I was looking for something else when I came across this piece of writing from a few years ago. Sometimes I surprise myself with what I find I have written. Does that happen to you?
It took the builders three days to knock through the wall of my bedroom to put in a window. Day after day, they chipped and hammered and swore until the hole in the four foot thick wall was scarcely big enough to let in the sun, but bigger than the view of Polly Garter’s next-door garden deserved.
My bedroom was at the back of the house in the part that had already withstood eight generations. In my great-great-great-grandfather’s day it had been a public house. Years later, when it was finally rid of the smell of ale and gin, my great-grandmother wanted the front, which at that time still bore the legend, ‘Albert Inn’, fashionably pebble-dashed. The work had scarcely begun before the village bigwig came thundering to the door, ‘What are you doing, woman? This is sheer vandalism, destroying our heritage.’ My great-grandmother didn’t give birth to twelve and raise eight children to be told what she could or couldn’t do with her own home — especially not by an upstart village boy — and she told him so.
That house, the place of my birth and my home for twenty-five years, stands in the middle of a terrace in the heart of the village. It was a matriarchal household: throughout my childhood there were four generations of women living there. My great-grandfather died the year before I was born; my grandfather sat quietly, smoking, in the corner, keeping his head down and his hearing-aid switched off; and my father, well, he was a character in one of my library books. On the rare occasions when I felt well-disposed towards him, he was the heroic Mr March away at war; most times he was the unseen parent who packed his daughter off to boarding school and sold her pony the moment she’d gone.
For a long time I believed my mother when she said my father worked abroad, like my great-grandfather had done. He, my great-grandfather that is, had worked on Ford’s first factories in America. When the hiraeth became too strong, and he returned home to Wales, Henry Ford himself came to our village and begged him to return, offering to transport the whole family back to the States. Or so the story goes. If my great-grandfather had accepted, then this story would be as imagined as I am.
But I am as real as the pen in my hand, so what more of home? As I said, my great-grandmother had eight surviving children and her presence in my growing-up home meant a constant flow of visitors. The encompassing of me within this extended family provided a shelter, the walls of which were stronger than bricks and mortar, and it was easy to ignore the non-existence of one person, to have only a vague awareness that something was missing but that it didn’t really matter much. I was surrounded with love and its synonym, good home cooking. When there were lots of us, the family, there for dinner we would pull out the table and I would squeeze onto the bench next to the wall. This was my favourite place, where the bricks I leaned against were warmed by Mr Shires next door’s fire. I sat quietly in the glow of conversation and knew that here I was safe.
In 1964 I passed my eleven plus and the door to another world, a more precarious world of Latin and physics, was opened to me. There was one other fatherless girl in the class but her father had had the decency to die. I explained to those who wanted to know that my father worked abroad. The summer of love was still to come and, in any case, free love only applied to the beautiful people out there, not the parents of good grammar-school girls in South Wales.
My French teacher was called Miss Henry. She was softly-spoken with a gentle face and greying uncontrollable hair. In her lesson we go round the class answering the question, Est ce que faites votre pere? Thirty-three girls sitting in rows waiting for their turn, or in my case, for the bell to ring, please, before Miss Henry gets to me, please don’t let her ask me. Shall I lie, make up an answer? Il est un medecin. Tres bien, where does he work? No, I’d blush, stutter, be caught out. Mon pere est mort. Convenient but they all know. The bell rings, the problem goes away for today, and I go home to steak and kidney pie and rice pudding.
It stands out in my memory but when I stop and think, try as I might, I cannot recall one unkind comment, not one slur on my parentage through the whole of my childhood and adolescence. If that was as bad as it got, then surely the family did its job well.
When I enter the house that is now my home, I breathe in the same sense of security that my first home gave me. I think my children feel it too; they continue to return here.
Since it was sold by my uncle some twenty years ago, Albert House has come on the market several times. Each time one member or other of the family views it with barely-concealed desire. But it’s never really suitable: too big, too small, no garage, no garden.
I was the last of the family to be born in Albert House and I linger over the link with the past. I’ve looked on old maps, tried to locate the public house that was to become my home. I’ve never been able to find it.
