Jude Rogers’ short documentary series Door Stepping has been airing on Radio 4 this week. In it, she goes back and revisits all the different homes she’s lived in, taking in a wide range of flats and houses, including her childhood home near Swansea, Jacobean university rooms at Oxford, and ramshackle London flatshares.
Each of the five 15-minute episodes are very personal and touching, and are full of feeling and memory (and rather brilliant little throwaway asides, such as the fact that Jude was college ‘mother’ to a future Bond girl, round about the time she also met Nelson Mandela and he told her he’d very much admired the Welsh rugby teams of the 70s).
Music, as you’d expect, plays a big part, with reminiscences about the posters and gig tickets tacked up onto walls and doors, and the records and sounds that were playing in the homes, on the streets outside, and by the neighbours at 6am in the morning.
It got me thinking about the homes – and the sounds of the homes – I’ve lived in.
I visit my childhood home every day, because my elderly parents still live there. The house has changed a lot. There are disability ramps and a Stannah stairlift now (which I can’t look at without thinking of the scene in Phoenix Nights where Peter Kay is stranded mid-way when the power fails, and he squeaks: “Don’t panic, just think – what would Thora Hird do?). An extension means that my tiny bedroom is now a much bigger spare room, but I do still glance in the corner and remember the cupboard that my dad lined inside with Mr Men wallpaper in a sweet gesture to put a smile back on my face after my mum said I couldn’t have it on the walls of the room. (To be fair, I would probably have gone blind if I’d had to look at several thousand Mr Greedys every day).
The early sounds I associate with this place are from my parents’ meagre selection of LPs, including The Beatles Help!, ELO’s Out Of The Blue, and the red single box with a weird and wonderful mix of 45s: Sarah Brightman’s I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper (!), Edwin Starr’s Happy Radio, and Edison Lighthouse’s Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes (Rosemary is my mum’s name, my dad bought it for her, they’ve been married 55 years, and to me it’s pretty much the sound of joy and love). The later sounds are my brother’s punk records and Black Sabbath LPs (laboriously transferred to cassette tape for me), 80s pop chart compilations, and then indie stuff. The Pogues’ If I Should Fall From Grace With God features heavily in my memory, and is another record that will remain forever, inexorably, linked to love. Only this time it’s not the love of my parents for one another, but the loud, sweary, throw-all-caution-to-the-wind sound of me falling in love for the first time. (Not with Shane McGowan, that would be…unlikely. And dentally challenging).
Other homes that spring to my mind are my college digs in Harlow, where my landlady, a cousin of Rick Parfitt, kept a barn owl in the garden shed. This is Nirvana’s Never Mind time, REM’s Out Of Time time, and Primal Scream’s Screamadelica time.
Then there’s the rented cottage where I moved in with my boyfriend (now my husband). A lot of bumping went on in that house: of heads, on the ridiculously low ceiling beams; and of other body parts (well, it was our first home together, what did you expect?). Aretha. I remember a lot of Aretha, and a sexy stackload of Stax.
I could continue through the other homes I’ve sinced lived in. Each saw moments of wonder, despair, hope, a barrel-load of laughter, and mountains of music. Instead, I’d rather you lot told me of some of your Door Stepping memories. Anything you like: an old home you’ve seen change beyond all recognition; that one album your roommate played over and over until it drove you round the bend; the particular sounds of a home, musical or otherwise. Knock knock…
(The final episode of Door Stepping is on at 1.45pm tomorrow [Friday] but you can catch-up with all five programmes on BBC iPlayer Radio).
Nice post. I think I’ve lived in about 19 places (also starting in South Wales), so mine would be a longer series …
I lost count at 29. I occasionally have a Google Earth street view of places that spring to mind, but it’s the interiors that matter, and even in my Dad’s house everything has changed since I lived there. Some of them can be evoked by musical association, the visualisation spreading out from the record player, but it doesn’t matter to me that most of those rooms (across three continents) are lost to memory, because the house I love the most is the one I live in. “You can’t go home again” is true, because it’s not there any more, either because you’ve changed, or it has, or both.
