Lieux de memoire.

Lavenham 

  

Upper Bridge Street, Wye, Kent

This morning, [21/05] to a superb U3A talk called Boom and Bust in Mediaeval Lavenham by Jane
Gosling. I was particularly impressed by the quality and variety of the speaker’s photos of the many mediaeval buildings in the large village. Several featured various Crown Posts in different houses and suddenly, seeing them, I was taken back to my own much-loved old house in Wye, in Kent. I had left in early 2015 after over thirty years in the timber-framed semi-detached late fifteenth century house on one of the main streets in the village. I could barely afford to buy it originally but felt it to be historically, a dream house for me, with its beams, inglenook, Crown Posts et al. Despite strenuous modernisation, much of the original remained to be treasured and enjoyed over the years and it became one of a very small number of homes in my life which I have totally loved. Eventually, when I was eighty, I accepted that it was becoming a little too hard to care for it and I could see that, quite soon, it would become an increasing burden.

Crown: upper part of an arch
Post: upright support

Happily for me, this realisation gradually happened and coincided with a sudden impulse to live in Bruges which I had visited, and admired, every year for over twenty years and the excitement of making that adventure happen, quite took the edge off bidding farewell to my much-loved old house. Almost painlessly, I left, to remember it so fondly, but this morning’s photos of Crown Posts in the Lavenham lecture, called up the strongest desire to picture dear old No 1 and the Crown Post to which I awoke every morning for so long! It evoked a sudden, almost visceral, longing, not to return, but to savour the memory and the reflections and reminiscences it called up.

Now, all of this Crown Post remembering calls to mind the concept of “home” which has a strong connection to the image of “house.” When I think of my childhood home, I remember the house which was familiar and always there but which I don’t particularly remember admiring in any aesthetic sense, [it was just ‘there’] though I did love the garden; the “side-piece” adjoining the long garden which wasn’t ours, though we girls colonised it with our miniature patches of gardens; and the front lawn with the large Buddleia tree and its myriad summer butterflies where we so enjoyed our joint July birthday parties at the long, borrowed table. All of that was loved but the most important feature about a home is the person, or people, who make it home plus

Part of my childhood home minus front lawn. 2017.

the feelings associated with that person, and by extension, that home. And that, for my sisters and me, was our mother. One safely protective, always loving, adult was enough to make our home which

embraced us, and remains still, part of my precious internal landscape of memory.

Similarly recalled with strong feelings of attachment and love is the large house and garden where my children grew up; a happy, busy, spacious home with a garden garlanded with many trees and shrubs, ivy-covered old stone walls, a large pond [or little lake] with a stream, lawns and a Victorian greenhouse beloved by only me, I think! For a time we had a small boat made and loaned by a friend and for more years than I can remember, the daring swoop over the pond of an aerial ride, made by my husband to the astonished delight of the children, and much admired by young visitors too.

Waingroves Hall, Derbys.
Georgian-built, late 1700s, probably constructed around
the original Jacobean Clayton House; Victorian entrance porch
added c 1880/90.


Readers should find:
Geneology Blog: Robyn and the Genies
Waingroves Hall, Derbys.
Monday 26 October 2015 entry.
where an embarrassment of riches awaits.

Woensdagmarkt 9, Brugge
My apartment was on the top (floor 3rd)  behind the seven windows
with an eighth around the right-hand corner.
The terrace was hidden behind the top left corner of the building.
I meant never to leave, till old age intervened!