Leaving home

Emptying the parental home is a tough job. While my sister and her husband managed to pack up almost all the goods and chattels in a few days of Herculean effort, it seems to have taken me the entire summer to re-home the last few pieces of furniture. 

I'm quite pleased, though, that out of all the things in the house, only one settee too old to comply with current fire regulations and one elderly bed had to be broken up and taken to the tip.

(The wood will be recycled into a composting bin.)

My parents bought the house in 1965, when I was two and a half years old. I can remember the six months it was in their possession before we moved in quite clearly, as my sister and I were taken over there often while they worked in the garden. 

There's very little of the house from that time that remains unchanged. Two or three original windows ... 

... the tiles in the porch ...

... and the original bathroom tiles, here with later tiles below them and the early 60s lemon bathroom suite that was my mother's pride and joy. 

I remember my father sticking up the two diamond-shaped plastic hooks. My mother, in her ceaseless quest for cleanliness, wanted my sister and I to have a flannel each, which we were to hang on our own hook after every ablution. 

Needless to say, that never happened. 

Also, sitting on the 'dirty clothes bin' in the corner with my legs stretched out and my feet up on the airing cupboard door, reciting my 3 times table while my mother pushed back my cuticles with the rounded end of a nail file. (Ouch.) We hadn't been taught our 4 times table yet but I got as far as 4 x 4 by myself and felt very proud.

Here's something I don't remember. Under a piece of carpet in the cupboard under the stairs a piece of lino that is completely unfamiliar, and presumably an always hidden remnant from the house's pre-Harvey life. 

And something I'd completely forgotten ... through a gap in the late 60s, built-in Sindy furniture, the original wallpaper in my parents' bedroom, which provokes a jolt of memory. 

My boys, going on a final prowl with me, are on the look-out for forgotten treasure. This is as close as they will get. 

The hardest thing to say goodbye to, for me, are the trees. It doesn't help that the cooking apple tree, the survivor of two that flanked the middle section of the garden, is growing forget-me-nots at its roots.

Dear tree, who never provided the handholds and footholds necessary for me to climb it.

And the tree I grew from pips taken from my grandmother's garden in Bishopston after her death, the twin of which Dru transported from the garden of my previous house when we moved to our current home.  

And the tree my eldest grew from seed to achieve some Brownie badge or other.

I will always see you

The fruit on the third tree is still far too small, but I take a couple of apples from each of the other two trees to see if I can get some seedlings growing. 

My father's long neglected shed at the always neglected top of the garden provokes a smile. 

Quick, Mum, quick, there's a weed on the lawn!

Back in the house the clank of the front door bolts and the rattle of the security chain, as the last piece of furniture leaves the house to be upcycled by a friend of a friend in Portishead and my dead father locks up for the night. 

A funny thing happens as I walk through the empty house. I keep expecting to see brown hessian wallpaper on one wall of the front room, and the burnt orange carpet that was another source of great satisfaction for my mother, but they are long gone. 

Or the small, dark kitchen with its dark blue wallpaper, before my Uncle Gilbert knocked through the larder, coal house and porch to make a single-skinned 'extension', but there's just a glimpse behind the late 70s pine panelling.

And after the 1930s lilac floral wallpaper and the 1960s horsey wallpaper and the early 70s pastel floral wallpaper, a glimpse of my bedroom in its true colours, before my parents covered it with blown wallpaper and painted it Bluebell White from the Dulux range, following my relocation to Lancaster in 1980. 

Blue blue electric blue ... 

I must have had a premonition they were going to do that because here's what must be one of the first ever, pre-digital selfies, of me the summer before I left, committing a glimpse of its glory to the historical record.  

The last two things to leave are my father's razor blade that he always left on top of the electric shaving point he never used ... 

... and one forlorn peg left on the washing line. 

The names in concrete will stay until the new owners block pave the drive ...

... but it's all there in my head, from beginning to end. 

À La Recherche de Shaldon Perdu

During the four days I spent in Devon over the long weekend, I wandered the village of Shaldon a fair bit and realised I hadn't actually stayed there since I was ten, when my parents bought a caravan on the site across the River Teign and a couple of miles up the coast at Holcombe. 

Yet of all the places of my childhood, Shaldon has perhaps shaped me more than anywhere else barring my home city of Bristol. All that red sand made an indelible stain on more than just my white socks. 

It seems that every passage and alleyway holds memories, from the clacking of my plastic beach shoes on tarmac ... 

