#56: The Manor House

Enough of the afternoon has slipped by that even in June the light in the sitting room – east-facing and furnished for cosy winter evenings – has started to fade. Mum needed to leave early for the opera, but I decided to stay a bit longer before locking up and leaving the key. Martha has already had a long nap today and it’s not yet time to feed her again, so we sit and play together on the carpeted floor. Her happy shrieks and gurgling laughter fill a room that never felt quiet or empty until today. When she starts to get restless, I scoop her up and head out into the hallway. I want to show her the house.

I can’t remember if I’ve ever been truly alone here. It’s a big house so it’s easy to feel alone, or to escape from others when necessary, but have I ever been here without company? With no-one in the garden? No-one pottering in the kitchen? No-one dozing in the snug?

Maybe that’s why it seems so empty.

My grandmother, Romey, died a few weeks ago and her house already feels different. I can see her impression everywhere, like a ghost who’s left their shoes neatly laid out in a row by the door. Everything looks exactly the same – as if she’s just popped out for a bit or has gone away for a few days – but it feels different. I go to make coffee and there’s a brand new jar in the cupboard, not even opened; coffee bought for her, which she will never drink. And I don’t know why this breaks my heart.

But it does.

Walking around, I wonder what will be kept and what will be lost. Talking to Mum earlier, I suggested hiring a skip for all the rubbish. My grandparents lived here for more than 50 years, and it feels like their entire life is contained within these walls. For every family treasure – real and nostalgia-infused – there will be a half-dozen books or knick-knacks that we’ll need to dispose of. But that was then, when I was trying to be calm and helpful. Now my practicality has deserted me and I’m devastated by the volumes of what no one will want. Because they’ll mean nothing without her. They’ll mean nothing outside of this house.

The blue and white china cups that she always used when making tea. The Formica dresser drawer full of mismatched teaspoons. A glow in the dark star chart that never seemed to fit in the bright kitchen. I look at her recipe books but there aren’t any worth saving. Good Housekeeping 1976. A faded collection of potato recipes. Loose sheaves from an old Cordon Bleu magazine. Do I keep them for the irony? For the sentiment? Or just to postpone throwing them away?

Even as a lifelong hoarder, I can recognize how much of this is essentially junk. The plastic clock above the kitchen table. The pots of pens next to her chair in the sitting room. The ridiculous cartoons on the walls in the bathroom that stopped being funny about 15 years ago. Cupboards groaning with jigsaws that she’ll no longer piece together. Jars of what I can only assume are decades-old jam on shelves in the pantry.

I wander from room to room, taking photographs of photographs, and I can’t help but think about the enormity of emptying this house when the time comes. The work it will take – physical and emotional. Its walls and floors are saturated in memories, and I’m just a grandchild! This is the room where I played with Hot Wheels cars on faded orange tracks; where my sisters and I made a band with the odd selection of string instruments hanging on the wall; where we slept in tiny fold out beds, and shrieked with laughter at the novelty.

This same room is where I printed out the table plans for my wedding. Where we all sat at long trestle tables for Granddaddy’s 80th birthday party back in 2002. Would keeping the toys or zither or ukulele or old paperbacks or broken sofa bed hold onto those memories? Will hanging the mandolin on my wall or putting that table by a window in my house remind me of this room or just look out of place? And this is only one room and only my memories. I cannot imagine what my mother feels here, remembers here. My aunt and my uncle. All my cousins, with their own weddings to look back on, and their own family gatherings with Romey and Granddaddy.

It’s just a house. It’s just a house.

But it’s not just a house. It feels both shallow and inevitable that it’s taken something so practical, so material to expose my grief. The eventual literal loss of this house seems to stand in for the intangible loss of her person.

It’s not just a house. I lived in seven houses before I left home at 18 and I’ve lived in nine since then, but this one has been here throughout. It’s been an anchor for me and for my family, and now it will be sold. New owners will paint over the water stains I’ve watched grow a little wider with each passing year, and change the wallpaper in the downstairs loo. They’ll pull out the hooks Granddaddy put in the ceiling of the third floor so we could abseil out of the window in case of fire, and will never know how hilarious it was that he didn’t provide ropes long enough to reach the ground. They’ll cover the exposed panel in the bathroom where you can see the Tudor wattle and daub, and they’ll change the curtains in the drawing room as they don’t need to match the trimmings on the sofas that won’t be there any more.

