My parents are moving house. They have lived in Northampton since 1995, and in their present house since 1999. They are moving to East Sussex. I didn’t grow up in Northampton. Yet I have spent a good deal of time there in the last sixteen years. I have a first set of memories of the first house there – very small, looking down on a green, opposite a church. The first time I visited was September 1995. A coach took me to Northampton’s unaccountably big Greyfriars bus station. I heard the War Child Help CD which had just been released. The sleeve said that it was all so rushed, they could not list the artists and track names. The next day, I think, I saw the town for the first time. A new Waterstones in a sandstone building on the edge of the market square – it soon enough closed and became a travel agent. The glass lifts in the mall, the Grosvenor Centre – which has remained popular and crowded over the last sixteen years I’ve witnessed it. A big ugly car park from where on a high floor my mother pointed out a sight on the horizon – the tower in which they tested elavators, perhaps by dropping them from a great height.
The second house, since 1999, is far bigger. Three floors, spacious rooms, a cellar that they had refurbished for storage. A garden, which has been altered over the years – it becomes hard to remember all the changes, but it has been paved with rough brick, with beds of flowers and herbs, and a pond. A garage at the end which was given an electronically operated door, a few years ago: then the car could drive out into the back lane. Up and down the back lane, a long stretch of brick, tarmac, weeds running between walls and doors: a Smithsian setting, the kind of place I found romantic when at 19 I first educated myself in British New Wave.
At the front, the house looks on to a long street heading away in each direction. Looking out from the front gate, the street stretches further to the right (south-west) than left (north-east). The latter leads soon enough to a junction. Turn left again, past a vet’s surgery, to another junction on the corner of the Racecourse – a vast green space. To the left, grand houses front the Racecourse. Across the road, the White Elephant pub does the same. To the right, the road runs away through an agreeable parade of shops, fish & chips, a Chinese restaurant, a church. I am very fond of this humble landscape.
Go back to the street, the house. The long pavement feels quite narrow, for it is so hemmed with cars. Last week my father and I walked up it and saw an overweight boy cleaning out an iron groove between paving stones, as though in a perverse bob-a-job. I looked at the iron – stamped with the name of a Northampton firm. In front of our house, an iron gate enters a low stone wall. The front garden is shallow, paved. I’ve never paid that much attention to it. The porch is nicer. White plaster surrounds you as you press the stinging bell. The house number is marked in a blue & white steel plate. The door is painted pale forest green. Its top half contains a large, remarkable stained glass feature: a songbird in a tree. Turn a Yale key and open the green door. Inside the hall is quite dim. A mat. The floor is a pattern of tiles. The ceiling feels high. The hall conveys coolness, sobriety. A modern clock ticks, apparently remotely connected to an atomic clock somewhere, so always telling the right time. To the left, a door to the living room. Open this and light floods in – through the big bay windows which take the sunlight streaming from the southeast, through the morning at least. Wooden floorboards, white walls. A colour scheme of oranges and yellows, on the low sofa, the low pine table, the darker wood piano against the wall opposite the windows.
The piano has held books of music, and piles of LRBs, now gone. It’s a better piano, for practical purposes, than the one at my own apartment. It resounds with a modest ingenuous sound that I like in this instrument. On this piano in three days at the start of June 2001, I wrote ten songs that I called I Think You Dropped A Moonbeam. I must have been sitting on the stool with a pen and paper to hand, picking them up and scribbling something, going back to formulating a melody. Behind the sofa are low lamps for the evening. On the opposite wall, a fireplace. Christmas cards are spread across the flat horizontal surfaces of this wall once a year. On the right, a pine chest of drawers; above it, 4 shelves of American fiction. On the left, a TV and video that don’t work that reliably; a collection of VHS and DVD; and a few shelves of modern British fiction, with Rushdie and Iain Sinclair at the top.
