>>>>>> HOW THE HOUSE ENDED >>>>>>
There was only Claire and Mick there when the Pryor’s hero of a house was torn down. They were the only ones with stomach enough – and yes, with poetry enough in their souls - to see the narrative through to its natural ending. They had guessed the house’s fate, but none of them, not Mick, not Claire, not Millicent, not Wenno, none of them were able to stand its emptiness a minute longer.
They sold it just three weeks after their mother was gone, and the wreckers were in like the latest wave of invaders couldn't wait to see it go. But that's how Dorothy Pryor had always wanted it anyway, that no-one should get to live in it after she was finished with it. Said it was something to do with Allan, and fidelity, and
Out there on those once sprawling black-soil plains of Greenacres, against all odds it had stood its ground – and for the first ten years only the back half of it - stood its ground like a monument to post-war grit, an expression of the battler’s determination to prevail in the face of want and shortage, of no electricity, no sewers, few materials, damaged men, damaged women, besieged by bureaucracy and artichokes and Bay of Biscay dirt, with only the winter mud and the summer flies in abundance. And kids. Kids by the truckload. Because everyone was busy making them. Making kids and scabbing about trying to put roofs over their heads.
The Pryor’s half a house was eventually finished, but in the same way as it began, fashioned by collections of men and women and kids, like convocations of enthusiastic amateurs at a country working bee. And all the while with the Enfield Council hovering, pestering, proclaiming the new world of the 1960s, and its new world of construction rules, rules that were suddenly looking down their noses at second-hand materials that, just a decade before, the battlers were being encouraged to stand in queues to get, to fill in forms and wait and wait, sometimes driven in desperation to swap ancient motorbikes for the wood and wire of any half decent chookhouse. Then overnight the Council seemed to become preoccupied with pointing at the epidemic of Housing Trust boxes over the road, and implying – “See, this is how we’re doing it now!”
But that half a house, on Lots 27 and 28 Fosters Road, stood and stood, added rooms, added verandahs, became whole, changed colour, rearranged its gardens, lost its buffer block, replaced the fences. And so in its final garb it stood, for forty more years, proud and unyielding, maybe just a touch holier-than-thou.
But even though its era was gone, it had seen off most of those original Hillcrest interlopers over the road, as one by one they also succumbed to the relentless creep of modernity. And for all that time there were always Pryors within its thin walls, although mostly only Dorothy for too many of its middle and latter days, after their restless offspring flew away, and Allan finally succumbed to the effects of his war.
But each of them – often with passing arrays of partners, kids, and mates attached - were compulsively drawn back from time to time, to that byre where their lives and their spirits and their various concepts of God and purpose began, to have wounds dressed and egos restored. And it was in their re-telling to each other across the kitchen table – sometimes honestly sometimes not – of those forays out into the world, that seemed to sustain them as a family, as though none of them had ever really left, continuing to transcribe the latest part of the bigger story onto the fibrous plaster of the old place’s inner lining, for safekeeping, as this is only the way a house attains any greatness. And, sometimes, may even becomes mythical.
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As the sun breached The Hills, and before the gruesome business of the day, Mick and Claire first did a tour of the area, went looking for the landmarks of their youth, as all middleaged people tend to, as if needing to reassure themselves that they were once children, and that there really isn’t a disconcerting relentlessness about Time, and Change.
But very little remained – the dirt tracks out to the back blocks now had signposts, and actual names – Whysall Road, Princes Road, Cedar Avenue – each bitumened and guttered and kerbed and treed, with chicanes to quieten the traffic, where once only kids on scrapyard bikes jumped make-do ramps, and the only vehicles came in the dead of night, to leave piles of fascinating rubbish, each a joy to the eyes of a ten year old scabber. And the unofficial trotting track over where the Hampstead Barracks had been was now also lost under a swathe of brick veneer and double garage roller doors, good neighbour fences, gardens with diosma shrubs, lawns of everlasting kikuyu.
And when did Fisk’s silver shed/house melt away? And Pop Kendal’s railway carriage with its war-beaten woman and its endless scurry of kids? And old Bill Hardacre’s house, with its pioneer market garden blocks he'd named after places in his head, blocks that had all stood like a statement of determination since the eighteen-eighties, and even Pratley’s bungalow on the corner, then the only totally modern house on that shapeless plain of dreams. Every one of them gone.
With the silence heavy between them, they finally sidled to a halt opposite and sat in the car, sat and nostalgically watched, in the manner of last members of some faded imperial club, holding back the tears and the ache in their cheeks, determined to be part of that hingepin of their lives to the very end.
To the jarring clatter of falling corrugated iron – ancient pre-war corrugated iron the gauge of which the world would never see again - the bulldozer went straight through the heart of it like bulldozers have always done, as if it was a structure of no consequence in the long history of the human race, filling the air with the eternal clamour of yet more ends and beginnings.
But it was only when the big yellow back-hoe swung its crushing arm left and right and left again, straight though The Shack, their first home in the wilderness, that Claire made an odd noise in her throat, bumped a fist on her brother’s shoulder.
“Are we finished with this...?”, she asked, and Mick nodded, started the car, and it was done.
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There are four houses there now, on those two slices of wheat paddock that were once at the frontier of urban civilisation, ugly, modern, boxy, jumped-up stick-and-panel lumps of unimaginative shit, without romance, grit, or colour, and no capacity to understand the nature of the love and the sweat, the Friday night bodies and the everyday swearwords, that were tilled into the black dirt beneath their concrete slabs.
And the final irony is that all four places were built by one of the big welfare groups, and used as sheltered accommodation for some of life's more desperate misfits. They both believed their mother and their father would have thought that extremely apt, and just as funny as hell.
© T.R.E. 2021
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