Siobhan sends a postcard to her childhood home
“Dear House,
You are where my childhood memories begin. The red brick house with its red tile kitchen that our foolish deerhound refused to walk across. The two gardens, one filled with trees, hedges and a secret pathway, the other hiding a small blue wooden house beyond the vegetable patch – the cottage of a rose fairy.
The house with the shiny new conservatory that started as just a hole knocked through the living room wall, where we saw in the Millennium and covered the fading Christmas tree with strands of party poppers.
The sink where I stood on a stool “washing up” and making endless soapy “cappuccinos,” which I would hand to my parents and they would dutifully pretend to sip from then act surprised when I would fall into giggles announcing, “It’s just bubbles!”
The house where I had two bedrooms. My grown-up bedroom was at the front of the house and I had my own desk and two windows, one looking out over the driveway and the other to the side of the house. A room with so much floor space I could build a whole sprawling town out of Duplo across the carpet. But before that, I had the bedroom at the back of the house with a window looking out over the garden below, a church spire in the distance.
The bunk bed with plastic stars stuck on the bed panels that glowed ghoulish green when goodnights had been said and the lights turned out. The room where I picked up a yellow crayon and scribbled it back and forth over the roof of my Barbie house before turning to the walls. Not really trying to be naughty but just wanting to know what it felt like to do something I knew I shouldn’t. The thrill of the act and then the waiting. Waiting with anticipation for my sins to be discovered, which, inevitably, they were. And then the icing on the cake: to be able to blame it all on Jessica Pierce and get away with it all.
Jessica was a notorious scribbler of walls, so no questions were asked and my lie remained intact until, many years later, I revealed it to my mother, much to her amusement. She couldn’t really chide me for my lie when she too had lies grown from that house.
From the back garden, the tip of the church spire peeked above the tops of the trees, beyond the other houses that lay between us and the churchyard. The chiming of the bells would roll over these houses and into our garden. One summer when I was still quite small, the church bells varied from their usual ringing and began to play some different tunes, most memorably The Teddy Bears’ Picnic. Each day of the summer holidays spent playing out in the garden would be accompanied by the church bells’ rendition of that song.
To a child it didn’t seem so unusual, and it wasn’t until I was in my late teens and my parents and I were reminiscing about those years that I recalled it all. My mother burst out into uncontrollable laughter, tears spilling down her cheeks. I sat there surprised and confused until, between giggles, she confessed that it had never been the church bells but instead an ice-cream van. An ice cream van that used to pass by the front of the house every day of the summer holidays. The church bells had been a spur of the moment lie to spare her from a child’s daily demands for ice cream.
When I found out we were to leave this red brick home I childishly, stubbornly, and tearfully refused to. I said I would remain despite everyone else going. Until the day finally came, when the last of boxes had been packed, rooms standing bare, when we closed the front door for the last time, climbed into the car and began the drive north. Leaving an empty house behind.
To read more from Siobhan’s series Letters Home, visit thelettershomeproject, and follow her on Twitter! Or read her first letter in issue #2 of Wallflower magazine, out 21 March.
Want to have your work featured here or even in our next issue? Just tweet us or get in touch and you could be our next contributor!