“My landlady, a cousin of Rick Parfitt, kept a barn owl in the garden shed.”
That would be a fantastic opening line of a short story! Calling @Locust
Well, I’d cut out the “a cousin of Rick Parfitt” part, unless I went for a comedic story. It would be a distraction and set the wrong tone if I went for my first instinct: to make it a horror story! 🙂
A brilliant piece of editing. True – it’s hard to think of any context wherein the phrase ‘a cousin of Rick Parfitt’ would not imply an element of absurdity. However, replace it with ‘a great-neice of Aleister Crowley’ and your reader knows exactly what kind of story it will be. Although that’s far too obvious and cliched – which the Locust never is! 🙂
Lovely post.
The flat in Barnes I was born into, looking out onto the river, and wondering about the faraway land on the other side, and what sort of strange people lived there. The bridge across, that seemed to stretch on into eternity. No music, just a snowball fight with my dad, the terrifying magic of Maurice Sendak and the little boy my parents almost adopted, a year older and resplendent in his cowboy pajamas. We visited him later, just once, with his eventual family. They gave us Nutella sandwiches, and I felt strongly that he’d therefore found a good home.
The house in Sheen that we moved to when I was just 5 years old. The place that for far too many years after we left remained the geographical centre of my soul. I remember the short drive on moving day, and arriving to find the bookshelves empty. I’d never seen an empty house before. This was the house where I became the first version of myself. The house where I kept hamsters, and played football in the garden and attempted to dig a tunnel to Australia. Finding broken crockery in the Earth and claiming it as Roman ruins, every act an adventure, every adventure marinated in nascent legend. The house where my brothers drilled a hole through the bedroom wall so they could speak to the neighbours’ kids, where the (until then, presumed male) guinea pig one evening gave birth to a deformed litter, which it immediately attempted to kill. The house from which I walked to school the next day, head spinning, blood still on my dark green school jumper. The house where the neighbours on one side hated us, and the neighbours on the other side loved us – where the garden fence blew down and never went back up, all the easier for my parents to skip next door for a quick glass of wine or three. The house where I first played video games, and spent hours staring at the now full bookshelves, wondering about all the endless wisdom that lay beyond the thin veil separating child from adult. The house we left suddenly, as I turned 12, and that I ached to return to for years. The house I slept in with my best mate the night before the move, furniture gone, bookshelves once more empty. Huddled in sleeping bags, plotting our continued friendship, our undying loyalty. The house where my parents threw an epic going away party, in which windows were smashed and a game of football rampaged across the entire upper floor for hours on end. The house where we listened to the Travelling Wilburys, and Fleetwood Mac’s Tango In The Night, Paul Simon and Womack and Womack. The house I always think of when I hear this song…
The house in Kent where I spent my teenage years, disoriented and ungainly, desperately trying to will the distance back to London to be a few miles shorter. Where I inherited a larger bedroom, but a smaller life beyond it. The house where I discovered music, and deepened my love of comics, books and anything else that let me escape my surroundings and trip the light fantastical. Where I outlived and ultimately outgrew hamsters, and where – for a few years – I tried my very best to become the proverbial island. The long, thin kitchen which connected the two sections of the downstairs, through which we needed to squeeze past one another, and in which every major domestic argument of this period of my life occurred. The house my brothers and I learned a hundred ways to break into and out of, and where my family never truly settled. The house that was never a home, but by necessity became a fortress, as my family seemed to wage ceaseless war on small town life before eventually becoming temporarily submerged in it. The one place I’ve lived that I’ve never returned to visit since leaving in my early 20s, a van full of possessions, my best mate from the sleeping bag days sat next to me in the driver’s seat. Don’t look back, you can never look back. The house where my music became my music: Nirvana, Radiohead, REM, all the rest. The house this song always brings to mind….