... to the inky business of fetching my father's paper, which necessitated going through School Lane and which I hated because who wants to think about school when you're on holiday? 

The duck pond's still there, minus its ducks (mallards, mandarins and chloe widgeons) and the low wall you could sit on replaced by railings. The gunnera still grows in the same spot, though - 'Look at the rhubarb, Mummy!' - and the fish wouldn't disgrace a safari. 

Clearly the telephone box has seen better days, and the Ness Gift Shop with its corrugated plastic awning is no more. 

We holidayed in lots of different places before The Holcombe Epoch. I was a baby when we stayed in the cottage at the Ringmore end of the village. 

It had two entrances on different levels in separate streets, and freaked my mother out because she thought she was on the top floor but could hear someone dragging their lame leg across the ceiling. 

I do remember the draughty old Manor House in pole position on the Strand, now divided into apartments. The flat above the Clipper cafe and gift shop, which was as close to staying on the beach as you could get, and is currently an upstairs annexe to the restaurant. And Chez Nous, a B&B owned by Mr and Mrs Cordon and their Jack Russell, Jo-Jo, and now seemingly the local headquarters of UKIP. 

I was envious of Jane and Sarah Woolley because they got to stay in the Dairy which was cool and dark, and had corridors, crannies and window seats. They used to keep their collections of pink and white top shells on the meeting rails of the sash windows.

It's long been a private dwelling. 

The most spectacular change has been the transformation of the caravan park by the bridge - we stayed in caravans and chalets there - into a development of modern cottages cunningly designed to resemble the other Georgian dwellings in the village. 

The first time I saw them, I really did think I was dreaming as it looked like they had always been there. The only giveaway is the width of the roads and their names, Oystercatcher Court being rather more high-falutin than Albion Street, Middle Street and Coronation Street. 

All this change is not without melancholy. Walking the back streets I saw familiar houses with unfamiliar names or, in  the case of Lan Y Môr and Sandy Nook, no name at all. A door I must have entered dozens of times opened and an unknown face peered out. 

And the voices of the old are gone. More Waitrose than West Country these days.

The wind still sounds oceanic in the woods on top of the Ness ...

... but you know you really are getting on a bit when the headland itself has undergone a fundamental change.  

I can't help wondering whether seven-year-old me would look at today's somewhat stumpy Ness at the mouth of the River Teign and still see some sort of god. 

Winter Aconite: Remembering Iris Wathen

The best teacher I ever had died yesterday, and the timing feels a bit strange as she'd been much on my mind these last few days.  I was in her class almost fifty years ago, but I still remember which things she taught us and how she made me feel, which is valued. 

This is a poem I wrote about her some years ago. I'm glad I got to share it with her. 

Aconite

for IW

Were you called Iris for the rainbow goddess

or the stately flower?

Either way your name isn’t apt.

There’s nothing insubstantial about you

you don’t drift through gardens in sapphire silks

and pinstriped scarves. 

Instead you bundle about your business

with diffident squirrel glances,

earthed like the roots of the plant you brought in

to show us one Monday morning

exploring the lure of its petals, its deep-toothed leaves.

Wolfsbane tamed in your capable hands.

Though sometimes there were rainbows

in your classroom.

Refraction through jam jars of water,

a milk bottle chrysalis bursting with ice,

triangular prisms spilling from boxes

like ingots of light

Postscript:

Reading comments about this blog posted on my Facebook, it seems that Miss Wathen was the favourite teacher of quite a few other former pupils too - no surprises there then. And that tadpoles featured quite heavily in people's recollections. I'd forgotten the time the naughtiest boy in the class knocked the bowl of frogspawn from her desk onto the floor.  It was an accident on this occasion, and she didn't shout at him and tell him off as other teachers would have done; she merely asked him to pick it all back up again, ha ha.    

J'accuse ... Rover!

For a long time I've blamed this:

for this:

But I'm doing a poetry workshop in a few days' time about childhood and where we come from and I've been gathering a few bits and pieces that are triggers for writing about my past: a thruppenny bit, black and white photos, an old school exercise book, a  red hardback Famous Five book. I've bought some things too: Green Shield stamps, Black Jacks and Fruit Salads ... and this:  

God, I remember it so well!  My first reading book. And the joy of reading it all by myself.  The heady independence!  

I mean, I can still recite it.  And suddenly I am four all over again.

I remember the eponymous dog also.  Rover!  He was black, he was. And quite big.  He loved playing with his ball.  He was - 

A BLOODY BORDER COLLIE!

J'ACCUSE ROVER!