house – once her mother said the dell, which was a quarry, gave her headaches because it collected positive ions – I stayed put in the kitchen.
I gave her daughter a baby which had to be taken out, because we were too young. Then this house became a forbidden place to me and now, out of the blue, I was back in it, and for a moment in the shuttered dark it was all mine. I had become exhilarated but quickly choked with sadness and found that I couldn’t go any further. I have two beautiful children and for forever I’ve wanted to make amends for the un-amendable. This knife is only whetted by becoming a father.
A last look around, in a vain attempt to reignite the happiness, I turn to leave and see something on the counter, amongst the junk mail, I have it with me now. It looks like a list of song titles written in the hand of an old person, all wobbly capitals. “I’m just an old fashioned lady” it says at the top. She would be old by now, the mum, and I have no idea where they’ve all gone.
When my mother died she left a poignant note, scribbled in the same wobbly hand on the back of a birthday card. It reads, Poz, come and get me before the storms, I’ll wait for you.
