It takes a heart

I live in a suburb not far from some of the larger properties in the city.  Situated on the slopes of the mountain that profiles the city, the houses there do not encourage neighbourliness: their entrances meet the street a good shouting distance from the next, their front doors stand unseen behind walls, trees and hedges.  Some years ago, when mail was delivered in such quantities that it required daily delivery, the postmen who rode the bicycles up and down the long avenues were only the fittest: there were downhills, but they could never compensate for the toil of pedalling the ascents with a heavy leather bag of post.

It was a lonely day’s work: no one at the gate, the occasional car emerging from its lair and few pedestrians. Dogs were loud, angry and intent on keeping you moving.  What it offered, however, was a safer passage than the busy streets below where cars came from behind and added to the perils of the swaying leather satchel.  But if you liked solitude, it was the route for you.

As a runner I also chose it.  The quiet, the safety and the fresh, early morning air made its streets the ideal place to run. The views were magnificent, but to enjoy them I had to manage the uphills.  As any runner knows, an uphill slows you down far more than a downhill speeds you up; running downhills never makes you want to stop; running uphills does.  Stopping should be avoided, but your mind does not agree. What’s needed is distraction, a sparkle of birdsong, fabulous topiary or a stunning house, to keep the feet moving. 

But on my last run I saw a house – and it stopped me! Out of my past I heard the words: “You’ve got to keep this house in the family.” 

While he was stationed somewhere in Africa during the Second World War, my father bought the land where I grew up.  He bought it unseen, a large plot in an area where few houses stood, remote from the city’s centre and its surrounding suburbs.  After returning from the war, he took a six-month break from work and set about building the house he wanted for his family of five.  It had everything but it had nothing: no streetlights, no bus routes and the minimum of services.  But it had views, views of the mountain with its buttresses, gorges and peaks, views of the suburbs below us stretching out towards the hills on the horizon and views of the lights at night when they carpeted the city that lay before our eyes.

What the house lacked for me was companionship.  My siblings were too old to be my playmates and the remoteness of the home meant that my school friends were too far away to make play dates easy to organise. I did have one friend though whose parents never hesitated to bring him up to play. His father had been with mine through university, served with him in the war and they remained close. He loved what my father had built and would take any opportunity to visit. “You’ve got to keep this house in the family.” Those words. His words.

When my father died and the incidence of my mother’s minor strokes increased worryingly, I sold the house. The decision was simple: it was not my home – it was my father’s.  He had built it, added on to it and had never ceased to find something that needed alteration. I had been gone from the home many years before, had married and started a family. During those years the house had begun to deteriorate: wood panelling warping in the study, mould creeping into the en-suite guest bathroom (added without any formal planning permission), and swimming-pool tiles parting coming away from the sides.  Faced with the need to refurbish the house and maintain the extensive garden which my mother had been unable to manage in more recent years, the prospect of living there was burdensome. What had been a home for me as a child would become a house that would wring life out of me, making me a parent whose responsibilities involved a house more than children.

Turning down the opportunity to keep this house would have saddened my father’s friend. Unlike my father, my heart was not in it and never could be. And a house without a heart is never a home.