The next door in the hall opens with more difficulty – and yes, when I last left Northampton, and tried to remember the house, I found myself thinking of doors and their knobs, their motion, heaviness and play. This white door can be awkward to open. Inside is the garden room with dark wood floorboards, a mirror over the fireplace, a locked door to the outside, to a tiled passage into the garden. A big dresser stood in here for years, taking up space – then they discarded it: an improvement, really, the greater space and light. A low table, a low green sofa, a narrow chair almost like something in a church. An entire alcove of books: British classics, works from the Eighteenth century (lowest shelves) up through Romanticism, the Victorians, Eliot, Hardy, Tennyson, a load of James and Conrad, Ford, and into Joyce (the old squat green hardback Ulysses that my dad says he was given as a school prize in the early 1960s), Lawrence, even up to postwar works at the top: The Lord of the Rings in three red volumes, Kingsley Amis, William Cooper. These shelves of books touch me. Partly because I still see the house as it was when they first moved in and placed all these things – I still see this alcove as an ingenious new resting place for stacks of books from the older house in Woolwich. (A feature of my mind, which I actually like, is to tend to think of things as new when they are years old, while I still feel I have not made a full reckoning with them.) At Christmas when I have visited, I have sometimes taken one or more of these books and read in it, beside a fire roaring or smouldering here, preferably with a glass of sherry or port to hand. Last Christmas I read William Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age, and a bit of Walter Pater. I like reading Max Beerbohm’s Christmas Garland of parodies too. Beyond the mirror is a set of shelves holding … art books, old catalogues, theatre programmes, a few songbooks. European and Russian classics lined at the back of the top shelf, unconsulted in truth. And mostly music: a stereo, a couple of speakers, a long shelf of vinyl LPs, a rack or two of tapes below it; a large shelf of CDs. A year or so ago I encouraged my parents to discard unwanted, unneeded music. A lot of vinyl, CDs and tapes were purged. I like this. It clarifies what you retain.
Back in the hall, along the white walls – a mirror here, a picture? – a crowded set of coat hangers. A door down to the cellar. The knob turns easily, fluently. A light switch on the left. We had a cellar in quite a similar place in Woolwich. It was musty, dank. A supply of coal lay unused. This is somewhat different. Descend the cellar steps and find a little cupboard within it – it holds washing, pots of paint. On the wall opposite it, shelves which have quite long held a mess of matter – old video cassettes, figurines of Mickey Mouse and friends, a battered Spanish tambourine, an abacus, coloured pencils. Now, in this long season of preparing to move, the cellar floor is full of boxes full of books to be picked up – and of magazines and other items. A little window opens to the stony front garden. Maybe I have never given enough time to this cellar. Maybe I could have spent time here sorting things over the years. I suppose that a cellar is always a place you readily leave behind – climb the stairs, shut off the light and put those unresolved items out of mind. My other association with the cellar is the cat that my parents kept from 2001 to 2007. If you opened the door she would want to wander down the stairs. If you locked the door, you might come to hear mewing from inside.
Opposite the cellar door, a more awkward door opens to the dining room. The metal knob is somehow jerky. The upper door has two glass panels. We close it to keep heat in. The dining room is big, spacious, airy. Its walls are painted bright yellow. To the left on the near wall are high cupboards, the whole wall given to storage. The cupboards have held glasses, bowls, plates, tins, bottles of drink for Christmas. Open one and you smell a scent – of old wood in an enclosed space, or of the foodstuffs themselves, or whatever combination. So many times I have pulled open one of these wooden doors (not always easy to keep closed) to fetch plates or a wine glass. A long table runs through the middle of the room. A green plastic cloth covers it. It tends to pile up some bills, paper from charities, sections of the Guardian. These pile also on the slim dark wooden table with drawers, parallel to it on the right. It holds also books of Northampton Stone or Pevsner on the county. Above this a set of shelves hangs from the wall. Here are bowls (though many have just lately been discarded, those bowls I’ve eaten cereal from over years), cups, the tiny sample of imitation Russian revolutionary porcelain I bought for my father for Christmas 2004, after someone took me to an exhibition of it at Somserset House. Another fireplace, marble, black and grey. Postcards atop it, some from me: Edinburgh, Montreal, Dublin. Cards from others sending thanks and greetings. Before the fireplace stand bottles of wine, full and empty. Another set of wooden cupboards in the wall beside it. Paintings on the wall, including an abstracted cat fight. To the left, as you advance through the house, a great broad window. It lets in much light and makes the table here a good place to work. It looks out on the garden wall, the bird feeder, next door’s house.