The house share in North London, stumbled upon by chance. I’d been living with a couple of mates and both had to move out suddenly, just as the lease expired. I was imminently homeless, and working hundred hour weeks as a trainee lawyer. I had one afternoon to find somewhere to live. I saw two places: first a flat at the end of my then girlfriend, now wife’s road which I would have shared with four female Australian nurses, and which I sensed would be immediately terminal to the good thing I had only just started. Then a large Victorian terrace half a mile down the road, in the shadow of the new Arsenal stadium, where the four residents spent an evening politely interviewing me over tea and cake. The first place that truly felt like home since I was 11 years old, where I met one of the best friends I will ever make in life, and where, through sheer dumb luck, my idiosyncrasies seemed to be exactly what the place needed. Where we ate home made pie and watched bad movies on the sofa, and listened to new records. Where I’d come home late from work and always find someone else still up and ready for a chat. Where there would always – always – be a random in the kitchen you’d never met before, someone’s mate from way back when, or a new pal waiting to be made. The house where I started a football team that still continues to this day. The house where one of the residents worked for a hip hop radio station and we got to meet all sorts of strange people and were invited to parties we had no place being at, The last place I ever lived before I lived with my wife, and where we shared some of our happiest times. Here’s the tune for this one.
The flat, directly across the road from the above house share, that my wife and I bought together shortly before we got hitched. The previous tenants were a brain surgeon an astro-physicist and their three tiny, frequently naked, always wild children, who we’d see cavorting around the living room on the way home from work. The flat that was an absolute tip when we inherited it, but which had the happiest, loveliest vibe to it from day one. The flat where we moved in, and one the first night, as we began to scrub down the filthy walls, I asked a friend “have we made a mistake here” and he replied “I’ll put the tea on”. The flat I spent long days and nights sanding, painting and varnishing, until it felt vaguely habitable. Where the elderly upstairs neighbours played great reggae and smoked bad weed, and where you could hear the people on either side laughing and crying and everything in between. The flat we did up and did up until it was beautiful and home, every inch of it ours. The flat where I took up running. The flat I would return to on Champions League nights, surrounded by police horses and men selling scarves, and with that incredible buzz in the air, kids on their way to their first game, adults drunk on dreams of glory and the liquid equivalents. You could hear the roar before the goal went in on TV. The flat we eventually brought my daughter home to, tiny and fragile and seemingly far too marvelous to be of this world. Where I first found myself alone with her, and watched her little hand grip my thumb and made a silent promise as to the kind of father I would try to be. The flat we left a year later, in search of space and schools and extended family.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aV0Ka-SSEU
The place I live now, in Wimbledon. Mum and Dad down the road, brothers and their families round the corner. The best place I’ve ever lived. The previous residents were miserable, and it took a couple of years to make the place feel a home, but it was bigger and brighter and greener, and it’s where we truly became a family. Where there’s a street party every July that makes me glad to be alive, and full on trick or treat every October that’s worth rushing home from work for. Where we watch Home Alone at Xmas, and flip pancakes in February. Where my son was born, and my kids began to flourish. The house where I took up surfing, and changed jobs to something a little more family-friendly and fun, and where we invented all the best games and played all the best practical jokes. Where we walk every morning to the school at the end of our road, and know our neighbours. The place that is home to me, and something of a happy ending, for now at least. When I think of this house, I think of the summer time, and my kids singing this, at the tops of their lungs….
Beautiful, just beautiful, Bingo. Glad I knocked.
Lovely writing!
A great piece of writing.
13 different addresses here.
The place I lived for the first year of my life, and the entire road it stood on in fact, was demolished long ago (’70s) and a big shopping centre (Intu Watford, formerly The Harlequin Centre) is now on it’s site I think. Or possibly the service road just at the bottom end of it.
I went for a walk past my main childhood and teen home (#2) a month or so ago. A very-early-’50s brick ex-council 3-bed semi in an amazingly good location, right on the far edge of an estate. Quiet cul-de-sac facing onto a green and a strip of old woodland, which led onto vast playing fields. Kid heaven. Lots of good climbing trees and even a highly-scrumpable orchard just around the corner.
