The searing guilt and sweet nostalgia of clearing your childhood HOME
A lock of her baby hair. Hoards of treasured family photos. An attic stuffed with memories. When Janice Turner was forced to put her mum into a care home, she discovered...
MANY mornings in the past seven years I’ve woken in my old bed in my old home wondering why I’m here. The house has the same compound smell of baking, apples left to ripen in a paper bag, with a top note of Lenor.
I wonder for a moment if my adult life never happened and I’m still 17, skulking in my room reading Iris Murdoch and plotting my escape. But my father is dead, my mother is in hospital — a bust hip, a stroke, another fall — and I’m alone in this ghost ship of our lives.
What will I do about the house? I ponder this during every long visit when my mother is ill. I open the pantry and find bags of sultanas for her Christmas cakes or Easter eggs bought for my sons, or I see an abandoned jigsaw puzzle by a tremulous shopping list and I howl.
Yet each time, after weeks of convalescence, weaker, frailer, but propelled by a mighty force of will, my mother somehow returns. ‘I’m not going into an ’ome!’ is her battle cry. Until the day, last November, a week after her 95th birthday, when I put her in one.
She’d been lying in the hall all night when she was found, delirious and dehydrated. Her handbag was upstairs hidden beneath her pillow as lately she’d imagined fires were raging across the street and that some evil, faceless man was plotting her eviction. Such wild stories spun by her subconscious revealed what she could not say: she felt besieged, frightened, no longer safe. As she lay railing in A&E, I made a call. By that evening she was in an ’ome. But what of her house? This time I knew she’d never return. Within weeks, she, who’d refused a stairlift, could no longer walk a step, while her always lucid mind was scrambled not by dementia, it transpired, but psychosis.
So like a tomb raider I loot her valuables, taking bank books and jewellery back to London. I cannot face deeper excavations. I’d open the sideboard, one of the mahogany behemoths crammed into this Sixties box, where my father kept Important Things, and come across his clear clerk’s handwriting, then recoil. Not yet.
What a violation to ransack your parents’ home. Even a year earlier I’d get a rocket from my mother for suggesting her home helps clear out the box room, a graveyard of knitting needles and dead Dustettes. Yet suddenly I have free rein, and legal power of attorney, over her life, from bank account to underwear drawer.
ON THE top shelf of mother’s wardrobe is a cash box. I force the lid and find inside £20 notes tied in two fat rolls, each with a message for one of my sons: ‘Spend it well. Love, Granny.’ She’d been squirrelling away hundreds of pounds for them and at Christmas I present them in lieu of gifts she can no longer buy. They are received with downturned faces: ‘We can’t take this ...’
Every domestic object, from the hardwood fruit bowl, a 1949 wedding present, to the sherry schooners in the drinks cabinet, is freighted with my parents’ absence. I feel asphyxiated by nostalgia, guilt, regret, loss.
Sitting in the derelict garden where my father once grew in military ranks all the summer vegetables they ever ate, I decide to sell the house.
What is a house? A different thing to every person who lives in it. To my father, who’d been a tenant, latterly renting from his employer the National Coal Board, it was the apogee of self-improvement. Aged 41, long after he and my mother had abandoned hope of children, I showed up, miraculous and adored.
His daughter wasn’t growing up in a pit, he decided. He was almost 50 when he bought his first and only house, a two-bedroom, one box room, house in the cul-de-sac of a new modern suburb of Doncaster, the nearest large town.
I wonder only now, when there is no one left with answers, how, given his age, he got a mortgage or how, given his modest wage, he managed to save. But he bought it, somehow, in 1971 for £3,375. How my father loved this house, tending it with his own hands: glazing windows, rewiring, decorating. He built a greenhouse where he grew tomatoes that he’d post to me in London; an outhouse for the freezer. Retiring aged 64, he’d toil all day until he’d pull out a deckchair and sun himself, lizard-like, on the lawn.
What was the house to my mother? A perpetual workplace where she’d sew and knit clothes, make jam, cakes, pies, proper meat and two veg dinners every night for my dad. A place of deep frustration. While he lay in the garden, she watched daytime soaps, windows closed, seething. She wanted company, shopping trips, a ‘run out’, but, like most women of her age and class, couldn’t drive.
Even in the house, since my father controlled the money, she had little power. Only after he’d died and, aged 89, she’d engaged in what for her was a wild spending spree — sofa, cooker, washing machine, kettle and toaster — did she tell me she’d always hated their furniture. He’d chosen it, not her. She’d never had any say. What was the house to me? Awful teenage ingrate that I was, it was a starting gate. In this dull suburb, with no escape from parental scrutiny, I was trapped, impatient to be free, for the race to begin. I despised their ugly, old-fashioned furniture; the blue Wedgwood, jugs and brass knick-knacks.
I sneered snobbishly at the swirly carpets, Artexed ceilings and royal memorabilia. After I left at 18 for university, I returned as little as I could, insisting my parents visit me in London, until their failing health pulled me back. In the New Year, when my mother’s mind briefly cleared, I told her I was selling the house. Unoccupied, it was growing unkempt, a burglary risk and, besides, nursing home fees were eating into her savings: she might need the cash.
I’d dreaded telling her, yet she didn’t seem to care. I was shocked. She’d fought so fiercely to stay in this house but now was happy to let it go. She hoped her grandsons would take some crockery and my husband keep the tools, but gave no other orders.
I accepted an offer in March but the contract still wasn’t signed by July. I’d decided I wouldn’t clear out the house until I had a completion date. I didn’t want to wallow: I’d give myself a week.