Another awkward door – why these anomalies? I suppose places are gradually refurbished, features are uneven – with a cheap local firm’s calendar on it, into the small kitchen. The floor is tiled in navy and maroon. Another view of the outside. The mundane morning world of instant coffee in a mug showing a local church or a Moomin. The cooker’s hob is hard to use, not very reliable. At times over years I’ve stayed here alone, and enjoyed being in the house a lot – and I have tried to cook things, but I can’t say I have found this cooker a boon. Opposite it, a shelf with glass jars of cereal; a fridge-freezer with a bread bin on top. A door from the kitchen is bolted. Open it and step down from the kitchen, to the porch with its rough mat, hooks holding a few implements like brushes, a toilet door to the left. A key turns the back garden door – not always easily for me. Its faint crashing, rattling noise as it opens, swinging away to the right. A concrete step to the garden. It is paved in brick, I think. A couple of paths lead through it, past beds of herbs and flowers, past the pond and a tree that I think was once cut back by the council. There are a couple of beautiful pictures of the fluffy cat in the garden. The side passage leads back to the garden room door. Here I remember being in the evening with lanterns lit, in the summer of 2003. I associate the memory with reading By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept, which I’d found tucked unassumingly on a shelf.
At the garden’s end, a green iron picnic table, a bench of iron and wood, green iron chairs, under a wooden trellis. Sometimes we’ve eaten lunch out here, cheese and pickle; not so often supper. It ought to be a good place to work. But it can get windy. I remember coming out here to read and write on Flann O’Brien’s Third Policeman or Poor Mouth, around April 2002. Sunshine and wind. Beyond the table is the garage. This is just a functional space, a transitory space where you get in and out of the car. On its concrete floor are a few benches, tools, paint pots and the like – and a couple of bicycles. I have ridden round the Racecourse on one.
Back in the hall, you can climb the stairs. A white banister ends at the bottom in a round knob, a bollard. Many times I have descended the stairs and clasped this, curved around it on my way, in an exaggeration of safe landing. I find that I develop ways of relating to such spaces and features – like the way I will routinely cushion a door with a foot to stop it shuddering into its frame. The stairs are lined with quite a thick green carpet. This runs up to the passage through the first floor. It is a feature of the house – luxuriant, comfortable, also quietening, muting one’s movements around the floor. A picture of what I think was Christo’s wrapped Reichstag was on a wall here once – I think it’s now gone, though I also see now how bizarrely easy it is to forget these basic things. (My own home has virtually no pictures on any walls, mainly because I don’t know how to put them up; so there’s little for anyone to forget.) At one end of the hall, at the front of the house, is my parents’ bedroom – a big room which I suppose catches a lot of light at daybreak. Outside it is a set of shelves, at the foot of another stair. Here are a bunch of genre novels: crime and science fiction. I always found it a delightful touch that the shelves are also populated with toy robots, illustrating the SF chronotope. Moving towards the back of the house, next on the left is my father’s study. Its door is usually open. I have little tactile memory of what it is like to open it, how the doorknob feels. I think the walls here are grey or pale blue, gunmetal. I recall first entering and finding all those books moved here, from Woolwich and from the other Northampton house. Shelves in two alcoves were piled high with them – and still are, as I write, though many books have lately gone from here. A big window looks out over gardens, over the brick-paved passage in ours. My dad often has a blind down, and works on late into the dark with the tiniest light on, not seeming to notice he is scrutinizing a little screen amid such darkness. The floorboards I think are a rich wood. A rug upon them. A couple of different desks have occupied the room. A big Edward Hopper painting confronted me the first time I entered here – an empty train tunnel. I think the picture was new. Other smaller portraits stand around: an aged Ezra Pound, a sketch of Bertolt Brecht, postcards of Russian constructivist art.
The bookshelves on one wall have come down. They held many books on London, New York and modernist literature. Beneath them used to be a long green desk, bracketed to the wall I think. A desktop computer stood on it. This is quite long gone now, after some kind of internet failure I think. I have memories of using that computer in its bulky plastic casing. Coming back across the Racecourse one Sunday early in 2001 and looking for the first time at a pop music message board, which would come to be rather a focal point in my life. Travelling to Northampton alone in September 2001, arriving late at night from delayed trains, and on a subsequent Saturday sitting and typing a chapter on Flann O’Brien which four years later would finally be in print. Doing the same, the same day even, for an essay on Frank O’Hara – this was just four to five days after 9/11. Or three years later, again tending the house alone, dropping in on this computer to check my email and fire off regular replies each day over a weekend, while the balloons sailed outside in their festival.
