Category: Nostalgia for the past

Categories
Childhood memories Coping with Covic-19 Covid-19 How can I return to my old home? Nostalgia for the past Returning Home

A House Through Time

When I was growing up, we sometimes used to stay with a great aunt, who lived in an old thatched cottage in a small village in East Anglia. The village was near an old Roman road and at that time, in the 1970s, the landscape around the village was almost denuded of trees, its history obliterated as old hedgerows were cut down and fields increased in size. The cottage itself was one-up, and one-down, with a lean-to at the back and a bathroom added at the side sometime in the 50s or 60s. The walls of the original structure were still made of wattle and daub on a timber frame: it was indeed a house through time – across centuries and generations.

In the course of building work, my aunt discovered a great Tudor inglenook behind the utilitarian 20th century fireplace, with niches at either side where one could sit in winter, when the rest of the room was freezing cold. Upstairs, the bedroom floor still had its original timbers, which had grown uneven over time, so that it was a disorientating experience to walk on them.

The cottage was said to be around five hundred years old, and so hundreds of people must have lived there, untraceable and unknowable. At night, when the fire was dying down and the countryside was quiet, it sometimes felt as though there was a thickness or heaviness in the air, as though the previous generations had left, in some way, a trace of their lives; their unknown and unknowable births, marriages and deaths.

When people move into a brand-new house, they are at the start of a story, but already creating that story.  Revisit Your Home makes it possible for families and friends to return to where they used to live in the past, discover more about its story, and add to the richness which the property carries.

In my own house, the title deeds include a handwritten page giving the name of the person who built the house as well as the name of the first occupant, a widower who lived there with his daughter. In the local museum, I found an aerial photograph of the area taken during the 1940s, including my house, clearly showing that the garden at that time was laid out like an allotment, with a path down the middle and beds for vegetables on either side. The garden soil has always been very rich, so I am profiting from the tillage of previous generations. I sometimes think of what life must have been life for people who were living in that house at key moments in history, such as the declaration of two World Wars.

Revisiting a home serves as a reminder that living in a particular place entails a beginning and an end; a welcome and a beginning; happiness mixed with sadness.

The BBC series ‘A House Through Time’, which starts this week, focuses on an 18th house in Bristol, near the old harbour, which was the home of several sea captains involved in the slave trade, one of whom was captured by pirates. At different times, a foundling orphan was left out on the steps, a black servant ran away, possibly to become a pirate, and John Wesley preached the evils of slavery in a nearby chapel. Well-worth watching.

visit our home page
watch ‘a house through time’
Categories
Childhood memories Coping with Covic-19 Covid-19 How can I return to my old home? Nostalgia for the past Returning Home

Garden Lockdown

All-focus

Since lockdown, many of us – those who are lucky enough to have one – have been spending more time in our gardens. This has been one of the sunniest springs on record. And yet we’ve not been able to buy new plants as we would normally have done.

With the extra time, we’ve had an opportunity to grow new plants from seed – our front windowsill is filled with sunflowers, forget-me-nots and radishes, growing up from seed. And the extra days of lockdown have given more time to contemplate changes in the seasons which we might well not have noticed in the same way before.

This year, with the record sunshine, the azaleas in our garden have been the best-ever, the forget-me-nots have almost smothered the wallflowers; the peonies have come into blossom. The garden is filling with the honey-smell of wisteria, the scent of early roses, a regular pattern of flowering and a comforting sign of the apparent constancy and predictability of the world and nature, in a time when everything seems to be falling apart.

But just as gardens can delight, they can also disappoint, cause grief, surprise and even shock. As some plants flourish, other will fail to thrive or unexpectedly die, like the  massive old clematis in our garden, which died last year, leaving a great gap on one wall which will take many years to replace with new growth.

Many great gardens have been neglected, destroyed and disappeared, but gardens can also come back to life; Heligan in Cornwall, rescued from brambles, the orchards replanted, the glass houses rebuilt, the beds restocked with gorgeous sub-tropical flowers; Croome Park, where newly-replanted trees are gradually restoring the vision of Capability Brown, or Stowe, the greatest garden of all, where the National Trust has dredged lakes, restored vistas and is replaced lost statues.

But some of us will have experienced the satisfaction of restoring a neglected garden in a house to which we have moved; where undergrowth has been cleared, lawns remade, flowers and shrubs replanted. In our garden, a few years ago, a utility company had to carry out major works, which entailed destruction of trees and shrubs, digging of trenches and loss of privacy for many months; but now there is no sign of its temporary humiliation.