The house’s front garden, where my dad’s pride-and-joy roses grew, is now paved over and used to park the current owner’s cars. The old wooden 3-panel front door(light blue with frosted glass panels) has now been replaced by a white uPVC one. I wonder what they’ve done with the back garden.
I recently went back to the house where I grew up, for the first time in 34 years. It had been built by my great-grandfather in 1928 but my parents sold it during my first term at university and moved into a tiny cottage, so everything I took to the Halls of Residence in September ’82 – basically my records, my Jam and Cure t-shirts, my guitar, and a lingering sense of not quite belonging – was all I owned when I came back to a mattress on my little brother’s floor at Christmas.
The thing about going back to the old house was that everything was so amazingly familiar. The heft of the front door, the sound of the latch, the creak of the floorboards – standing in the room I’d last seen at 18, even the dimensions were as comfortable as well worn shoes. I could still have found my way in pitch dark from the bed to the window, like I used to when I needed a piss. That room was Clash, Stranglers, Police, Jam, Cure, Squeeze… that last summer, I’d listen to Pretenders II at ear-bleeding volume on headphones, while the house slept and I couldn’t, already drifting slowly further and further away from the last home I’d have for 15 years.
When that came it was a huge Victorian flat we bought the year we got married, ’96. It had a living room the size of a tennis court. Our puny chairs and table looked like dolls house furniture in it. It took us three more years to afford carpet, but for the first time in my life I had a sound system bigger than I could carry in a backpack. We’d come back from the pub on a Friday and crank up Blur, Oasis, Supergrass, Elastica, Sleeper, Stereophonics, Radiohead. There were always sleeping bodies in that room the next morning, some we knew, some we didn’t.
This week I moved my mum out of the tiny cottage. My dad left last month, unexpectedly, against his will and hers. I cleaned out his study, and nicked his Mozart. The Horn Concerto has never been my favourite, but it was the one he always seemed to be playing whenever I visited. Funnily enough that house was never my home but of all of them it’s the one I wish I could go back to now.
The first house Mr Drakeygirl and I bought sounds remarkably like your flat, Chiz. It was a Victorian semi tucked in between some flats and a factory at the dodgier end of a nice little town, and like you we had hardly any furniture, but we did have boxes of records, a fuck-off stereo, a fridge permanently stocked with beer, and an open door policy on partying.
Life changed here.
We got married when we lived here. It was here that we lost our first baby before it arrived. And it was here we eventually brought back our daughter weeks after her turbulent birth, shellshocked and terrified by a diagnosis we didn’t know how to cope with.
Surrounded by cheap woodchip wallpaper, a dining table my mum and dad gave us that still had chalk/paint? marks on the underside with the date they’d bought it, thirty years before.
It was home. It was where we learned about the important stuff: loyalty, acceptance, hope, and love. And then we moved, and took those things with us.
4 places in my childhood/teens, the student years add another 6, then 3 rented flats in various parts of the country when I started working. My current flat, the one place I have bought, turns out to be my 14th home, and it’s also where I have lived by far the longest (almost 20 years now).
It would make me very happy if I never had to move again. I’m sitting in my living room as I write this, and it is very likely my favourite place in the world. Before going to bed I often pause and look around this room before turning off the last lamp, feeling very lucky to have found my sanctuary.
Anyone interested in this sort of theme might enjoy Margaret Forster’s My Life In Houses, which is a very good and moving read.
Thanks, Bargepole, I’ll check this out.
I’ve only had four different addresses, and my current one is next door to my previous.
