If only

This appropriately blurry picture is one of the few that I have of a house where I spent a lot of time as a child, and its unfocused quality seems to reflect its haziness in my memory. It was on the south coast of England, and belonged, implausibly, to my grandparents. I have no idea how they afforded it. It was demolished in 1976, a casualty of the English heatwave, its foundations undermined by the heat, and I’ve always regretted it. A recent conversation with my brother on the subject developed into a consideration of why I hadn’t been writing much, and he suggested I take the phrase I’d just used “if only the house were still there”, and- well, and write. So, this afternoon, I did, for about three hours without stopping, finally feeling as though heavily caffeinated. The trick, as all teachers of creative writing know, is to use the phrase in as many different ways as possible, and here are five efforts which are more sketches than complete stories, but might be worth revisiting…

1 English Class

“If only the house were still there…”

They were discussing memories, and specifically, loss. He had been attempting to encourage the class, which consisted mainly of refugees, to explore their own past, and to allow these awakened ideas to animate their use of the past tense, which was the week’s linguistic focus. So far, a lady from Iraq had spoken of the date palms in her home city, Yulia had spoken of her childhood home in Donetsk, every year the blossom on the cherry tree falling like pearl dust. And then Kazima had recalled her home in Sudan, the adobe walls, and fields of sorghum, and how she could still smell the sweet grassy smell of the sugarcane. Before the war, and the destruction, before her flight to safety, her battles with immigration officials, before the hatred in the faces of the people outside the old hotel in the faded seaside resort where she’d remained while her case was processed. “If only the house were still there,” she repeated.

The class fell silent, lost in their own thoughts, and he caught his breath momentarily, struck by the beauty of the phrase. He had always been susceptible to women’s use of language, their effortless navigation of the circuitous pathways of syntactic and semantic nuance, their code switching. Here it was her grasp of the subjunctive mood, which, according to the plan furnished him by the school managers, they were not due to cover until the second term. He was also entranced by the mournful quality of the opening conditional, hinting as it did at a deeper sense of melancholy suggesting a sensitivity and sense of loss with which he felt instinctively in tune. And then, the reminder that this was her second language in the barely perceptible twisted diphthong in house, which sounded a little closer to howse. Why was he so often attracted to foreign women, he reflected again, trying not to notice as, having delivered the phrase, she turned aside to exchange a joke with Ivan, the gym-buffed young Libyan sitting next to her.

If only the house were still there…

2 Monopoly

If only the house were still there…

The boot- it was always the boot, inevitably representative of the kicking he felt he was getting- had just alighted, finally, on the indigo blue rectangle signifying Mayfair, the very property embellished until so recently by the chunky green piece symbolising a house. And he had sold it! Remortgaged it to the bank to assuage his terrible losses, deciding that of his increasingly shredded property empire, the house on Mayfair was the least likely to bring him a return which would keep him actively in the game. Full thirty times had Phoebus’s (for he saw Alex, in his privilege, as a sort of deity) boot gone round Neptune’s salt wash, and each time it had picked up two hundred pounds, whereas all his token, the battered top hat, appeared to achieve was an invitation to “go to jail”. 

It was typical, he thought, typical of the combination of bad luck and mischance which had blighted his life- his upbringing in the impoverished North, far from the corridors of power, his failure to attend the right sort of school, like the ones attended by his cousins, where the boys all had their assured routes into comfortable jobs in the city. Only last week he had met Alex, his father’s sister’s child, always a fool, now a partner in a successful law firm specialising in divorce- “a real growth area, you know,” he had fatly opined from the restaurant seat into which he’d oozed himself, with the air of being fully to the manner born. And as for divorce; well, that was another story, another bitter pill in his pharmacy of wormwood. And now, absurdly, and for reasons he couldn’t fathom, he was playing his cousin at Monopoly, a hideous reenactment of the seasonal, once a year traumas of his childhood. He could almost smell the sulphurous odour of overcooked, defeated brussels sprouts, see the sagging Christmas paper chain somehow so reflective of his parents’ unsatisfactory social ambition.

Now, he collected the paltry rental payment from a hopelessly houseless Mayfair, glumly contemplating the dwindling pile of banknotes, glancing enviously at his opponent’s correspondingly swelling pile, clearly  drawing its tumescent potency from his own shrivelled inadequacy. 

If only the house were still there…

3 The Old House

If only the house were still there…

The rain, driven horizontally by the wild winds of Dartmoor, insinuated itself under their anoraks, stinging their eyes and smudging the colours on the battered OS map he was forlornly clutching; what a fool, to have clung so stubbornly to the habits of the past, and spurned the technology of the present. Somewhere, he knew, there was another version of himself, more successful, more handsome, richer, more assured, with some smart handheld device (he thought that’s what they were called, but wasn’t even sure).

