This Ole House

For my siblings.

Fifty years ago our family moved house. The council-owned one we lived in was due to be renovated and the work couldn’t be done while we were in it, so we had no choice. Mum and Dad weren’t unhappy about the move, having been ‘on the list’ for a larger house for some time. The new house had four bedrooms rather than the current two-plus-boxroom, a lounge twice the size of our current one, a big kitchen, and a separate dining room, one of Mum’s dreams. One of my dreams was an indoor toilet, the flick of a switch illuminating the way to it rather than the run across a dark void to our outdoor loo, my heart pumping at the thought of what might emerge from that dark to grab me.

In the 1980s my parents bought the house, all of us aware that it was through a policy introduced by the hated Tory government. (What we weren’t aware of was how Mum and Dad had borrowed the money to do so and the problems it would cause twenty years later. Another story.) There was a running joke at the time that you could tell which houses on a council estate had been bought by tenants as the first thing they did was install double glazing. My parents did.

A few years later Mum rallied the family and my brothers’ friends to dig a chunk of the garden up to make a paved patio. Over a couple of weekends when the English summer allowed, shirtless teenagers heaved shovels of soil and stones into a skip, dragged bags of sand and concrete off a small truck, laid flagstones. Mum had a dream of a built-in barbecue to host family gatherings and my uncle created it for her, a nook in the garden wall that still exists and has hosted more garden waste than it ever has sausages and burgers. The grill has long rusted away.

Despite efforts to get him to shift after Mum died, Dad stubbornly refused to budge from the home in which they had raised a family. He rattled around in its large rooms and four bedrooms until just over a year ago, when he died in the lounge less than twenty-four hours after being released from hospital to do so. I’m not the only one of my siblings who feels guilty that we didn’t do enough to make that happen for Mum and she died in hospital. Yet another story.

I lived in the house for only a decade before leaving home but I’ve always thought of it as the family home. It was the place I went back to visit my parents, the place where my childhood memories were stored, both physical and mental. What’s the saying? If walls could talk. They would have heard our family shenanigans because they do, after all, have ears. Those ears would have heard much laughter, some crying. They’d have listened to muted conversations, confessions of love, shouted arguments, reports of births and deaths.

Large houses, stately homes sitting in acres of parkland, are scattered throughout Britain and are passed down through generations. Ours isn’t stately in any sense of the word and we all have our own homes already so, after weeks of removing the evidence of forty-nine years of family life, off to market it would go. 

Last August, after we’d finished clearing the house and before I left to return to my home at the other side of the world, we said goodbye to it with a final family party. It was summer of the English variety so we hoped we might get a break in the weather to use Mum’s patio. The built-in one not being usable, Brother no 2 bought a new barbecue for his subsequent use and he, Brother no 1 and Neil put it together amongst the weeds growing up between the patio pavers. Cue many jokes about how many men does it take to build a barbecue and when do we call it and turn the oven on?

They persevered and finally we had a cooking mode. We chucked a few sausages and burgers on, the chicken relegated to the oven for fear of undercooking. The forecast showers managed to stay away and we plonked chairs in a ring. I popped a couple of bottles of fizz to share with my sister and niece, the boys swigged beer. The kids sat on a blanket that I’d found in a chest, my sister becoming teary when she recognised it as the one that had hosted our childish bums on multiple family outings.

We had a good afternoon, a lot of laughing, a lot of teasing, a lot of memory sharing. Then we packed everything away and, a couple of days later, I locked the door for my last time, snapping a couple of pictures as Neil waited in the car. I haven’t lived there for forty years and was surprised how emotional the parting was. I’d spent almost two months sleeping in it amongst memories, digging them up daily as we pulled physical reminders from multiple places, and I’d thought my emotions fully sated. I suppose that final tug on the cord will always be the hardest.

A year later our family relinquished its last claim on the house. It had lain empty for twelve months before the sale was finally complete. Maybe delays were my fault – as we’d worked I’d commented that we were one year short of fifty. Just over a month ago my brother locked the door for the final time. When he drove past a couple of days later there was a skip parked in the drive, the carpets we’d trodden on – and the only physical thing we’d left in the house – overhanging its sides. The new owners have already started making memories with a much-needed makeover, something we knew would happen, little in the way of maintenance having been done for the last twenty years. Whether it stays in their family for fifty years or five, I hope when they leave they have as many happy memories of the house as we do.