This house
A story of one hundred years of our lives in this house, before we move on to somewhere new.
My dad says that on the day I was born, he walked the 20 mins from this house to the hospital, striding right through the middle of the Moss Side anti-racism protests of 1981. The streets were thick with the sound of anger and justice. He was focused on getting to my mum. And to me, his first daughter. The way he tells it, everyone stepped aside for this long-legged white man, striding through the throng of history being made, as he set out to be with his new family.
Not long after, my dad changed jobs which saw us move far away, while my grandparents continued to live in this house. This house in which my grandad was born in 1921. This house on ‘the Parkway’ in a neighbourhood called Fallowfield; a place that had once marked the edge of the city, backing out onto the fens that had reached as far as Cheshire. This house, built by the council for Manchester’s bulging industrial population, that has been our family’s home for over one hundred years.
For as long as I’ve known it, this house has sat on a busy dual carriageway, the fields my Grandad spoke of now long committed to the project of urban sprawl and affordable housing. On this strange spot none of us would have chosen, perched opposite a Shell garage and a 20ft LED billboard. Right on the busy main artery connecting Manchester city centre to the mighty network of motorways shuttling northerners to the north, south, east and west, via the ever-congested M6.
As kids, my brother and I would bounce around in the back seat of our family sedan on our way to this house, antsy and agitated from the 2 hour drive from Wales, or Bristol, or Grantham, or wherever we were living at the time. Coming off the motorway we would spot the miles of gravestones in the southern cemetery at the opening to Princess Parkway, and we would know that finally, finally, we were nearly there.
This house smelled different to our own house. The detergent fumes from my Grandma’s fastidious cleaning mixed with the smell of braised beef boiling in a stew in the kitchen. My grandad’s black cat would sit, alert, on a table by the kitchen door, ready to wap any one of us who dared stroke it, or linger near it, or walk past it too slowly.
My little brother and I would clamber over our Uncle Grant in this house, shrieking from being mercilessly tickled until our Grandma couldn’t take the noise anymore and would tell us in no uncertain terms to Settle Down, before she herself would get lost in a fit of whole body laughter at some story or other. Or at watching Tom and Jerry on the telly. Her Scottish accent thick and rich, somehow both deep set and high pitched in its he-he-he.
Over a decade later, in the months after my Grandma died, I moved into this house. I’d been offered a ‘posh summer job’ at a bank in fancy Knutsford, and mum suggested I live here with Pop-Pop, because ‘it would be good for you both’.
For the first few weeks, we both navigated the realities of living with a virtual stranger. Me, two years through university, determined to be independent and self absorbed, missing my boyfriend and my friends and the thrill of being in a clan. Him, missing my grandma, trying to work out how to look after this sulky young woman who was now living in the bedroom next door. He fed me with kedgeree. And curries. And played music from Southern Africa on the cassette player in the living room.
A few weeks in we decided to go out to dinner. We went to Frankie and Bennys and both drank too much as he told me outlandish stories about ‘borrowing’ RAF planes to fly over India and moving his/our family to live in Zimbabwe. We laughed a lot, red sauce on our shirts, red wine around our mouths. And just like that, we liked each other. Then at 9pm he fell asleep as befits an eighty-year old who was out well past his bedtime. My job became working out how to get him home, trying to find a taxi that would fit in his wheelchair.
A year later, my parents had moved back into this house to help look after him. I was 21 and my brother 19; and this house on the dual carriageway opposite the Shell garage in a dodgy-ish part of town became our family home.
I brought home my first boyfriend to this house. We listened to Coldplay and pushed the single beds together. I brought home friends to this house. They would come in and chat with my Grandad, one leg now amputated, shirt sleeves hiding tattoos. My friend Nick and I sat in the living room until 2am debating the Iraq war and immigration and Europe and political philosophy. My friends Niki and Jane and Laura came to stay, and we danced to Justin Timberlake in some city centre bar, drinking vodka-lime-and-sodas which dulled the pain of walking the streets in painfully strappy sandals. I worked two jobs to save to go travelling— one at the council and one at a bar on Albert Square, and several nights a week we would get taxis home for £4 at 4am, trying to be quiet enough not to “wake the whole house up”.
Then in my twenties I left this house: for London, for ‘a big job’, and to find my own feet. Years were spent climbing career ladders, half-committing to relationships, travelling to new continents. Coming home sometimes. I remember standing outside the front door of this house in the week my Grandad died, chatting on the phone, eeking out the call so I could delay going in to find Pop-Pop was no longer inside.
Seven years passed and I came home again. Tail between my legs, beaten down by London’s ferocity and in the wake of a global financial crisis that made everything shake. I was made ill by civil service toxicity, severely depressed, on the edge. And slowly, I healed in this house. I locked out the world and made life small again. I sat for hours on the living room sofa watching West Wing episodes back to back, and when a pit of hopelessness was opening beneath me I would get up quickly to do some yoga, or make a jigsaw, or talk to my mum. Outrunning anxiety by focusing in on the small things within these red brick walls.
Until in another desperate sleepless night at 3.30am, the clouds broke, and an idea came to me which woke me up out of the doldrums. An idea I had to get down on paper. As so, this house is where I started writing for the first time. Writing what was going on in the world. Writing for myself. Writing myself out of my struckness. Re-engaging with the world, while finally, properly, making myself at home.
In the decade that followed, I shuttled back and fore from this house, retreating back to its slowness when the world got too fast. Walking the dogs in Alexandra Park on another grey Manchester day while my dad repeats the mantra that ‘it really isn’t that rainy here’. Watching Question Time with my mum late on a Thursday night, drinking our way through a bottle of Tesco red and eating cheese and onion crisps covered in Worcester Sauce.
When my brother would come home, we would rally ourselves to venture out of this house. Exploring the city’s tiny rammed Jazz bars or dancing for hours and hours in a damp warehouse club. One Boxing Day we were so bored of this house we escaped to a Hacienda revival and bounced around in a sweaty crowd to Derrick Carter and Graeme Park as if it was 1989. They actually played Strings of Life and I swear the whole crowd levitated. Can you imagine? Levitated.
Which brings us to now, where one hundred years after my Grandad was born here, we are now leaving this house. Our family centre of gravity has shifted to South Wales, and so we’re all relocating ourselves to create a new place of warmth where we can be together more often. Leaving behind the people’s history and football and Factory Records and white skies. To a new life not living on a huge dual carriageway, no longer just moments from the heart of this great industrial city.
This house. A container for a thousand family dinners and a million televised football matches. Where on a warm September day you could sit out in my Grandma’s garden and hear the roar from a goal at Maine Road. Where different dogs from different decades launched themselves onto our laps and snuggled wet noses into the crook of our necks. Where we lost at Risk or won at Monopoly and regularly wondered when exactly someone was coming home because “no one in this family ever tells us anything”.
This house where Fur Elise has been the doorbell ring since before I was born. Where a mishmash of furniture coexists from a hundred years of different family constellations. Where my great-grandmother would write angry letters to Government Ministers about how they should be doing better, and where as a boy my grandad was grounded for shooting the heads off a row of garden daffodils with a pellet gun, and where my mum came to live when she first moved to the UK in the mid 70s, leaving behind a lifetime of fat African skies for the promise of cold rain and family.
This house we loved.
This house, where we loved.
This house.
This piece was written for the Heroine’s Journey Storytelling Challenge: 10 days. 1 story. Shared.