I can feel my grief now.

Perhaps l should have expected it. It’s where so many memories live after all. They’ve got smaller as she got older – walks in the surrounding woods becoming just the house becoming just her chair, but they’ve all been here. Helping Romey to cook in the kitchen or playing cribbage with her in the sitting room. Getting married on the front lawn. And more, older memories. Christmases in the drawing room with the silver fibre optic tree, and a yearly treasure hunt with clues always hidden in the same place. Running around the garden as our young feet pound on lawns that bounce with moss. Playing Sorry and Ludo for hours.

I miss my grandfather again too, not realising how I’d been clinging to traces of him in the house. Jars of nails screwed to the ceiling in his workshop, another room that has no real purpose except as his consulting room, his threadbare chair exactly where it was the last time he sat in it. All tangible links to the past that can no longer be practically maintained.

Locking the door to the empty house when I leave feels like an ending. I struggle with the lock, pulling the old warped door back and forth to align the bolt and wondering if there’s a knack I’ve forgotten. I guess it doesn’t matter anymore.

I’ll go back again, of course. This isn’t the end yet, but it is the start of the end. There’s still so much to do and I want to help. I think I need to help. And I’m looking forward to it, both to support my family with the emotional and physical work and because it feels like the perfect way to wallow in memories; remembering, sorting and processing.

I found some 100 year old four leaf clovers in a German work book slotted between novels in the dining room, labelled H.L. Colchester, 1907. I wonder what else is left to find.

Wine Info

Year: 2016
Grapes: Grenache, Cinsault, Cabernet Sauvignon
Producer: Le Petit Pont Réserve
Alcohol: 12.5%
Source: Calais Vins

Le Petit Pont Reserve Rouge is garnet-red coloured with spicy aromas of ripe red fruit.

On the palate it is round with a good presence. (Taken from The Home of Wine)

Wine Review

Livvy

We’ve been drinking this wine for years but I’m so pleased to be reviewing it on this post about memories as, more than any other wine, it sits at the crux of so many important memories. Linda and Richard introduced me to this wine on an early visit to Witney, and so it always reminds me of evenings spent drinking wine and chatting with them. We then bought cases and cases of it for our wedding, filling my Kia Picanto with as much wine as was legally allowed, so it’s a wine that reminds me of that wonderful day. It reminds me of the official beginning of our branch of the family, of dancing and laughing with so many important people, of celebrating on the lawn at the Manor House…

It’s safe to say that I would love this wine even if it tasted like garbage, but luckily it doesn’t! Even after ageing in our cellar for 18 months, it’s light and delicious. It has a thick, almost opaque appearance with a deep ruby red colour, but isn’t too heavy. It’s very dry with soft, warming tannins and fruity, plummy flavours.

9/10, can’t wait to drink again

Chris

Like Liv, I love this wine. Picked up from Calais Vins for the princely sum of €3.20 a bottle (and retailing in the UK for about £8), it combines Cinsault and Grenache – both traditional Rhone grapes – with a bit of Cab Sav to give it some extra body.

I was really happy we got to serve it at the wedding, given how closely I now associate it with trips to see my parents, and how accessible it is – this is a wine to sip casually at a party, or late at night with friends and family, rather than something you’d decant two hours before drinking or spend too much time matching with specific foods.

Between the white (also excellent) and red variants, we brought 40-50 bottles back with us from Droxford that weekend, which we then whittled down with surprising speed over the course of six months, till only this single bottle remained. It’s languished in our cellar since then, which I’ll admit made me a little nervous – but any fears I had over its drinkability two years later turned out to be entirely unfounded.

Le Petit Pont’s red is fruity without being cloying, balanced without being boring, and bone-dry without chucking a bunch of headache-inducing tannins into every mouthful. Unlike Liv, I wouldn’t say it’s light, but that’s one of the things I like about it – there’s just enough weight, just enough seriousness and complexity to the flavours to remind you every now and then that you’re drinking something nice, rather than just drinking.

We’re off to France again tomorrow, and while we’ll have less room in our boot this time (it turns out that babies need stuff – and lots of it), a stop at Calais Vins is already factored into our journey home. Whatever else we buy there, a few cases of Le Petit Pont will definitely be coming back across the Channel with us!

9/10 (8/10 on its own merits, 10/10 for the price)