But as the date approached, I felt a vertigo-like dread. How could what has always been the northern point on my compass no longer exist? My mother’s health had declined to a wordless, bed-bound state. This house represented her active, living self and I was killing it before she was even dead. Moreover, as an only child, no one else shares my early memories.
I come up from London the first Saturday alone and I barrel in like a contestant on Supermarket Sweep, stuffing my mother’s cardigans and scarves, her rain hoods and hairnets, into bin bags. I’m doing OK, I think, not too upset, when I come across a cigar tin: ‘Janice’s hair’ reads a scrap of paper in my mother’s hand alongside a brownish, ribboned lock.
I shiver. Dear God, what do I do? Maternal love is so weirdly talismanic — I’ve kept my sons’ baby teeth, after all — but it seems bad juju to throw it away. I move on to books. My parents’ reading tastes span five categories: TV celebrities, the Royal Family,
What to do with the fish knives and cake forks?
cricket, Yorkshire and plain food. (If only Freddie Trueman and the Queen Mother had collaborated on a guide to scones.)
In my bedroom is everything I left behind when I fled at 18: my school recorder, Rock Against Racism badges, pottery animals. The oddest things stop me dead, like the figures who danced on a pin atop my music box or my mother’s coat hanging in the cloakroom from the last time she left the house. No, bin them all.
Before Monday I must empty the furniture that the British Heart Foundation will take away. I start with the sideboard where I find both my father’s formidable organisation and my mother’s stoicism. Having never written a cheque or paid a bill, I see how, after his death in 2012, she’d tried to take charge of her new domain, labelling everything in her shaky hand, including a folder for his funeral marked starkly, ‘Dennis End’.
What to throw and what to keep? I suddenly understand those TV superhoarders. They can’t make decisions. What about the fish knives, the butter knives, the cake forks, still in their wooden case, awaiting the social gatherings my parents never held? What of the china tea sets used only on Boxing Day or the 30 types of vessel crammed into the drinks cabinet — so many glasses for a couple who barely drank. Let them go.
On Monday morning, the British Heart Foundation removal van makes my stomach lurch, like that dreaded moment when a funeral cortege arrives. A large tattooed woman with a clipboard briskly appraises objects that have stood in this house for 48 years. A larger tattooed man helps her take the sideboard, my mother’s dressing table. They reject the oak dining set because the leather on the chairs is not certified flame-proof.
The couple can’t get my parents’ two wardrobes downstairs. My husband undoes rivets at the back and they come apart. I feel the task must nearly be done until my husband climbs into the loft. Here was everything my father, a child of the Great Depression, never threw away.
In a cascade of tiddlywinks, jigsaw pieces and dust, my husband passes down my entire childhood. The national costumed dolls with fans and mantillas my godparents bought me from foreign holidays; the bell-bottomed Seventies duds of my Tressy doll.
Twinkle and Jackie annuals; a trunk of 60 Enid Blytons; my first hairbrush; a battered Sooty puppet. It is a brutal form of psychotherapy to feel anew the fun or pain or embarrassment each object evokes, then cast it away. The skip is full and I am raw.
Next day, a new skip arrives, my husband returns to London and I’m joined by my mum’s old home help, Big Sue. (Named to distinguish her from two other carers, Little Sue, and the more occasional Other Sue.) First the kitchen, 100 lidless Tupperware boxes, the bins marked Self-Raising and Plain Flour.
Then my father’s garage with its screws sorted by size in jam jars, everything from the nozzle of an Eighties Hoover to a length of copper pipe, saved just in case. On a nail we discover the collar of our family dog, Honey, who died in 1987. I find a box of labels I’d had designed for my father’s homemade wine: Chateau Turner. In a rack, five bottles of Blackberry, 1995.
Then I tackle what I’ve been dreading most, the huge cupboard in the box room. Here is the family archive, the photos and slides. I find remnants of all my mother’s hobbies, taken up in bored retirement: collections of commemorative coins and stamps.
BuT one collection she maintained until a few months ago: every article I’ve had published, back to when I was a cub reporter on the East Anglian Daily Times, and my parents subscribed to this local newspaper 200 miles away.
‘Work out what is special,’ friends advise. Do I have to keep every photo? There are thousands. My father liked to capture his household achievements: the shed he built; his hanging baskets.
Then, aged 65, my parents discovered coach tours and left Britain for the first time, cataloguing with awe this magical new place called abroad. Yet I fillet their pictures ruthlessly, chucking out snaps of Lake Garda and Danube cruises, to the horror of my husband.
And I resolve to make an album with captions to tell the story of my family, as its sole survivor, for my sons. The irony is you have no curiosity about Victorian ancestors in long skirts until there’s no one alive to ask who they are.
I learn, too, that some things must be left to others to throw away, hopefully people who love us. You will never chuck those baby teeth, that lock of hair, cards made by grandchildren, letters from your dad.
I saved what I hope represents my parents’ lives. The ‘Every Price Per Ton Reckoner’ tables my father used to calculate the price of coal when he left school aged 14 to be a weighman at the pit; his taped-up cricket bat and badges from his team, the Barnsley Wanderers; a certificate from the National Coal Board signed by chairman Ian MacGregor.
I keep the Dimple whisky bottle in which he saved sixpences and later 5ps to put towards holidays. I keep every pillow case handembroidered by female ancestors. I save Sooty.
On the morning the house is to change hands, I open a bottle of Chateau Turner Blackberry, 1995, and in the ragged garden we drink a toast to my mum and dad and to this house, so long our home. I pour the rest on the soil, where my father’s greenhouse once stood.
My husband leaves in a van while I hoover and dust. Not for the new owners, property developers who will gut the place, but because it’s what my parents would have done. Then I put the keys through the letterbox and catch a southbound train.
I found an old Sooty toy and my Jackie annuals