returning to the home I was born in

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 20^th 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 18^th 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.

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watch ‘a house through time’

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.

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