Coming Full Circle
Sep. 11th, 2023 12:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphilo Now that the attic room has been converted into a decent living space I've moved my computer in.
For the past week or so it's been the hottest room in the house.
When winter comes it'll be the coldest.
I'm sitting now under a sloping ceiling with nothing above me but plaster board and tiles.
When I was a kid my bedroom was a very similar space- and my bed lay under the slope. I baked, I froze. I was a Dickensian waif. But when you're a kid you accept whatever you're given as immutable.
My sister strolled past that childhood home the other day, took pictures back and front. It's sixty years- sixty three to be exact- since we moved. At the back there's still a strip of woodland screening the house from view. The only difference is that the lane the back gate opens onto has been metalled. In our day it was a mud and cinder path- with deep ruts in it which became glorious puddles at the right time of year. If you walked left you came to a place where the path bifurcated. Keep to the left and you went downhill and back to the road, turn right and you'd come to the big park where my sister once participated in a pageant celebrating some significant date in the town's history. I watched. I was impressed.
I'm talking about Croydon. These days it's a bit of a joke- a huge conurbation with a heart that's only feebly ticking. No-one has ever called it beautiful.
Still, the place we lived in when we were growing up was on the very edge of the real countryside. Ballards Farm for which the mud and cinder lane was named- was a proper working farm with proper working cows- and the scents that went with them. Half a mile up the main road were fields. And our road curved through a wooded valley called Croham Valley- and I understand the word Croham has something to do with crocuses.
Which brings us to the front of the house. It's built in the same style and at the same period as the house we live in now. 1930s- a time when even journeyman builders had an eye for the picturesque. Bow windows. decorative brickwork, dormers. The present owners are having it gutted. In my sister's pictures the front garden is full of building refuse- bricks and window frames and all manner of ripped out trash- while the living room window is a gaping hole through which you can see across a wrecked interior to another gaping hole at the back...
For the past week or so it's been the hottest room in the house.
When winter comes it'll be the coldest.
I'm sitting now under a sloping ceiling with nothing above me but plaster board and tiles.
When I was a kid my bedroom was a very similar space- and my bed lay under the slope. I baked, I froze. I was a Dickensian waif. But when you're a kid you accept whatever you're given as immutable.
My sister strolled past that childhood home the other day, took pictures back and front. It's sixty years- sixty three to be exact- since we moved. At the back there's still a strip of woodland screening the house from view. The only difference is that the lane the back gate opens onto has been metalled. In our day it was a mud and cinder path- with deep ruts in it which became glorious puddles at the right time of year. If you walked left you came to a place where the path bifurcated. Keep to the left and you went downhill and back to the road, turn right and you'd come to the big park where my sister once participated in a pageant celebrating some significant date in the town's history. I watched. I was impressed.
I'm talking about Croydon. These days it's a bit of a joke- a huge conurbation with a heart that's only feebly ticking. No-one has ever called it beautiful.
Still, the place we lived in when we were growing up was on the very edge of the real countryside. Ballards Farm for which the mud and cinder lane was named- was a proper working farm with proper working cows- and the scents that went with them. Half a mile up the main road were fields. And our road curved through a wooded valley called Croham Valley- and I understand the word Croham has something to do with crocuses.
Which brings us to the front of the house. It's built in the same style and at the same period as the house we live in now. 1930s- a time when even journeyman builders had an eye for the picturesque. Bow windows. decorative brickwork, dormers. The present owners are having it gutted. In my sister's pictures the front garden is full of building refuse- bricks and window frames and all manner of ripped out trash- while the living room window is a gaping hole through which you can see across a wrecked interior to another gaping hole at the back...
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Date: 2023-09-11 01:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-11 02:11 pm (UTC)