Newspaper House

My mother's Daily Telegraph January 2012

 

Lord, I do love old houses, and the older the better. I can not live in a new property. Do not know why. (Would rather live in a caravan but better still, if pressed and if you absolutely insist, a huge American home on all–weather wheels – with half a dozen workshop trailers tagged on behind? perhaps not.) Could manage a timber cabin in the woods though. Could design it myself, even. But realistically, am only comfortable in somewhere which has seen human nature alive and kicking for ages, preferably centuries. 

This is not snobbishness – it is a plain fact. But, anyway, the older, the better. I don’t want overindulged smartypants interiors. I do want authentic age, ragged around the edges. I like slightly cracked plaster, and uneven floors. I know nostalgia is fake, and all about the truly dreadful hardships which went before, but I love seeing the ancient times right there by the fire. I love making the stairs creak on the way up to bed. I love the birdsong from the same families who bred here so long ago. 

Can’t help speculating about this house – I don’t need ‘several reception rooms’ but my various workshops would take care of that. Cellar and large garden with orchard? Yes to both, if you please. I could even turn the shop back into a shop. Five bedroooms just means the extended family could pitch up here and have a rare old time together. Living so disparately across the globe, it’s not often they get to socialise in the same place at the same time. July in Maine is usually their answer, at the family home in Smallpoint, right on the beach. But every so often they need a UK place to be, and until now it’s been my mother’s or brother’s place, or a house loaned to them by a friend for a few weeks. 
I dream of having them all to stay with me, some time. 

As for ancient houses, there was a BBC Radio 4 programme years ago, about an extremely old Sussex ‘longhouse’. Or was it Suffolk? I captured it on my cassette radio, on tape for posterity. I remember that the delighted owner described how his home positively inhabited its position in the landscape and the climate, its wooden members responding to the weather and especially the winds, and the inescapable fact that the house had a living, breathing SOUL.  You could hear that soul breathing in the background. 

I once had an old house where the tiny livestock (cute, four feet and quivering whiskers) had as much right to abide inside the stone walls as I did to live between them (the fact that they ventured outside those walls is beside the point, for now) and the roof was assisted by metal bars, like yard–long staples, set into the interior stone surfaces and reaching up to clutch the roof beam. When the wind blew up to extraordinary force in winter these metal rods would start to sing, quietly, and hum, then vibrate louder and deeper as the wind rose, like the mast–stays on a sailing ship. We’re talking hurricane force winds here. Nothing stays idle in that kind of wind, certainly not people trying to sleep. I loved to reach up and touch these bars, to feel the vibration thrumming through them, and to know that my house LIVED. 

in the kitchen of the old house in the hurricane belt

Just had a thought. In my own experience, very old stairs tend not to creak.  Ha!