Two more doors lead to bathrooms – a toilet of which my only thought is that its flush is such an extensive crescendo, it makes me think of the word ‘cataract’; a bathroom whose bath I always felt took a long time to fill. One more room down the last stretch of the greencarpeted hall: my mother’s study, another remarkably big room extending to the back of the house, to a bay window overlooking the gardens to left and right as well as ours. From here you see the trees and flowers, or neighbours. My mother had shelves of academic books on education, especially with reference to young children: these have moved somewhere now. On the opposite wall, above a second desk, more shelves with a little assortment of plays, a few of Shakespeare’s, a set of Virginia Woolf featuring, I think, a first edition of The Hours. Perhaps what has touched me most in here is the set of shelves left of the door: here, for a dozen years, waited the children’s books left over from my youngest days. Many I have not read, many were my brother’s. But many I have – I was a more prolific reader before age 12 or so than any time since – and so many titles, authors and pictures carried their own charge when at Easter this year we assembled them all for sorting and in many cases discarding. Now a remainder waits here to be transported; others in a box in the cellar will be taken away by a bookselling friend tomorrow.
Climb the last flight of stairs. The soft green, worn a little in the middle of each step; the white banister to the left. A railing above, securing the highest landing. As you climb you come gradually level with a window, facing the top of the stairs: a simple sash window I think, with a little fastener to pull to one side, then you can hoist the lower half roughly up. I can hear the sound of the wood scraping as it loosely rises. It leaves just enough space to stick your head out, if you want. Or just sniff the air outside from here. Beyond the window is a sloping roof of grey slate – above the bathroom and the study. In the middle, atop this, is a chimney stack. Orange-red chimneys point up from the roof. Beyond is the landscape of the gardens again, but from higher than before. This view, this point means a lot to me. I like the vantage point, the height over the local world. I love the mundane suburban architectural detail of the slates and the chimneys, the bricks, the colours and textures. You can reach through and touch the rough slate. I love how it looks in the sun, or in a downpour. I suppose some of my pleasures and attachments could be called simple. These little things, this view and the scent of the air, and the memory of all the times I have viewed and scented it, the other years to which those memories belong – all this seems to me like the richness of a lifetime, something you could live with forever.
The top floor holds two proper rooms. One, along the corridor (which previously held a wooden dresser full of colourful recent novels), was designated as my brother’s room when the house was purchased. He didn’t spend so much time in it, and didn’t object to it being redesignated for other things – a place for a scholarly project, in fact, with journals lining the shelves. Some of his books remained a long time, though, like the Spiceworld volume I’d bought him. The room looks out over the stairs, through an internal window halfway up the wall. It also features a skylight, and the low door (turn a simple latch, I think, in a wall sloping down with the roof) into the attic. The house has a cellar, a garage and an attic! I have explored this space very little. It’s not especially hospitable, not meant for a long stay. I think you feel the heat of boilers or shafts of hot air floating up through the house. I am not sure of the floor, but somehow I feel that it’s softly carpeted or lined with rugs. It has had boxes piled in it a long time. They have held old tapes, Spectrum computer games, Lego, playmobil, Star Wars toys, jigsaws and more. I’m afraid I have foolishly evaded exploring the attic’s contents still more than I have the cellar’s. I should have looked through all this years ago, and I never did. It was out of sight and mind, till just last week the boxes were hauled out for consideration at last.
The other door from the landing leads to my room. The door is of light wood, pine I think, and it swings breezily open, its base a little off the floor. Stand in the doorway and look in. Green carpet soft across the floor: comfort, quiet. To the left, a desk which was there when my parents moved in. I have always been glad of these accidents, the inherited desk with its grainy wooden edges and legs, its deep drawers holding old packets of photographs I took in New York City in January 2001, and its middle a different surface, brown but heavily scratched by perhaps decades of use. I have taken photographs of things on this desk, trying to catch this texture. Above it hung shelves – now gone. On those were a lot of books shipped up here from Woolwich, a rather inappropriate, ill-assorted bunch – Hegel, Ricoeur, stuff I’ll never read now – but also a fine set of Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, and two books I was given for Christmas in 2000. The then current edition of the Biographical Dictionary of Film in black and white livery, and the even heftier Letters of Oscar Wilde in purple and orange. I asked for the former, not the latter. I have always kept them together since, even now at my place, remembering the time I received them. On the desk over years I’ve often typed at a computer. In April 2002 I was writing a book on an old laptop here, morning and night.
