It still fits you will note. 57 years old and rather moth eaten, the jacket that is!
I’m not sure about this without checking but I think
we must have moved into this house roughly 28 years ago. When we arrived here
we put everything that was in the loft in our home in Angmering directly into
the loft here and at that time we also moved Stephen’s mother in with us from
the little cottage next to our house in Angmering, where we had a small
adjoining terraced garden that we all used. Consequently, some of mother’s
things were squirreled away in the loft here also. Mother would have me
climbing up to the loft to find this or that box and have it put in her room to
sort out… She did like to sort things out… or was she just checking that it was
still there and that we had not taken it to the tip?
She would also change a lot of things in her wardrobe
from summer clobber to winter time wear. So that her wardrobes were not too
crowded. I did not complain about that at all since by that time she was
becoming more and more immobile and, in the end, she decided that she did not
want to make the effort to come downstairs in the day time any more. After a
while we thought it would be a good idea if we moved our bed downstairs then
she could have our former upstairs bedroom as a little sitting room, where she
could have visitors to tea. There were servant downstairs to serve after all.
It is all an amusing memory now, but it did get to be
a bit wearing at the time, I confess that sometimes I would turn to face her at
the door of the room she was sitting in, perform a quick bob curtsey and ask if
that would be all, before going back downstairs. She didn’t think that was the
slightest bit funny.
It is five and a half years since she died aged 94 and
we have not moved our bedroom back upstairs, not given it a thought. We live in
a kind of smart hotel room in the main downstairs area. Actually, all we did
when we changed rooms was remove the dining table and chairs to accommodate our
big high bed and since there are only two of us most of the time, we have a
marble topped French table in the bay window where we take our meals that is
not a great effort to move slightly if we have a couple of guests for dinner.
The main bedroom upstairs that we moved mother into is
now a shared two desk office/sewing room/ironing station now, though I also
have a desk downstairs where I write.
The reason I am banging on about this today is that
whilst I have had my own staying sane list of things to keep me occupied
Stephen has spent the lockdown on his own private projects, clearing out, first
the garage and then a list of other things like going through old photos,
re-planning our sports memorabilia, poster photo sets and even helping in the
garden which he has never done before in forty years together.
Last week he started on a new much larger scale job.
He has begun to sort out the loft! Oh! The horror! Thankfully, his plan is a
little but often scheme and for the most part he has asked me to stay out of
it, because he thinks that I will look at everything as his Mum used to and
then insist that it go back into the loft. I do stay away until he has had a
good rummage himself and then he allows me to agree or disagree on what goes
for ever and what should stay. In truth, it is only fair to say, that our house
is already thoroughly cluttered, there really is not anywhere to put an extra
pile of things that we have easily managed to do without for the past thirty or
more years. This story is ongoing of course since he has so far only touched
the tip of the iceberg.
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