“Don’t worry, I’ve been here before, and there should be a house just over that hill,” he faltered, an old one- “it has a roof still, I remember, and it’ll be somewhere we can bide the pelting of this pitiless storm. We’ll be out of this in a minute.” He spoke with a cheery confidence he was conscious of not fully feeling, and out of the corner of his eye caught her expression- resentful, mistrustful, disappointed. Was this just another rung on the infernal, descending ladder of their relationship, another station of the cross as they approached their subterranean Calvary? Was she even now bitterly regretting her decision to give him another chance, after all his failures? Anyway, once they were out of the rain, he thought, he would be able to show her how well he could manage, how competent he was. He could visualise the scene- how he’d build a crackling fire in the old fireplace from the twigs he’d resourcefully gather from an outhouse, with a spark from his cigarette lighter, and how she’d kneel gratefully in front of it, comforted by his solicitude, trusting him implicitly, and how after all this they might go upstairs, where there would be no bed, but perhaps straw, and a roof right over their heads, under which they’d shelter. Is this love, is this love, he imagined himself crooning into her hair as they lay entwined. It would be wonderful, miraculous, and this crisis would not be a final devastation but merely a turning point, a moment of peripeteia in their lives, and tomorrow the sun would rise on them, lying in one another’s arms, and they would be happy, and blessed, and…

The house was gone.

Where it had stood was nothing but a pile of stone, and a few sheets of corrugated iron. A rat stole stealthily away, no doubt irritated at having his place of refuge disturbed by the arrival of these human beings in a place where they had no business to be, for who really ventures out on the moor in such weather, in diesem wetter, in diesem braus?  He gazed at his map, and found time to wonder when it had last been updated.

The rain continued to fall, with what appeared a renewed intensity, and spitefulness, the tor now shrouded in low lying cloud. He turned, to see her retreating back, grimly noting her decisive steps.

If only the house were still there…

4 Nostos I

If only the house were still there…

They sat, side by side with Anna, the archivist, in the reading room of the Institut fur Stadtgeschichte, the Frankfurt archive, gazing at the screen, on which a map was displayed. The room had the neutral, inoffensive air of all such contemporary buildings, its soft pine fittings reassuringly nonspecific, equally suggestive of school, office, or, as in this case, as sanitised repository of memory. Above all they irrevocably suggested the present day, and therefore a reassuring distance from the grainy black and white images of people familiar to Benny and Hannah- the family gatherings of solemn faced patriarchs, cautiously smiling young couples, then the horrors of mothers and children with hands raised as they passed for the last time through familiar doorways, and emaciated, ignored cadavers twisted beneath the baroque swags of window frames.

They’d been in contact with Anna for some months, the emails sent from their Connecticut home somehow reaching this young woman who, in her unashamed modernity, with her blue streaked hair, and heavily tattooed forearm- an abstract floral pattern of some sort- held the key to their past.

“So here you see the map of Frankfurt in middle of 19th century”, she announced, with the pride of someone finally finding an excuse to be centre stage, and conscious of her ability to act as interpreter of the esoteric . “Here is Judenmarkt. And here, on other later map”, she said, swiping right on the screen, “is Borneplatz”, she continued, pointing to a heavily hatched area, ”and here lived many Jews. And your grandparents’ house was here, on Alterheiligenstrasse”, she said, pointing to a black smudge. “And this is today, Neue Borneplatz, and here Alterheiligenstrasse. Do you know what was your grandparents’ house number?”

“We have letters,” said Hannah, “so yes, we do know- it was 126. And a picture.” She thought for a moment of the blurry image of Lily and Arnold Rosenberg standing in the doorway of 126 Alterheiligenstrasse , Arnold with his hands on his hips, Lily staring straight ahead, her expression unreadable, effaced by the years as she gazed into a future that would include neither her nor her husband.  “It was an old house, probably eighteenth century, and in the family for many generations.”

“So it will not be there now- this part of town was bombed in the war. But we can find where it was. We can look on Google maps.”

As Google loaded on Anna’s laptop, they remained for a moment poised over the aerial view of the modern city, the intricate lacework of streets divided by the slow swirl of the Mainz river, one feature Lily and Arnold would have recognised. As Anna zoomed in, Benny, who had been looking at the pictures of the old town before 1944 and afterwards, found himself thinking uncomfortably of the allied bomber planes- how many people died in those raids, including Jews hiding out in attics and garrets, in gaps between false walls?

