Happy and Horrible Houses

Heavy rock music is pulsating through the house, someone is drumming away on their desk upstairs in time to it. It's a bit of a contrast to the Chopin that was being played on the piano earlier. I love the house being full of noise and energy like this and the cosiness of the real fire roaring away, keeping the house warm.

Sometimes the house can glow with extra energy. It's like the walls radiate something back of the atmosphere they have absorbed over the years. Maybe the house is feeling happy. Perhaps it swaps round sometimes, we fill the walls with memories and energy, and every so often it returns the favour.

Even the cold and unwelcoming house I grew up in occasionally did this. Most people who came to the house didn't like it, and some thought it was haunted. It had been two very large maisonettes which my father knocked into one house. It was quite odd as there were two of everything, two bathrooms (one was used as a dark room), and two kitchens (the one upstairs was a store room for tools). We had the two front doors for some time as well. I have a friend who is convinced that knocking down walls upsets the atmosphere of a house, and I think she might have a point. Upstairs there was a particularly strange window embedded in a wall with a cupboard built around it. It still had the net curtain hanging between the glass and the brieze blocks. The upstairs kitchen had a 'back door' which used to lead to a wooden staircase into the back garden. This was deemed unsafe and knocked down, so left the house with an outside door on the first floor that lead to nowhere. There was a huge attic, with a make shift hatch flap. When it was windy, the flap would fly open, exposing the cavernous area above. Birds used to get into the attic and it was common to hear noises akin to bodies being dragged across the ceiling. Occasionally they would fly out into the main part of the house when the flap fell. To this day I feel really uncomfortable walking under ceilings where tiles are missing, or there are openings above me. There were industrial strength fire extinguishers fastened to the walls in various places - I suppose my mother's pyromania encouraged this precaution.

My father played correspondence chess, an impossibly slow hobby, but meant that he could work out the perfect move with no time pressure. To help with this, he mapped all the positions of the pieces in a notebook. He had a large, square rubber stamp that made the impression of the chess board in bright red ink, and filled the details in by hand. He always left the board set up over night as well. One morning, he asked who had moved the pieces, he knew for sure they weren't as he had left them, but no one had. My mother used to complain that someone was rattling the empty wine bottles outside the dark room, but again, no one was there. There were many minor strange things like this that went on.

After my father died, my mother had to live in this huge house alone for several months before it was sold. She hated it, having never spent a night alone there before. No one wanted to be alone in that house.

The problem was, you never felt like you were actually alone.