Old Houses

   

Sunlight streaming through broken windows 
in an old empty house

Extract from : Old Houses by Robert Cording.

Year after year after year

I have come to love slowly

how old houses hold themselves…..

…..I have come to love

how they take on the colour of rain or sun

as they go on keeping their vigil

without the need of a sign, awaiting nothing

more than the birds that sing from the eaves,

the seizing cold that sounds the rafters.

From: Walking with Ruskin Robert Cording

Cavan Kerry Press 2010.

Old cottage in Matlock, Derbys.

I began to appreciate old houses in my thirties when my husband and I, then living in a modern house, were looking for a four bedroom cottage in Derbyshire. As we looked, I grew aware that I no longer loved the modern teak furniture [Danish. All the rage in the 1950s/60s!] which we had painstakingly saved up for and gradually bought, but increasingly loved the varied bits and pieces of elderly, old, even antique furniture which we came across on our cottage-hunting expeditions. This same search also began to open our eyes to, and concentrate our minds on, old houses, some of which were gorgeous but financially totally out of our financial reach. But eventually we found an old hall, not in the really rural parts of Derbyshire we so admired, but close to where a coal mine had been and perhaps a mile or two from a brickworks. It was near a village which was not particularly beautiful, though the situation was actually, immediately, rural surrounded by fields and with two acres of land with stream and pond and a Victorian greenhouse which had seen better days. The fact that the hall was in a poor state having been mined beneath years before still suffered from subsidence damage, in spite of which, the price was more than we had envisaged. Eventually, dear reader, Waingroves Hall was purchased and our little family of five moved in. My father came to have a look at our somewhat disheveled purchase and opined that we would be prisoners of war for life. We loved it though my husband’s enthusiasm cooled somewhat eventually as the physical remedial work required seemed endless.

Waingroves Hall

For me, living in the Hall was like falling in love; in fact I experienced a sort of coup de foudre; it was love at first sight, the strength of which continued for me during the entire 15/16 years we spent there. I loved it all; the two acres of trees and gardens; the pond; the old greenhouse; the ever-present effort to keep the grounds looking good. And the privilege of living with my family in such a familiar yet old house, a central part of our lives but also of so many former lives with their hopes and dreams.

In a snowy downfall in Wye.
The 'perpetual twilight' was solved by the
addition of two dormer windows

 

 

I felt similar emotions when I later bought a timber-framed house dating from around 1600, in Kent. Again I couldn’t afford it and there were several problems! What seemed an endless stream of air, i.e. draughts, found entry at numerous tiny gaps around innumerable beams; an old fireplace was blocked off with badly-painted hardboard; the top of the lower stairs was in perpetual twilight, as was the attic bedroom. The paved courtyard adjoining my small garden at the back, was owned by the business next-door and the other next-door, whose half the original Hall house, adjoined mine, had right of way through my little garden and across the courtyard. Good neighbourliness was at a premium but the house was a joy!! My 31 happy years there saw my old house grow ever closer to my heart and increasingly part of me! My circumstances changed during that time, but the essential essence of my life remained invested in, and nourished by, the lovely old house.

Study area, Wye, Kent

I left to go on an adventure when I was 80 and now, nine years later, I can still [and do] take mental walks through the Hall [bought in 1968 though built in the late seventeenth century] and the Kentish timber-framed beauty [bought in 1984 but built around the time that Elizabeth 1 died] Every part of each house is still readily accessible to my wandering through in my imagination; I see the furniture, the pictures, the grandfather clock, the curtains and cushions, the tight little turn in the dark upper stairs where it was so difficult to manoeuvre the chest for one bedroom in the roof!

Gaston Bachelard
1884-1962

I imagine that this is not exceptional; the French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, believed that there is a dynamic interplay between the mind and its surroundings, each shaped by, and responding to, the other. A house and its contents does, in any case, reflect the tastes of the person who chose them but I have a strong feeling that each of these two houses which were so dear to me, remains within me, part of me, with lighted rooms still there in images in my mind, all still awaiting my arrival. Somehow, memories become embodied by the places in which we live. These two houses continue to provide my inner landscape.

In spite of the interwoven nature of house and inner self, nonetheless, if one were to revisit a formerly much-loved house, there would be no physical evidence of the former connection.

                                                      In 55 Etisley, Ted Hughes laments:

Our first home has forgotten us.

I saw when I drove past it

How slight our lives had been

To have left not a trace.

Ted Hughes
1930-1998

But my children grew up in the old Hall and my memories of rooms and spaces like the garden and the Tarzan swing above the pond, are punctuated by remembered scraps and episodes of their, of our, lives. My sense of self is so closely related to those two fondly-remembered houses as to be inseparable from them. So perhaps, a house is like a theatre of remembered lives; whole histories are played out and the memories of these are portable and precious; perhaps only ghosts remain in the house itself but clear images live on in the person’s mind.