Essaying Stories of Home & Place
Stories can be found by everyone… in houses and attics... ideas for writings might be tucked away in boxes, recipes, furniture in rooms, in pieces of clothing at the back of a wardrobe... In family histories... discovered in conversations, letters, family archives, photos, films... In memories shared or stories told by others. Take a look at these lovely short pieces produced at the Book Week Scotland Workshop in November 2022, and worked on after the event.
Stream-path
See where the stream-path is!
Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’
(‘Eden Rock’, Charles Causley.)
‘This will be the last cut’ she says, the last cut of grass, the last cut of hedge, the yellow hedge running a high border between the garden, a short garden, with the field, a green site always known as ‘the field’, a provisional space, a wide corridor pre-ambling between where we lived, where my parents lived, where mum lives now and the thick wood beyond, with its oaks and sycamores more than two centuries old. And I hear mum say these words in the kitchen of this house where we grew as a family, shared meals at the table, shared stories of our lives. So many shared meals around the table, around the generations, eating, peeling back time to find yourself still there, feeling the vibration, the buzzing interface of home. And those words voiced with a wistfulness I hadn’t heard before or at least not in her conversations, her aperçus about a garden that is forever in the seasons, as gardens are, as we are, as she is.
Do I feel their ghosts here, in places around my parents’ house, the kitchen with its 70s style cabinets and Vymura wallpaper, the crepe-paper garlands hung for Christmas sagging terribly with the steam from pots. The objects they placed holding onto those thumb and eye prints of memory. I do, provoked as they are by this silence.
We walk down a dull hill into a duller wood that used to be gated but which now runs open to the river. Along the resurfaced path, passed rhodies and wildflowers, mature trees, the oak and sycamore of memory. We have grown up around them, each of us has played out our summers under the laquearia of their branches; observed them through seasons of fullness and of emptiness. Omni-presents in our sightlines. Following dad’s death in late winter, we watched these old familiars in silence through the hide of the kitchen window, softly breathing with them, almost assisting in the insufflation of their leaves, filling their green canopies with our air.
Now walking among them, a fresh delight is found in just looking straight up at them, spirits uplifted by hefty trunks to lofty light-filled spaces. Small rooms in which to sense as they do. At ground zero, I feel young next to them even if not in human years. Mum asks about each of the trees. I hazard a guess, then forced by the need to know more, I consult the Woodland Trust app. Answers download. Names are assigned by feature. Yet these trees are already known by their shape, location, presence in this landscape through years and years of looking, waiting, walking down the paths shown to us. Today the static is not of the still, stationary kind but of white noise...their imagined language.
And it’s been this way for a while. Memories changing, eroding then reappearing in different guises. New ones from farther back, never before shared, asserting themselves. Stories of her own mum and dad. Expanding vignettes of their life together as a small family; his illness before everything changed. Neural canopies of synaptic light, of energy offering variance, seldom without connection. Burgeoning in the ways of those broad oaks and sycamores, in the air and in the deep, dark loam where roots enmesh lovingly with others, feeding, sharing, connecting something with something.
Always something with something. Never a wasteland of nothing with nothing.
And it’s this separation that dementia brings, that death brings, which recalls this something with something – a division of roots to find who we are, what we are in one deep cut.
William Hume
Stuck
The door sticks every time as if the house has moved without anyone noticing. Except I do, because I’m the one who goes in this room, pushing the door past its creak and pivoting on the metre of wooden floor that is still uncovered.
This room has become a mound. Chairs and small tables are stacked around the walls. A lawnmower, two tangled vacuum cleaners and a computer screen, powdered with dust, circle the bed, which was put there ‘just in case’. Today, when I open the door, someone has balanced a cardboard box of toilet rolls on a slope of dishevelled duvets. The wheelchair has been moved to the side of the fireplace, and on its seat is a straw hat I don’t remember.
There are also the dust shadows of what was there before. The scratched leg prints of a 1930s glass cabinet (ugly, we all agreed) and the piano which always had its lid open, encouraging small children to rub their hands over the keys. The wall cupboard, painted to look like a drinks’ cabinet, is still full of gummed up bottles that I will pour down the sink a few weeks from now.
Even though I am the only one who steps into this room (except for whoever moved that wheelchair), everyone agrees it needs clearing. Someone should go to the dump or take bundles to the charity shop, one of the others says. As if it is easy to give away objects that are battered and bruised: chairs that are limp and sagging and a coffee table with white cup marks etched into the dark wood.
This room is a bulging collection of what is left over. In a plastic crate are pieces of china from the vanished cabinet, after the others have taken a ‘couple of things, just to remember.’ I video the remaining items, holding each up as if I’m in an auction room. The others say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ until we get to the teacup with our grandmother’s name on it, the Christmas cake plate with a quarter moon chip and the Victorian jug wrapped and unwrapped over decades.
Everyone hesitates to make a bid. She hated the motley collection of bric-a-brac, which she had to hang onto because everyone else had gone. It was bundled into this room where it could be mislaid. Now it’s bequeathed to us, but no-one wants to stow anything in cupboards, which are already full of what we don’t need. The jug goes to the charity shop, the plate goes in the bin, and we draw lots on who takes the teacup.
