The House

   It stands like a last outpost of some rapidly dwindling kingdom; it's rooftop visible from all points of the compass even though wild shrubs and high skinny sallies almost completely surround it and have done so for many years now.  There is one single solitary sentry of a door, hanging off one of its two original iron hinges, rust covers everything metal in this place and the door hinges are no exception.  Some of the windows are intact.  Some are not. Their softwood frames are valiantly trying to hang on to the glass that they have framed for decades, glass that children looked out through on cold frosty mornings before they walked four miles to school.  The window frames are trying to  stem the aging process just like the rest of us lie about our age or try some magic potion to stop the march of time. 

 Paint is peeling from the door.  Paint is peeling from the walls inside.  The floors of concrete have long since sagged and sunk into the earth below them, children once played on floors here, their knees sore from kneeling down playing marbles.  An electric light cable hangs from one of the ceilings.  A reminder of a short lived experiment in 1967, when my father erected a small windmill on the roof to generate electricity; the house was not on the National Electricity grid and would never be.

Many hands put a thumb on the latch to open this door, between 1944 and 1968; from my grand-father who was the first owner through to my father who closed the door for the last time in February 1968, when he took his wife and four children to a different part of the parish to live. 

I was one of those children.