The other way, to the right as you enter, a window looking out over those gardens. A replay of the views from below, a variant on the window view I mentioned before: here looking right at those slates when the rain comes down, remembering. And looking across the great expanses of gardens, both sides of that back alley, all the way to the big houses on the main road by the Racecourse. So many times I have looked across, and never known what life is like in those houses; barely even seen anyone; trusted that they couldn’t see me. The happy mystery of other life going on. The lower window hauled up in summer, to let in the evening’s air, and sometimes in August the sounds of the festival: tribute acts, local rock, funfair rides. Below the window is an old green chest. This has been in the family perhaps 30 years or more. It contains bedding, linen. Left from the window, plugs in the wall including one that I think handles all the TV for the house, from an aerial up here I suppose, and one powering an old stereo deck which nestles on the lower rung of a black trolley. I have another such trolley in London, with a bigger stereo; have carted that around for twelve years. The one here in Northampton is two tape decks, radio, and a CD player that was my first ever but packed up a few years ago. I bought it in September 1993. I tested it with The Best of the Icicle Works. Later I would keep the Parklife CD in it a lot, a red and white ring. Now I sometimes tune to radio on it, like Russell Davies on Radio 2 – and I recall hearing Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Devils and Dust’ on this radio, early in 2005, and having sentimental tears brought to my eyes. And I play tapes, from the selection stored on a nearby shelf. But this stereo has run its course. It will never play again. I have left it behind after eighteen years.
Beside it, a broad alcove in the wall opposite the door. Bookshelves line the alcove. These books are still here, as I type – no, wait, they’re not. They have been packed, or are being packed, in boxes for delivery to me tomorrow. But they stayed on their shelves a long time. They include old Penguins like Ivor Montague’s Film World; Tolkien’s Silmarillion; Hardy; Salinger (I read Franny & Zooey here, some of it in the cafe in the Grosvenor Centre); Gavin Lambert’s Inside Daisy Clover, another odd teen story I read; more academic books. On a top shelf have stood more things, random objects: a Jimmy Carter coin from the US mint, a tower of Meccano. A mantelpiece in a disused fireplace along the wall has held figurines, like a polar bear from Sweden and, in his box, Hazel from Watership Down. The wallpaper around all this is grooved, ridged, pale. My bed moved here from the other Northampton house. A little table beside it, a laundry basket on the far side. The bed is broad and comfortable. I wonder how many nights I have slept in it. For years, above it hung a little poster denoting an England match at White Hart Lane. That now hangs in my bedroom in London. On these walls too hung two posters from the James Joyce Centre, illustrating episodes of Ulysses. One now hangs in my London study. Finally, beyond the bed, the last thing before the wall backing on to the attic, is a cupboard covering the length of the wall. Again what serendipity, that the top of the house held such a room, with such vast storage, that could take so many of my possessions that were shipped up here, back when I had no space for them. You pull the thick wooden cupboard doors open with effort – they have no locks, just sheer weight, you must get behind them and push one side or the other. On the left side hang old jackets and T-shirts, mine and my brother’s. On the right side, three shelves, so four tiers of material. In boxes shunted efficiently into the space here have been my old university work and notes; student union posters; notes from my days trying to form a band; jiffy bags holding envelopes holding letters, from my family and so many others. Role-playing games and their spin-offs, floor plans, extra rulebooks. The home-made scenarios that my brother and I concocted, and mapped out with immense, absurd elaborateness, in folders and envelopes. Comics that we wrote and drew. Magazines: Shoot!, Match, Imagine, White Dwarf, a few volumes of Q and Empire that were easier to lose; a pile of inkies, mixed in with student newspapers, that on my last day in this room I sift and halve. The amount of material in this cupboard is vast, and I have only made really good inroads into sorting, judging and where possible discarding it during the last six months in the house: a session or two in spring, then several days in September, sixteen years since I first came to Northampton.
I needn’t dwell on those boxes here, though. What I have always liked so much is having a room here at all. The fact that my parents bought a house with space for a room for me; that whenever I chose to visit, I knew I had my own place to sleep and stay, amid my own things (to an almost ludicrous degree, as I’ve just indicated); that the room had its desk, its cupboard, all this fortune. The way I could spend summer evenings sniffing and listening to the world outside through the open window. The many mornings with coffee up here as I dawdled or broached some task, always knowing that it would be really useful, while I’m here, to look at all that stuff in the cupboard. These days are gone. There won’t be a room for me anymore. What is left of my possessions is coming to my home. I must find space for them somehow. I am saying goodbye to Northampton, to life in this house and around it, which has been a haven to me, a place I could always go.