The first and most memorable one was on a dead end street in a residential suburb, in a big old house that my parents bought when kid number four (me) was on the way. Painted pastel green and entered through a veranda with stained glass windows, it had a magical terraced garden and bordered onto a hilly nature park – an island of granite and trees left standing when the other hills had been blasted away to make way for streets and gardens. An extended playground for us kids; climbing up the vertical rock wall leading from the street below to the highest point of the park, sliding down giant boulders covered in ice in the winter, building tree houses and fighting imaginary (and occasionally real) enemies. The night we were awakened by the horrific anguished screams of a cat dying in the jaws of a fox. A winter night when me and mum stood breathless by the second floor window, watching another fox in the moonlit glistening blue snow – the biggest, most beautiful fox we’d ever seen – listening, then jumping to catch a mouse hiding underneath the snow and frozen grass, almost dancing in the moonlight.
The garden behind the house was home to a steep slope where the first owner’s three dogs were buried, and next to it a long marble flight of stairs. The biggest firtree I’ve ever seen stood guard at the top, so gigantic that we all had trouble sleeping through stormy nights, fearing that it would fall and crush the house and everyone in it. Three levels of terraces were leading up from the ground level of the house to the top of the garden next to the park. At level two a huge cherry tree grew, and I put a plank from level three onto the fork of its trunk so I could walk straight into the tree and reach the lowest hanging cherries (the top ones were reached from the balcony by my room). Lots of stairs and walls and strange paths (where we constantly used coal from the fire pit to write secret messages, play games, or hopscotch) and at the street-facing front of the garden; an old disused marble fountain used as a flowerbed hid underneath an old plum tree. A garden that fuelled our imaginations and spawned wild, romantic games. The ordinary games of balls and rackets and rules to bend and break took place on the fourth side of the garden; a large, dull open space covered with gravel.
The house itself was full of nooks and crannies, long slanting closets built under the roof in every bedroom; where secret club meetings took place by fire hazardous candle light. The stairs from the first floor and the banisters at the top of it saw me practice death defying circus acts. The bathroom was where I got all of my information when I inhabited my international spy incarnation (the very old shower head in fact serving as my secret phone line) – for some reason going by the name Elisabeth Bergkvist…!
The sound of my dad practicing his contra bass. The sound of my brother practicing the piano. The sound of the small transistor radio that I lugged around with me all over the house. A Hard Day’s Night played religiously once or twice a day on the stereo when my older brother was in school. Mum’s album of feminist anthems (given to her by her older daughters). The anti-nuclear power protest album and Irish folk music of my brother in the final stages of the 70s. Kate Bush on repeat while writing Very. Serious. Diary entries. Playing ”Isn’t it a pity” when I’m sad, then flipping over to the A-side’s ”My sweet lord” to get happy again. Worked every time.
My best friend’s grandparents lived across the street from us. On her holiday visits we spent every minute together, from breakfast to bedtime, mostly doing stuff we knew we weren’t allowed to. I have a photograph of us sitting in their garden, looking very innocent next to a big stuffed bear. But I remember that hidden behind the bear at that very moment stood a bowl filled with stolen toothpaste and other pinched household products, mashed together in preparation for some planned prank.
By the time we moved – after a divorce and some tough years for my mother, trying to keep things afloat – I was so ready to leave. The garden, now overgrown with weeds and shabby from neglect, felt claustrophobic and depressing, a heaven only for hostile and disgusting insects. I hated school and didn’t like growing up, and the old home was a reminder of times lost for good. Mum sold the house, we moved into a large flat on the south side of the inner city and a new life began.
That’s beautifully descriptive, Locust. What’s Swedish for evocative?
I was at a loss to find the right Swedish word for it, so I looked it up, my dictionary suggests:
stämningsmättad (“saturated with atmosphere”), associationsrik (“rich in associations”), minnesväckande (“arousing memories”).
I’d plump for the first one, the other two words are too clunky.
Oh, and thank you! 🙂
Hmm. Let me tot up.
One place for the first six months.
One place from six months til 18/21 depending on whether you count uni as moving out.
St John’s College, Durham for two years, with a student house in the middle.
A post student house.
Flat in Ealing.
Flat mk 2 in Ealing.
House in Staines.
House in Windsor.
So that’s eight.
