White with the Weather of Old Centuries

As well as my maternal grandparents' house at Stone in Worcestershire, and my paternal grandparents' house in Wolverhampton, I also knew a third grandparents' house too. This house belonged to my paternal great-grandparents, whom I was lucky enough to know until I was around ten years old.. So as not to get them confused with my maternal grandparents (Nanny and Grandad Stone) or my paternal grandparents (Nanny and Grandad Mole) my great-grandparents were designated as 'Little Nan and Little Grandad'. Little Grandad, I mostly remember as sat watching the boxing - or maybe the horse racing. I remember a mole on his face, a liver spot? Is that what they're called? People don't seem to have them these days. Little Grandad fought in the first world war, though I didn't know this until the last year or so when Dad told me. Little Nan I remember as being indescribably Victorian. An echo from the century before, all steamy horse mornings and gas lamps, freezing cold winter mornings with flat, white unimpeachable skies. This colour only exists in old photographs that is impossible for an unremembered sky to reproduce. I remember her toothbrush, in the bathroom at the back of the kitchen. Strangely curved, it was like a device from another world entirely and used to fascinate me. I do not remember why they were designated as 'little' Nan and Grandad. Perhaps they were small, but I was small too, and I do not remember them being smaller than any other grandparents, maternal or paternal.

It is their house that concerns me here. The interior geography of grandparents' houses are ones that haunt our childhoods and our memories, unreliable or otherwise, of those childhoods. Places of wonder and spookiness perhaps, of holidays maybe -Christmas, or summer, certainly of being taken out of the normal routine of school and homework and weekends anyway.

My great grandparents lived in a terraced house in Handsworth in Birmingham. I remember the streets there as full of terraced housing, all exactly identical to each other. The weather in Handsworth I remember as always being exactly the same; grey and cold - uncomfortable but not freezing, a winter weather and also a non-weather too, a weather perhaps from a previous century.

I have always found terraced houses to be terribly mysterious. From the outside they give nothing away. Only one face can be seen. No sides, no backs. No intimation of what the back garden might be like. Inside a terraced house, apart from the rooms at the front of the house, you feel far removed from the street, in a secret kingdom, just back from the everyday.

At my great-grandparents house, the front room was mysterious too. Vague images of silent furniture, a wooden table. That same white Victorian light. Perhaps this was my great uncle Frances' room, for when he had friends over. He lived in that same house all his life, until he died only a few years ago now. For some reason, I don't connect him that much with the house.

When we went over we would sit in the cramped but cosy living room out the back. A small television was in the corner, around which armchairs and sofas were crowded. Despite the wintriness of my memories of their house, I remember that room as deeply autumnal, all browns and shadows and afternoons. Next to the window was a tiny room that looked out onto the long back garden. From the living room, there was a kitchen, and on the other side of the kitchen a bathroom where that strange curved toothbrush lay. I think Dad took me into that garden once. I remember it as being a long, slightly ragged garden - grass growing through cracked paving stone, a slightly ramshackle pond. Maybe anyway. Perhaps I have dreamt it all.

Far more mysterious was upstairs. You accessed the upstairs in the house by a door in the living room. The upstairs would fascinate me, a dark geography of unexplored rooms, and perhaps other stairways, maybe a series of interconnected attics, a place of shadows and beds and hours I never saw. In those long afternoons there, I would often think of that mysterious, remote upstairs land. I could not possibly imagine what it would be like up there. The fact that there was a whole other level to the house fascinated me, the fact that it had been there through all those years and all those visits and all those days out and I had never seen it.

Dad took me up there once and I can't remember a thing about it, except that the stairs were narrow and steep, but I think I only remember that because because I want them to be narrow and steep.

I have another vague memory I attach to that house. One of those ridiculously early memories that make no sense as to what is being remembered or why it has lodged in the memory. Perhaps it is not a single memory but a collision, a collusion of different memories, attached to each other because otherwise they would be too fragile and small and insignificant to survive.

Rain.

I remember rain. The only time I remember any weather connected to the house other than that wintry whiteness. I remember a dark living room and I remember a comic. It was something like TV21 or Countdown, one of those old British comics that had two page comic strips based on the television series of the era. It was a Doctor Who comic strip starring Tom Baker. I remember an orange tinge to the colour of the illustrations.

That's all this memory consists of; rain, an old Doctor Who comic strip and a dark (and in my memory empty) living room in Handsworth.

I wonder who lives there now, if the house even still exists.

Maybe, after great uncle Frances' death, it has remained empty, boarded up and dilapidated, and is known to other peoples' grandchildren visiting their own grandparents and great grandparents. An empty house has a great hold over the minds of imaginative children, particularly terraced houses in an area of town where the skies are white with the weather of old centuries.

Maybe that weather will last them years as well.