Our House
We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.”
Pascal Mercier
My Reflection this week is on homes and houses.
I’ve moved home thirteen times in my life. An average of once every four years. I don’t enjoy it. It’s not all the paperwork, frustration, and anxiety (although they aren’t pleasant). It’s the intrusion into other people’s lives. I don’t mind showing off the property we are selling; it’s the house hunting I dislike. I feel like I’m invading someone’s privacy as we wander from room to room, sussing out whether this one might be ‘the place’.
Given I bought (or at last had my first mortgage) aged twenty, you’d think I might be comfortable with it by now. I’m not. In fact, when we moved to the Southwest some seven years ago, I did not even see the house to which we moved. Nor did I read up on its description or see a photograph. I trusted Sarah to see us right. She did. Of all the places I’ve lived, there are few I fell in love with at first sight. That was one of them.
Thinking back to the first house I bought. It was a small two-up two-down in Leagrave. Once a village and now a suburb north of Luton. The house cost the princely sum of £8000, on which my then-wife and I took out a 95% mortgage. In those days, the largest mortgage one could borrow was twice the annual salary of the higher wage earner (in our case, my wife) plus half that of the lower wage earner (me). Together we earned just enough.
We bought it at less than the asking price of £9000 as the owner needed a quick sale because of a divorce from his wife. He’d bought the house for £8000 three years earlier. By the time we bought it, inflation was not as rampant as a few years before but still high at 16.5%. However, with no takers at his asking price, in the end, he settled for what he could. I took that as an early salutary lesson that property value doesn’t always go up.
I recall that the sale completed in late January, but we wanted to do up the place. So, given we still had some of the lease to run on our flat, we travelled for several weekends in late winter across London. Then on to Leagrave to spend long days painting, wallpapering and the like. Sustained by takeaways like fish and chips out of newspaper. Eaten with paint-stained hands. Simple days.
The flat we were leaving was the other place that I fell in love with at first sight. It was just beside Richmond Bridge on Cleveland Road. Although a stone’s throw from the Thames, sadly, the Richmond ice rink blocked our view. That’s now long gone, so if we were still there, we would have an uninterrupted view of the Thames across Cambridge Park.
Our landlords for the flat were a retired couple. I can still recall their office as something out of Dickens. It was a tiny, musty room, reached by climbing a steep set of creaky stairs. Within the room, the couple sat opposite each other at high desks surrounded by piles of papers. There was one tiny window high up in the wall above them. The glass so discoloured it threw an amber hue over everything. Anything you touched threw up a cloud of dust. I had the impression the couple never left the office. They seemed as dust covered as everything else.
The flat itself was small. Comprising a bedroom, living room and bathroom with a handkerchief garden dominated by a plum tree. However, the tiny rooms always seemed bathed in light. The bedroom flooded with sunlight in the morning, and the living room mellowed by the glow of the evening sun. Many of the places I’ve lived in my life have been just that. Places where I lived. But that little flat in Twickenham will always have a special place in a quiet corner of my heart.
We moved to the home in which we now live a couple of years ago. For more than a year of that, we’ve had a succession of builders, plumbers, electricians, plasterers, flooring people and carpet fitters improving the place. I hope that may mean the end of my house moves. But you never know ….
So, what music comes with my Reflection this week? I should have gone for something by Eddie Cochran, given our first home in Chippenham wasn’t far from his memorial. Cochran is one of those stars of the 50s and 60s who died young. Little did I know his premature death was from being thrown from a taxi that hit a lamppost on the Bath Road in Chippenham, while on the way to Heathrow (then London) Airport from a gig in the Bristol Hippodrome.
However, our house is a nice house and we do have two cats, so it’s this ….
