Alison Moore - The Pre-War House and Other Stories

When the bus has gone three stops and is in the city centre, when she is still two miles from home, she gets off. She walks to a café she knows, somewhere she has been before with Eric.

She takes a bottle of water from the fridge, pays for it and chooses a seat by the window, looking out. It is quiet. She does not talk to anyone. There are newspapers on the tables but she does not read them. When the café begins to close, she leaves her untouched bottle of water and wanders slowly home.

Closing the front door behind her and hanging up her coat, she goes to the foot of the stairs. She does not turn to look through the living room doorway at the dirty glasses on the coffee table, at the empty sofa and the television’s black screen. She climbs the stairs and enters the bedroom.

It is dark, just as it was when she left it, the curtains closed. She can still see everything though. She gets into bed. When she is ready, she reaches out. She touches Eric, his bare skin, his body, which was already cold when she woke that morning.

She closes her eyes.

No one disturbs her attempt to sleep. No one comes in asking if she wants a cup of tea. No one touches her gently and says, ‘Janie, love, is everything all right?’

In the front garden, in the narrow beds, the flowers which emerged in what felt like the first days of spring lie buried beneath the late snow, their opening buds like small mouths gaping in shock, their stems broken.

Inside, the rooms are full of cardboard boxes, into which the contents of the house have been packed. I open cupboards and wardrobes and drawers which I have already checked and know are empty, peering into and under the dark-wood furniture and the bare-mattressed beds, looking for the smallest thing which may have been left behind.

I remember the sounds of this house in which I grew up — the creaking of the doors and the floorboards and the stairs, the groaning of the pipes, the wheezing and sighing of the springs in the sofa cushions — the sounds of an old house aching. But mostly I remember the silence, the stillness.

Lifting the remaining pictures down from the walls, I am struck by the brightness of the squares of wallpaper behind them, the sharpness of the pattern, like pictures of the wallpaper as it used to be, framed by the wallpaper as it is now, which has faded over the years.

When the house is all packed up and everything is clean, I will sit at the kitchen table and eat the supper I brought from home, and mark a pile of essays on the Treaty of Versailles and the Weimar Republic and the ways in which the seeds of World War Two were sown in World War One. I have bedding to put on my old single bed in my old room, in which I will sleep tonight. My car is parked in the road, in front of the garden wall, by the icy kerb, to leave the driveway free for the van which will be here tomorrow.

In the morning, the men will come, and I will let them in. They will walk through this quiet house in their heavy boots, and they will take away all the boxes and the furniture, the contents of this old house, load it all up and take it away.

‘This house was brand new,’ said my grandmother, ‘when I was a child, in the 1930s, before the war. The garden was nothing but mud from one end to the other. My father laid the brick path down to the end wall, marked out the vegetable patch, and grassed the rest of it over.’

Little about the house had been changed since then. We were sitting on the same pre-war three-piece suite, with pre-war family photographs arranged on the pre-war furniture and pre-war pictures hanging on the high walls. Pre-war curtains kept the sunlight off the pre-war wallpaper and the pre-war carpets, and a pre-war clock ticked in the hallway.

‘Over the road,’ she said, ‘it was all fields. They’ve spoilt it now, building those houses there.’ She gazed out of the window at the ruined landscape. ‘We knew the war was coming, and sure enough it came. I was just a girl, a little younger than you are now. One night, a bomb fell in the field opposite.’ She nodded towards the new houses. ‘It made a big hole in the ground, but it didn’t go off. I saw it, the unexploded enemy bomb lying at the bottom, smooth and round like an egg in a nest.’

I thought about the quiet tree roots and the blind earthworms, startled in the ground or torn in two, their raw ends squirming, and my grandmother looked up at the empty sky, as if she was worried that the bombs had not yet all fallen.

I imagined it still lying there, this unhatched egg buried in a hole in the ground, under the grass with the roots and the worms, under the houses, the new estate.

My father was born in the 1950s, long after the end of the war but not before the end of rationing; even in peacetime the meanness of the war lingered. He was raised by my grandmother in this pre-war house, and it was he, in my childhood, who re-glued the wallpaper when it peeled, who mended the clock when it failed.

The front of our house, like all the other houses in the street, was painted white. Every few years, my father put on his protective overalls and spent a week up a ladder, cleaning the brickwork and the window frames, bleaching mould and treating rot and filling cracks and sanding and sealing flaking and crumbling patches. And then he painted, from left to right, from top to bottom, from corner to corner, working the new paint across each brick and between the bricks and into the corners. Our house shone in the sunshine, like the twinkling tooth in a toothpaste advert.

He liked to clean. He started in his mother’s attic bedroom and cleaned all the way down to the kitchen, cleaning the windows with vinegar and newspaper, the dark wood with lemon oil, the oven with baking soda. He was like a flood washing through the house, down the stairs and out through the back door, all the dirt pouring down the drain. When he had finished, our pre-war house looked brand new.

His garden was immaculate. His lawn was like a bowling green; it looked like he trimmed it with nail scissors. Nothing wild grew there. He dealt with the seeds shat down by birds in flight, like bombs dropped by enemy planes, and the Spanish bluebells whose bulbs lay deep in the earth beneath his pristine lawn, whose shoots wormed their way towards the surface in the spring. He protected his vegetables from the cabbage maggots which wanted to burrow into the soft roots and spoil them, and from the moth larvae which wanted to lay their eggs between the young leaves of his lettuces.

Spring was a minefield; he preferred the winter, the frost, the freeze, the ice — the clean, white world.

He was not a handsome man, but he was always clean — ‘spick and span,’ said my grandmother — and he had strong bones, good bone structure. ‘I have good bones,’ he said, ‘and good teeth. I have good genes.’

Like my father, I love the winter, the whitewash of snow, the freezing of everything. In deep snow, there is no garden, now gone to seed; there is no grass, grown long and uneven and littered with autumn’s leaves; there are no beds, no border plants strangled by weeds; there is no driveway, no pavement, no road; there is just snow, in which the only footprints are my own.

The outside world seems remote, like a landscape photograph of the bare branches of cold trees against a blank, white sky, viewed through glass which I clean the way he did, with vinegar and newspaper.

I glue the pre-war paper where it is peeling from the walls, but I don’t know how to fix the hallway clock which is running slow. I lift it down from the wall, and it keeps on ticking, pulsing in my hands.