Returning to a much-loved garden has the potential for disappointment as well as joy. Has the garden we might have remembered from our childhood been maintained as we might have hoped? Have trees, shrubs or flowers we planted in our childhood or youth survived? Do we still recognise it as the garden we remember from our childhoods?

Revisit Your Home to find out.

visit our homepage
Categories
Childhood memories Coping with Covic-19 Covid-19 How can I return to my old home? Nostalgia for the past Returning Home Uncategorized

Staying Home

Revisit Your Old Home

In the current situation, when so many of us are discouraged or unable to leave our houses, I’ve been reminded of other times in my life when I’ve had to stay at home. As in the current crisis, the reasons were often unexpected or even traumatic in nature; linked to particular circumstances, such as bad weather, or having an illness.

At the age of six or seven, I remember having a bad case of mumps, forced to stay in bed by high fever after telling my mother than there was a gorilla sitting by my bed. The proof the world still existed was limited to what I could see through the top of the window, the roofs of the houses on the nearby hill, the clear sky slanting towards the sun, which gave the promise of eventual freedom. Today, the views from the windows have taken on a special significance as we gauge how much the world has changed; little traffic, few pedestrians, but the sky is a vibrant, clear blue and the woods in the distance look much clearer than before.

I must have been eleven or twelve when I had four back teeth removed, which meant a short general anaesthetic and having to stay off school for a day. After the fear and panic of being strapped to the dentist’s chair and experiencing a very unpleasant, brief dream which has never left me, I was taken home and made to sit in the garden. It was a fine day in early summer; still under the effects of the anaesthetic, I studied the rectangular lawn, worn in places, with sparse bedding plants round the edge and a harsh concrete path down the middle, alongside the clothes line.

On that day, having realised all its imperfections for the first time, I decided I would take it upon myself to redesign and remake the garden, replacing the hard lawn edges with curves, create a grassy bank, and dig a sunken dell. And in the next year, these were all changes which I manged to make, much to the bemusement and initial opposition of my parents.

There were other days I still remember when it was bad weather which prevented me from going outside.  I remember a Sunday afternoon in spring, when I was about eight or nine and it was raining heavily outside. My sister had a new jigsaw, completely round, which seemed impossibly difficult, but she somehow agreed to let me help her. I crouched down on the carpet, which I can still remember with its 60s geometric design, and we worked quietly and efficiently to complete it together, cooperating as a team, the sound of the heavy rain pelting on the large window at the front. But on that day, protected from the weather outside, I remember a feeling of calm, happiness and well-being which has remained with me ever since.

I did finally return to my childhood home, carrying all the memories I have of the house, overlaid and merged with all the other memories.  In the garden, I could recognise a few surviving relics of the changes I’d made when I was a child, the remains of the grassy bank, the curving lawn, and remembered with a pang of strange and unexpected disquiet, the day when I’d had my teeth out and had been forced to sit in the garden and, under the effects of anaesthetic, dreamed of a different garden and a different future.

visit our homepage
Categories
Childhood memories Coping with Covic-19 How can I return to my old home? Nostalgia for the past Returning Home Uncategorized

The Beautiful House

Revisit Your Old Home
Revisit Your Home is a national agency which makes it possible for people revisit their former home in a safe and confidential way.

Houses in which we spent our childhoods may be places with dark associations if, for example, our memories of those childhoods are unhappy. And happy and positive memories are often mixed in with sadness, such as memories of pets or of loved ones who have passed away.

There is one house which has never faded from my memory; a large eighteenth-century house in Cornwall, surrounded by a garden full of hydrangeas. We only visited the house once, on a day in August many years ago, when the hydrangeas were covered with massive blooms of pink and powder blue and the winding, shaded lawn led on to a  distant view of what was then a space-age telecommunications facility gleaming on the higher land towards the sea.

We were there, my brother and sister, my mum and dad, for just one day; the house was reached by a long drive-way lined with tall trees; the front door, with its fan-shaped light, was reached by a bridge over what I perceived to be a kind of moat; inside there were Turkish and Corinthian arches and beautiful cupboards with delicate panelled glazing.

The house was rented by a distant relative; as someone who lived in a semi-detached house on a new estate, I’d never imagined that such places could exist, let alone that people might live amidst such grace and beauty. And we only made one visit, to part of the house; from the hallway, I had the briefest glimpse of the beautiful rooms beyond we were never allowed to enter; we ran around the garden, among the hydrangea blooms, and I remember the telecommunications facility gleaming in the early-evening sun.

