Moving house is always hard, especially when your family has grown up there. I love my house. It isn’t modern, it hasn’t got a wonderful kitchen, but it’s an old house, so that seems to me to be appropriate. Sadly, we need to move to a cheaper house – the cost of living crisis has gripped us in its merciless jaws. I can guarantee there will be scratch marks on the door posts as I am dragged out.
For our family, this house is very special. When we first saw the house, it was inhabited by an elderly lady who’d brought up her family in it for over forty years. It was a loved house that needed time and money spent on it: we were very fortunate to be in the position to buy it and do some renovations.
The squeaky door
At the end of our first visit to the house, as an afterthought, the owner opened a 1930s-style cupboard door in the hallway and led us down some steep, deep crimson-carpeted stairs into a two-roomed cellar. It was dark and untidy, but we could immediately see beyond the dingy cellar windows, and the squeaky door that led into the garden, and see the potential.
All those years ago, when we moved in – in the ‘better times’ just after the Labour landslide of 1997 – a carpenter made us a tall, wooden, white painted dresser against one of the walls, which has cookery books arranged all along the top shelf. On one blank wall, there are framed pictures that my children drew or painted when they were small, alongside paintings of many of the important or memorable places we have lived or visited.
Over the next few years, the squeaky back door was replaced, new windows were fitted in the cellar and – over time – replaced the original ones throughout the rest of the house.
A family house
All our children brought their friends home. We had the space for extra people: they were barely heard or even seen for much of the time. They would pile into the cellar, and in the spring and autumn they would light the fire pit on the patio outside the back door.
When my son was a teenager, he used to invite his friends over most weekends. I would cook food that would feed a crowd (curry or pasta usually) and his friends would sometimes bring drinks, fruit or desserts. Some of them would be collected by their parents before midnight; the rest would find various sofas (or beds if they were lucky) to sleep on until the morning. This tradition continued through the sixth form and university years. When some of my son’s local friends started to get married, his university friends came to stay to attend the weddings.
When my youngest left his secondary school, all his year group had small books where they would write memorable messages to each other reminiscing about the good – and sometimes the bad – times they had all had. Some of his friends said that they would always remember the good times that they had spent in ‘the big friendly house’.
The secret garden
Over many years the garden developed too. Small saplings grew into trees of forty feet in height, a pond was made, tall hedges grew making the garden completely private, and later, a secret garden was created, reached by going through an arch that had roses and honeysuckle growing over it. Pear and greengage trees were planted to accompany the apple tree; raspberry canes were planted in a remote corner. In front of the house, we grew a tall beech hedge that enclosed the front garden, so when foxes came at night-time, they were largely unseen – except by us.
In the back garden, solar fairy houses were fixed to the higher branches of the holly tree, and these would light up at night and fascinate the growing tribe of grandchildren. Glass lanterns bought from a niche garden shop were staked into the flower beds randomly and gothic style mirrors were fixed to the tall fences. At night, the garden has a softly magical aura. After rain has fallen, the frogs can be heard croaking in the pond.
We have had many, many parties in this garden and in the house: children’s and teenage parties, family get togethers at New Year and birthdays, and the Jo Cox-inspired ‘great get together party’ that our road collaborated on.
Moving on
It’s almost impossible to move on from a house like this – where there are memories in every room. Even the landing windowsill has a memory scraped into the paintwork, where the dog puts her front paws to look out for her friend, the postman, or anyone else she knows – she is very sociable.
Nowhere else appeals to me, apart from this house – or perhaps the house by the lake in the poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, a place I have carried in my memory since I was seventeen and first studied Yeats’s poetry. The image is as strong as it ever was. I won’t trouble myself about thinking where the local shops are, or how I would plumb in the washing machine. When I think about moving, I’ll just close my eyes and transport myself to Innisfree.
