![Date: 1st January 2022. I walked home from Helena's this morning but went via Alverstone Road because the weather was so beautiful and New Years day is always extremely emotional and nostalgic for me. [n.b. a white space indicates some redaction here.] the new owners have painted the house grey and replaced the red tiles from the front stoop. I loved the green so much so its very sad to see it gone. I looked right in through the windows as I walked past too which was weird because I don't think I've actually seen inside it since we lived there. Its so strange how much smaller and darker it seemed than in my memories of it, but the golden light outside and the train tracks opposite were exactly the same.](myhousediary.jpg)
On the Christmas Eve just past, almost two years later, I again went out of my way to revisit.
I can Picture my own first house's internal layout with perfect accuracy, even though I moved when I was six years old. For Bachelard, “After twenty years, in spite of all the other anonymous stairways, we would recapture the reflexes of the “first stairway,” we would not stumble on that rather high step.” For as long as I can remember I have been preoccupied by the past and my relationship with it, and, having personally lived in 10 different houses by the age of 18, Benson and Parnell's depictions of spatial revisitation feel particularly pertinent; I feel deeply attached to each of the physical spaces I have left behind.
On New Year’s Day 2022, I deliberately went out of my way when walking home from a friend’s house in order to go past my first childhood house.
On the Christmas Eve just past, almost two years later, I again went out of my way to revisit.
The old house, Bachelard writes, "for those who know how to listen, is a sort of geometry of echoes."
(Benson’s Pirates ends as you might expect; after revisiting his dilapidated childhood home, Peter Graham becomes supernaturally captivated by the idea restoring it in exact detail, recreating even the aspects which he disliked in his childhood spent living there. He finds himself unable to resist heeding the call of his family’s ghosts – even as his health begins to suffer for it – and, ultimately, he finds peace only through the act of restoration. "He knew they were pleased," Benson writes, "for as the work in the garden progressed, the sense of them and their delight hung about the cleared paths as surely as the smell of the damp earth and the uprooted bracken…"
Once the work is completed, Peter goes to sleep in his fully restored childhood bedroom. In the middle of the night he is awoken, "very suddenly and completely, knowing that somebody had called him." He follows the sounds of voices, the laughter of children playing together, and, not wanting to be left out of the fun, he runs out of the house towards them. The next morning his gardener finds him lying dead in the gravel, with long, deep footsteps trailing behind him at wide intervals, as though he had been skipping.)