I have a photograph of that day hanging on the wall above my desk; my brother and sister and mother and the two distant relatives, a black and white photograph taken by my dad, who isn’t in the picture, as he often wasn’t.

I recently discovered that this elegant and beautiful house is up for sale. On the website there are photographs of the interior and views of the garden. How much I would love to return there and return inside the house.

Yet to do so, I would need to pretend I was a potential buyer of the house, when in fact it is way out of my price league.

I’m aware that estate agents are often troubled by people who make a habit of visiting houses up for sale, which they have no intention of buying. I wouldn’t have the nerve to pretend I had the financial means to buy the property when I don’t. And so this beautiful house will remain unvisited by me, only to be glimpsed from the road, incomplete and mysterious.

visit our homepage
Categories
Childhood memories Coping with Covic-19 Covid-19 How can I return to my old home? Nostalgia for the past Returning Home Uncategorized

Summer Gardens

A garden is a living thing, like a person. It’s often said that caring for a garden is like caring for oneself. Gardens change, like people; they grow and develop and change over time.

Gardens are also unique, like people.

This is a time of year when English gardens often look at their best, blooming with plants from all over the world, but which we now think of as being deeply English; yellow spears of Loose Strife, which grows profusely by the roadside in Turkey; Rose Campion, originally from the warmer regions of the Mediterranean; Marguerite Daises from the Canary Islands. Soon red and orange Montbretia will come into flower, far from its home in the grasslands of Africa, mixed in with native British plants such as the foxglove and the ‘deep vermillion’ of the rose.

Gardens are places we explored as children, when they seemed so vast; we would seek out particular areas of shadow or sun, changing as the day developed. Gardens are places we associate with the people who cared for the garden and perhaps for us. Gardens are places where pets are buried; they are places of memory, of long, lost summer evenings, lights shining through trees, brief, remembered moments of music and laughter.

visit our homepage
Categories
Childhood memories Coping with Covic-19 Covid-19 How can I return to my old home? Nostalgia for the past Returning Home Uncategorized

The Individuality of Houses and Homes

Every house and home is different and individual, as people are. Houses are never ‘the same’. Houses may have many fundamental things in common, roofs and walls and windows, just as people have heads and fingers and toes. Houses may look similar from the outside, may even be designed and built to the same plan. But even during and just after construction, there will be thousands of minor ways in which one house is different from one which looks identical. Then as people come to inhabit a house it becomes different in hundreds and then thousands and hundreds of thousands of ways from every other house. It is as unique as a human being and bears all the marks and scars and signs of joy and happiness and growth and development as each individual person.

The colour and shape of the curtains. If there are curtains at all. The colours of walls and carpets and floors. The arrangement of the furniture. The way things are stored, scattered, left lying about, or kept tidy. Photographs of family members, living or deceased. Original artwork by artists or children. Musical instruments. Food bowls for pets. Cluttered areas of paperwork needing to be put away. Dust on shelves. Uneven floor boards or stone steps which have been worn down over decades by feet. Bicycles left outside. It is hard to take in all the details; our brain picks up on generalities and discards the details which undermine these. We are also influenced by our knowledge of the people who live in each house; whether they are friends or acquaintances or people we hardly know; the contents of each house back up these perceptions.

Even if two houses are side by side, their views to the outside world may be so completely different, they could be in different towns; the angle of trees or adjoining buildings completely changes the light which comes in through windows and the mood of the interior.

And as houses get older, so the differences increase. So the angle of floors changes, windows are replace, floors are scuffed, brickwork fades to different colours.

Houses are like people, to be celebrated in all their myriad uniqueness.

visit our homepage
Categories
Childhood memories Coping with Covic-19 Covid-19 How can I return to my old home? Nostalgia for the past Returning Home

Now that Autumn’s Here …

Autumn … ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness … close-bosom friend of the maturing sun.’

I memorised the words of Keat’s Ode to Autumn when I was at school. And as I have grown older, Keat’s words seem to hang in the air on walks through the countryside on an October day, the ploughed fields mellow-gold, the trees turning red and yellow, ‘barred clouds’ on the horizon which ‘bloom the soft-dying day.’

But as much as Autumn is about walks in the countryside, for me it’s about coming home, about the feeling of security when the curtains are drawn early, the outside air turning chill and cold but the house warm inside, snuggling up in front of the fire or under a blanket in an armchair, hot toasted butter and cake for tea, windows streaming with condensation in the morning, the anticipation of Christmas.

revisit our homepage here