I’m not very good at “home”. For a very long time my only real home was my childhood one, a nice, pretty decent sized Edwardian semi in Gloucester of the sort that could be bought on one teacher’s salary in 1978. It’s not really home in that Prousty way now: the folks have done too much to it, and I have a complex relationship with my childhood. But the hallway and the kitchen: that’s what I picture when I think of the word “home”, and they’re a lot less changed. The dimness of that hall as you push open the heavy, half-mullioned inner front door (there’s a porch to get through first, which has an unmistakeable clatter to its door which I know so well I could almost sing you the noise of it). The inner door has more of a muffled thump thanks to the carpet. It’s red, the hall. It’s always been red. A rich red carpet and white walls, intersected with occasional beams of dark wood. Dark wood – really dark, church pew dark – is all over that house. There’s a reason for it: a church was demolished around the time my parents’ place and its mirror were built and the pews went to make the stairs and the doors and the details.
It’s dim, then – dark, really – and always cool in summer. Although it’s not a very big house by the standards of the time, it’s built unusually with a stairwell that goes up all three floors. You can see the skylight at the top of the house while standing in the hall. I’ve always loved that. Dark red and dark wood. Coolness. That’s coming home.
And then second right into the kitchen. High, burnt yellow. The heart of the place, the place my mum runs her catering business from – even now, at 71. The place we argued politics (surprise surprise I’m from a family of Ideas Discussions around the table, which is why I can come off as pugnacious sometimes. I’m not: arguing about politics or art is very rarely anything other than friendly to me). The place me and my sister sparred and giggled in our hard wooden chairs, their white paint peeled off in small patches that made each chair look like the Cruella DeVil collection). The place where I heard the furious, weary question “where do we go from here, Rob?” more times than I can remember, in response to my latest miserable teenage outrage. The room of music and cooking and cuddles and joy and pain and shame, of overhearing my parents talking of Matters Not For The Children through the door. The boardroom of the house, and the playing field.
Nowhere has ever been home the way that house was (and partly still is – who am I kidding?) The only building that even comes close is college. But that’s a whole other set of paragraphs.
Colours, textures, and sounds. Memory is a real mix of all your senses, isn’t it? I have to ask, Bob, did you ever reply to your dad’s question with: “Down to the lake, I fear?”. Please tell me you did.
Ha, I wish I’d had the presence of mind!
I’ve become more of a lurker than contributor of late, no real reason. These threads are the reason I hang on through the vagaries of Afterword life. Lovely, lovely OP and posts……
Seconded. Best thread in ages and the promise of things like this is what keeps me hanging on too. When it’s good, there’s still nothing quite like this place.
I was recently wondering why it is that I’ve totally failed to break up with the AW so many times. I think it’s cos sometimes something like this happens and reminds me that there’s something about the old place which is painfully irreplaceable in my life. A bit like home, in fact.
Thanks, @drakeygirl
x
Yes. Thanks, Drakey.
Glad you started this.
So am I.
After everything, there’s this. How’s the sky looking out there, Bob?
It’s beautiful this morning. I’m on the south coast of Ireland and it’s a fresh, clean, dewy morning. Lovely. 🙂
This has been a lovely hour, reading this and listening to some nice music on the radio. Perhaps I’ll try to write my own tomorrow, it’d be nice to have a reminisce about old homes.
I agree – this is one of those posts that makes this site so special
Loads of lovely writing, loads of lovely people. What a perfect cool end to a scorchingly hot day !
I can count eight (including the university years).
More to follow…
This is one blog post that I’d like to contribute to but I’m not ready yet.
I must catch up with Jude’s programme didn’t realise it had gone out. It would be fun to look inside your old haunts wouldn’t it? I’ve clocked up a fair few.
