It wasn't a childhood home, it was a home from home; if you like, a holiday home, inhabited through all the seasons by my grandparents, just a short walk from the sea, to which I came on day trips, on overnight visits, on half-term and end of term and summer holidays.
There, Mr and Mrs Ramsay were waiting, waiting...
[the names I will give my grandparents, my mother's parents, though they were nothing like them. They had not eight children, just the two, a girl and a boy who I shall call hereafter (if I speak of them at all) Cam and James, though these aren't their names. I shall call myself Lily, though you will say (if you have read To the Lighthouse) it makes no sense to do so. It will soon.]
...waiting in this strange shaped house, of no shape I could put a name to; Mr and Mrs Ramsay, their roles perhaps reversed. Cam and James have flown the nest. James nearby and Cam further away, nearer to where they used to reside, in Wimbledon. James at some point will have a little boy; Cam already has a girl, Lily.
Years pass, in which memories are made. Years pass, memories remain.
Mr and Mrs Ramsay were separated then united. The house lived in by one, then sold; pulled apart, updated, renovated.
Mr and Mrs Ramsay wait no more, but the house still stands. Waiting; holding in its ceilings, walls and floors the echoes of all those that inhabited it before.
Cam has aged, James is ageing (and has been for some time), and Lily has grown, into a skimpy old maid of forty [four whole years younger than the other Lily's forty-four] and is at present standing on the front shared lawn (shared with the neighbours next door), by the roses and the broome bush, with a pen and notepad in her hand, sizing the house up like an estate agent. Screwing up her small blue-grey-green eyes (it depends on what light you see them in, whether she's bare-faced or behind thin-lensed spectacles) wondering how to go about making the first mark, for a first mark on the blank page must be made. She is a writer, but others, should they happen to glance out of a window at this breakfast hour, might think agent.
There's the living room. Behind that window lies the wooden stairs on which she sat, her legs swinging through the gap, colouring in, or watching, watching, watching for her parents (Cam and William) to arrive; and behind them was the passage to and from all the lower rooms; and off that the dining room, the kitchen, the downstairs bathroom. The kitchen was the window on the side, looking at the drive. The window alongside it the bathroom, where the vacuum was kept and where a white cupboard which held...which held...coats...outdoor shoes...? made a good hiding place; the window above that the upstairs bathroom and next to that Mr and Mrs Ramsay's bedroom, which had its own shower and basin.
Ah, the play room, she'd forgotten the play room, for the play room it was to her, where the dolls and their prams and books lived. Yes, there it was, she could just make out it's flat roof, stuck on the end, on the right as she faced the house, shaded by trees. At its side there stood a fig tree and at its back, beyond the two uneven steps [the doll's pram bumped bumped down them] a stumpy money tree, with leaves like that of ivy.
But what about the upper floor Lily thought, turning as she thought her gaze upwards. Behind that window there was the landing. It was passed going up the wooden stairs; once on the landing a railing could be leant on and the space that held the stairs looked down on, through. Dizzying...exhilarating...was it safe? The pot plant suspended from the ceiling, down below, spun. Behind the window on the left was a small cosy bedroom; James', then hers and Andrew's, her cousin, when they stayed at different times. Next to that a larger, a double room, where Cam and William, if they stayed, slept. Though that too also became Lily's [Lily and Prue's (another cousin) sometimes] with its tall dark wardrobe and chest of drawers with mirror. All pass and vanish; nothing stays. Lily sighed.
Picture credit: P R Francis.
See To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.
Written in lock-down, May 2020.