I come back a week later and open the door. The room looks just as full except the cardboard box has tipped over and toilet rolls are scattered over the floor. The wheelchair has gone. I pull the door to, grimacing at the creak. The room will have to wait.
Susan Elsey
The Front Room, Bay Road
As I enter the room my gaze falls on the fireplace facing me on the opposite wall. There is a cheering fire in the grate, providing warmth and colour in contrast to the cold, pervasive greyness outside. Looking to my left, a large bay window dominates this room, framed by sharply detailed oak panelling, its natural beauty recently revealed with the removal of many decades of paint. The view through this window strikes me, as always it does, as defining the purpose of the room, offering a vista of the world beyond while providing shelter and respite from the realities of cold, rain and wind.
Within this room is enfolded the past of my partner’s parents, who once called it home, and a present that is unequivocally ours. I see them sitting here still, as though through a dusty window pane: the large dining table which then dominated this space laden, as it was, with the mounds of cluttered correspondence that preoccupied their later years, collected but never catalogued or curated.
Thinking now of this room here, I can readily recapture the quality of light, reflecting and refracting the broad expanse of river beyond and below, casting its liquid lines onto the walls and ceiling. The door into the room, heavy and dark-stained, is itself at least as old as the rest of the house, though is not of this house. Its predecessor had fallen victim to the fashion foibles of interior design long ago, having had its precise panels and border beading crudely replaced with flush, featureless board. The void created by its subsequent removal had been of a size and shape requiring that I conduct a concerted search for a suitable replacement. Here it stands now, distressed deal, stained and hard as any ebony, a contemporary of the frame in which it sits but no less an interloper for that. The room seems to accept its presence, as it does the changing years… as we must too, with others now enjoying its benign embrace.
Dai John
What we leave behind
‘A ghost erases the present by repeating the actions of the past. That’s what haunting is.’
(Joanna Walsh, Hotel)
–
Central to the house is the game room, an open space visible as soon as you walk through the front door. Rejecting separation, offering only thin air where you would expect walls or doors, its guileless layout promises no secrets. Even the cover of the outer walls is broken by large windows welcoming the bright summer sun… because here, in my mind’s eye, summer lasts forever. The walls are a sickly shade of yellow that over the years has come to mean comfort and there, on the right, hangs a painting I made with my sister, though really, she is the one who made it beautiful, who drew the details of the clouds and the penguins while I tackled the purple glitter sea.
When I think of my childhood, it’s not unlike trying to spot a fish in a river; the water is flowing impossibly fast and as soon as I catch a glimpse of something, it’s gone again. I know memories are within reach but no matter how hard I try or how long I stand and stare, they remains obscured. This scene, however, is vivid: my sister and I sat on the floor together, side by side, while we made the white of the canvas disappear bit by bit. She mixed the paints to create an infinity of colours while I watched her with awe. I don’t wonder about the memory’s accuracy, if the reality of it was anything like how I remember it. This once, I tell myself it doesn’t matter. The warmth was real, and I don’t need to know more than that.
The small writing desk in the corner of the game room speaks of a colder, more solitary existence. Its old wood does not know the person I’ve become or the stories I’ve told, but it holds stories of its own. Stories of simple equations in textbooks, of drawings made and then discarded because the deep carvings in the wood messed them up. I wasn’t the last young child who used it, and I wonder if more will follow, wonder about the memories it already holds and the ones still to come. What is a child’s writing desk if not the ultimate proof of growth after all? Look, see that desk, that’s where I studied and created, where I sat day after day completing homework until I grew too big to use it. Standing next to it now I feel like a giant. I mindlessly wonder which of us contains more history.
Haunted. A word that appears around every corner, that beckons me no matter where I go. What does it mean to be haunted? Hauntings are associated commonly with fear, with blood-soaked ghosts and horror movies. Hauntings involve death and melancholy, a dismal series of regrets and what-ifs, and yet… I spend most of my days chasing after fleeting thoughts, running endlessly in the hope that I’ll catch up with them. Sometimes I get close, hands grazing their forms, but my fingers pass through them like mist. Always the chaser, never chased.
I can hear my writing desk creaking, can see the painting before me, but the truth is I haven’t been in the game room for years, and have no way of knowing if time has preserved it as well as my memory has. What if it hasn’t? This is where I grew up, where I felt like a child more than anywhere else, where being a child was fun and good, and not an insult. Where I brought stories to life with my friends, where my mother taught me to sew, where learning was still exciting. Visualising that space now, I become sad with longing. There’s a thin line between nostalgia and homesickness, between fond memories and a bone-deep ache I can’t heal from. This room is haunted in my memory, countless versions of my younger self laughing and running around. I’m scared that when I return I’ll be faced with a blank slate, white paint where stained yellow should be. I want selfishly for it to be haunted for as long as the house stands. For who am I without the ghosts of my past? Joanna Walsh wrote, ‘A ghost must be seen by the living in order to exist (if we are all dead, a ghost is nothing but a neighbour).’1 When the walls have been painted over, when my painting is taken down and the writing desk is sold, what will stop the ghosts from slipping away along with every other trace of my childhood? And if the next time I walk into the game room and it is devoid of familiarity, if I fail to find the company of ghosts, how will I know I haven’t become one of them?
Joanna Walsh, ‘Hotel Haunting’, Hotel (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), p.13
Lara Luyts