AWA: Academic Writing at Auckland

Houses have their own ways of dying... some with a tragic roar,
some quietly but to an afterlife in the city of ghosts...
(Forster 253)

       There is a certain smell (impossible to pinpoint exactly, but it is something like faded potpourri and warm clean washing mixed together with sunlight) that immediately transports me to a different time and place. No time machine needed for me; just a whiff of that strange, elusive scent - which lingers in all sorts of unlikely places (the last time I found it was in one of the old villas in the History department) - and I am at Stonegarth, and ten years old again.

       Stonegarth is my grandparents’ house; it has belonged to the family for more than forty years. My mother grew up there. I lived there for four months, the summer I turned ten. It was a terrible English summer really, raining and cold (one day it actually hailed), but to me it was a golden summer. I love Stonegarth; I can’t help but be happy there.

       Sitting here in Auckland, twelve thousand miles away, I could describe the whole house to you, from the stone-walled and stone-floored pantry by the back door, through the swing door into the front hall with its shiny, slippery polished floor, up the stairs to the landing and its wide window looking across the hills. But that would take an essay in itself. There are, however, a few random things it would be particularly hard for me to forget. The doorpost into the kitchen, scarred its whole length with the height marks of two generations of children. The lion’s head door knocker. The Japanese tea set displayed in its cabinet at the far end of the kitchen. The yellow painted back door and its yellow painted nail, where the wreath hangs at Christmas time. The polar bears in the lounge, carved in heavy Canadian jade. The big mirror in the lobby, hanging above the huge trunk where everybody’s boots and shoes pile up. (On my tenth birthday I climbed up onto the trunk to admire a new dress in the mirror; I remember standing there, an unlikely Venus in a yellow and white summer dress, arising out of waves of boots and sandals.)

       On the wall of the upstairs hall hangs a long tapestry, made by my grandmother soon after she married. When I try to remember it exactly, the colours in the picture run together and blur, but if I take a step back I can see several figures making their way along a dark wall towards massive doors. I used to look at the people in the picture, and wonder where they were going before they were sewn into the picture and frozen forever at that point in their journey. It was only later I discovered that the tapestry depicts the arrival of the Canterbury Pilgrims at the cathedral; the Wife of Bath is there, and the Miller with his bagpipes, and the Knight on his horse, and other characters I can’t see now.

       If I love the house, my brothers loved the garden. Much bigger than our garden at home in New Zealand, it was an Eden of space and freedom to us. There were a few forbidden fruits, such as the prized hydrangeas - the day James lopped off the heads of these with his toy sword was a direful one. But usually we could spend hours out there, wrapped up in our sprawling games of imaginative adventure, without mishap.

       Behind the house and garden Billinge Wood slopes up to the Yellow Hills. I would look out across the hills from my bedroom window; they are rough, yet they roll too, like a misty green sea; they are bleak, but beautiful. Both reassuring and exhilarating, the hills always give comfort, but hold the promise of something more. “Come and walk us,” they say, “and find out what lies beyond.” In tiredness or trouble, I still love to go walking across any hills I can find. “I have lifted up my eyes to the mountains, from whence help shall come to me” (Douay-Rheims Bible, Ps 120: 1).  But New Zealand is a young, ambitious country, bursting to assert itself; the landscape is bold and dramatic; the very trees are of  a more vivid green. The hills of northern England have an ancient brooding peace that is totally alien to the Land of the Long White Cloud.

       Under the short coarse grass of the Yellow Hills lies the grey stone of which Stonegarth is built, and which gives it its name. A hundred years ago, or more, the stone was dug out of quarries high up on the hills, and brought down to build the house. The quarries are still there, though they haven’t been worked for years; they are abandoned now, overgrown with bushes, and forgotten. But the house they built still nestles at the base of the hills, solid and dependable, as much a part of the landscape as the hills themselves.

       I grew up with Stonegarth as a familiar, stable presence in the background of life. Some of the earliest stories I remember are my mother’s tales of her childhood there. Over the years I stayed there intermittently, usually only a few days or weeks at a time, and though to my mother the house has changed, to me it always seemed the same. Now I have my own nest of stories centred around Stonegarth and its people. Everybody who has lived there has their own stories, I suppose, all of them different, but all with the house at their core. Stonegarth is forever and irrevocably a part of the family. Like a benign matriarch she watches her children come and go, and always she is there, waiting for them while they are away, ready to welcome them when they return.

       For a long time my ideas of family, history, and even England itself have been inextricably mixed up with the house. To me, Stonegarth is England, a microcosm of that country. Tucked away inside the house, as a seed is hidden in a nut, is a miniature version of the calm English beauty, its years of history and the past of generations who have lived and loved there.

       But the nut is beginning to crack. The house is to be sold when my grandfather dies.

       I can’t imagine death. I shy away from it, numbed and cowardly. But I know with appalling certainty what the loss of the house will be like. Is it callous, apparently to feel more for a house than a person? Because I don’t, I swear. But the sale looms large and terrible, perhaps because the loss of a mere house should be easier to confront and cope with than that of someone loved. Yet more than a house will be lost; along with Stonegarth we will have to relinquish part of ourselves, for stories and history are as much a part of a person as their fingers and toes.

       I don’t really believe in spooks, but last time I stayed at Stonegarth, I imagined the ghosts of all the people who had lived in the house. I thought of my mother growing up there with her siblings, and wondered if they had been like me and my brothers. I remembered how we played there when we were little; how I used to slide down the banisters instead of using the stairs (highly dangerous, I realise now), the boys’ Lego-building station in the big bay window of the lounge, the hours I spent on the sunny landing reading the old books stashed there. I wondered if the grandmother who had died before I was born, and who I share a name with, had loved Stonegarth too. I hope she did.

       Now I wonder what will happen to all those ghosts when the new people move in. I suppose they will be trampled on by the boots of the removers who will take away the beautiful old furniture and all the things, each one with a story behind it, that have been collected over forty years. The house will stand empty with the sunlight slanting through the windows, bringing out the golden highlights in the beautiful wooden floors. And all those ghosts will quietly rise and vanish, like the dew in the morning. Then the new people will appear, new voices will echo through the house, new furniture will fill up the rooms, and the Stonegarth we knew will cease to exist.

       Does it really matter that much? After all, we will still have our memories. The removers won’t be able to remove those.

       But memories can be dangerous. When they are all that is left, without a physical reminder to ground you, memories can become a trap. Gradually things in the memory become distorted, unreal, and you no longer know what is true and what is misremembered. Things you think can never be forgotten suddenly become hard to remember.

       Of course, you can’t live in the past, but you can’t ignore it either. Past history informs the present and the future: “What’s past is prologue” (The Tempest 2.1.257). The past recurs throughout life, like the refrain of a song. It is no good trying to ignore or forget it, for it will always be there; the only question is how clearly you can see it. I have no desire to live forever in my childhood, but neither do I want to lose it. Perhaps that is itself childish; perhaps the loss of the house will finally force me to grow up. On the day Stonegarth is sold one of the strongest links back to my childhood, to its blithe laughter and childish tears, will be cut forever.

word count: 1633

Works Cited

Forster, E.M. Howards End. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd, 1980. Print.

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. New York: Signet Classic, 1998. Print.

The Holy Bible. Douay-Rheims ed. New Hampshire: Loreto Publications, 2007. Print.