I’m from a Church of England Clergy family which requires moving from parish to parish so although I’m well settled now most of my moving was done in childhood. (Children of RAF/military might recognise this too?). My late father described his job as a Middle Class man, in an upper class house on a Working class wage. So we lived rather simply, but calm and cosy in numerous odd places, some rather imposing and grand. My favourite was a big old Victorian house in Yorkshire. We occupied the top floor – and the huge house next door was empty but was used as Parish rooms and a youth club. It was in some disrepair so huge plate fungus grew in some rooms, and there were cellars to explore – one room was dark and scary and full of old TVs, one room was sort of furnished for living in – seemingly abandoned. Another was full of old bikes. All very Syd Barrett. Wonderfully weird old place.
It’s probably no coincidence we now live in a crumbly old flat in a massive rambling old pile which is a bit spooky, damp and draughty – but I feel right at home (and fortunately the GF loves it too!)
Love this post. The house I will tell you about is my parents house. My dad passed away in December after spending 55 of his 86 years there. We moved there when I was 5 – halfway through my first year at school. I remember going to school and my new classmates laughing at me because I was the only kid in the class who couldn’t write his name. I soon caught up and overtook the little bastards!! Like most Dads my Dad had his own chair that no-one else was allowed to sit in. Since he passed every time I go to see mum I sit in his chair and assume the patriarchal role. It feels good.
In my teens I dated Gail the daughter of my mum and dads friends. They didn’t want me to date her for fear of embarrassment. One night while they were out at a barn dance with these friends we writhed around on the living room floor, sloppy kisses and my hand in her jeans. Background music was most likely Edgar Broughton Band or Stray – certainly not Marvin’s Lets get it on. I was 15 for chrissake – I didn’t know about G spots and the like. She expected more and didn’t hang around to see my fumbling develop into something more refined.
Remember the dining room mirror – I would stand in front of it for hours practising air guitar, prancing and gurning like a madman.
The old man used to take the piss out of my Incredible String band album especially the childlike Ducks on a Pond. It was all the proof he needed that it didn’t take any effort to be a pop star.
Later still he always seemed to enter the room just as Ian Dury bellowed out ‘Arseholes, Bastards, Fucking Cunts and pricks’.
Parties when the folks were on holiday – my best mate decided to prance naked around our front garden at 2am half pissed. As he tried to get back in the house me and my other mate pushed against the door to stop him getting in. He managed to put his arse through the porch window. We bought two pieces of replacement glass and each piece got cracked as we put in the last nail. We didn’t have any more money so had to own up to high jinks when the old man got home, He set about replacing the glass that us ‘fucking amateurs’ couldn’t do. Lo and behold he did the same thing. 4 pieces of glass to get the job done.
More parties – my brother had a collection of Airfix model aircraft lovingly painted and hanging from his ceiling – why a great ruse it was to take them from the ceiling, douse them in lighter fluid, set them alight and throw them from the bedroom window as if shot down by enemy fire.
Later still, serious girlfriend became fiancee. Raging hormones and unstoppable sex drive. ‘Just going to wash our hair’ getting into the tiniest of bathrooms, locking the door and shagging each others brains out.
Throughout my teenage years we didn’t have a phone at home. One saturday night the front door bell was rung by one of our neighbours. It was a message for my dad that his brother had been involved in a car crash – my dad said ‘Is he in hospital?’. The Neighbour said ‘sorry its more serious than that’. At 54 he had driven while pissed, had a heart attack and drove into a brick wall killing himself outright. They weren’t close – I don’t think my dad cried. I don’t remember tears.Didnt like him much myself.
My nan came to stay for the last 3 months of her life. She was shell like but still with a sharp wit and a steely determination to enjoy the last days of her life. She died in the bed I had slept in as a teenager.
I left the house in the wedding car for my first wedding – my aunt from Somerset was a hairdresser and promised to do my hair – she bouffanted it – I looked like a right prat.
We left the house in funeral cars for my Nan and for my Grandad and more recently for my Dad. This time I cried like a baby – he was as much part of the house as the bricks and mortars. Every time I go there I think of him. For me that house will always be part of the family, part of the memories of everything that has shaped my life.
Enjoyed this Steve,that Ian Dury track caught me out too when I borrowed it for the night to tape it….my parents still living in the only house they ever had,though my Dad never had his own chair!