“So here we have your street, and here is number 126.”

Anna lapsed into respectful silence, and Benny and Hannah peered, in disbelief- Hannah was awaiting an operation for cataracts- at the screen.

There, beneath a shopfront boasting that number 126 was the site of the Erotik Supermarkt, was a lurid representation of a woman’s body, leaning forward provocatively, and what Benny and Hannah both noticed almost before they noticed anything else, were the small yellow stars. No longer stitched on the woollen lapels of overcoats, as in a thousand historical images,  but here superimposed with coy prudishness on the breasts of this crude fantasy of femininity.

They gazed speechlessly at each other.

“Sorry”, said Anna. “Entschuldigen.”

If only the house were still there…

5 Nostos II

If only the house were still there…

He was strangely conscious of his own voice, as of something apart from him, yet running smoothly through the stillness of the room, imagining it as sound waves rippling over the studied tranquillity of the décor, the Aloe Vera, the Peace Lily, the African Violet, and the Scandinavian coolness of the couch on which he lay. 

“And if it were,” came another voice, which he realised with an effort, dragging himself back from the thought of his grandparents, their aspidistras in pots their heavy armchairs and antimacassars, belonged to the professionally detached lady sitting across the room from him, neither too close for uncomfortable intimacy, nor too far to inhibit the meditatively therapeutic ambience. “And if it were, what would you do?”

He felt he detected, underneath the professional urbanity, and the analyst’s non judgementalism, the slightest tone, of just perceptible weariness. Just another middle-class old bloke who can’t let go of the past, he imagined her thinking. Is this where it led, the A levels at the local college, the Psychology degree at Durham, the persuading her Daily Mail reading parents that the  “ologies” could be serious academic subjects, that their prejudices revealed more about them than they did about her choices, then the years of professional practice, the fighting her way in the patriarchal world of analysis, hoping for interesting cases, or real victims, women with abusive partners or parents (fathers, it was always the fathers). Was this it. Was this what she was thinking? The old middle class white guy with his memories?

He shut out these thoughts, as unconducive to the flow of his healing memories, and possibly unfair on her, and more reflective of his own insecurities (damn them) than the reality.

“It wasn’t just a bourgeois hang out, you know”, as if responding to her imagined critical air. “In the first world war it housed Belgian refugees, and my grandparents were no middle-class landlords- they had a little grocers’ shop in Yorkshire, a proper corner shop.”

Why am I justifying myself? he reflected, or even justifying them? To this jumped up counsellor? It had been his daughter’s idea, an attempt to wean him away from pointless nostalgia, and he had spent time researching the online profiles of the therapists in his area- Deirdre offered help to help him on his journey through life’s stormy waters, Jasmine offered healing through sharing a safe space, and Jessica quite frankly demanded whether he was experiencing trauma as a result of questioning his sexual orientation. None of these appeared to suit his immediate needs, and he was about to give up, when he clicked on Victoria, who wondered whether he might be anxious, overwhelmed, or weighed down by the past. That’s overstating it a bit, he thought, but- well, it’s a bit closer.

And so here he was, with Victoria and her calming house plants, and air of perceptible disapproval.

“What would I do? You want to know? I would throw open the front door, walk down the hallway, and glance in at the turret room, where I slept. I would run up the broad staircase, over the servants’ entrance, and explore the upper floors, where the lodgers lived, those strange dusty people whose name I never knew, clustered in those upstairs rooms. And then, with my brother, I would slip out to the back garden, push past the dusty hydrangeas, slide between the stone balustrades of the wall, and so, sneak into the park.”

“And then what would you do?” She asked, barely concealing a yawn, and casting a surreptitious glance at her mobile, which had just glowed briefly into life.

“We would feed the animals, we would float our boats on the lake”, he said. “And we would play. And as we played, we would be aware of the house in the background, solid, reassuring, aware of the hidden lives behind its windows."

“Nostos”, she said, to his considerable surprise and pleasure, “the pain of return”.

And for her it was as if a dam, long built, had finally broken, and she herself returned to a life before her parents and lecturers had pushed her towards a career in analysis, and she had sat at the dining room table in her parents’  old terraced house in Prospect Row, now long gone, beneath the dim, shaded electric lamp, reading The Odyssey and imagining a life of Greco-Roman exploration, perhaps becoming a distinguished professor of classics and returning home herself to her home to show her family the value of a good education in the classics. Long ago, before the council condemned the unhygienic houses on Prospect Row, and replaced them with a block of flats, itself now demolished.

If only the house were still there…