The continuing story of the house Joe and Mary Ann Scott lived in for over 50 years and the families that have lived here since.*
I have often wondered how Joe and Mary Ann lived in the house during their half century here.
It is after all a big place and there must have been times when some rooms just never got used, and when their conversation echoed through those empty spaces.
I say that because I am reflecting on the passage of time with our own kids.
Three have left to set up their own homes and while our Ben is just down the road, Josh is in Sheffield and Saul in Warsaw which just leaves Luca who really just has a reservation on his bed which he uses once or twice a week.
Now that is perfectly normal and is after all exactly what I and most of my friends did.
We left home arrived in a new city with a shedful of bravado and optimism, vaguely committed to a degree and study but really just relishing being away from home.
I never gave much thought to how my parents thought about the move or the empty bedroom I left behind.
And that again is just as it should be.
All of ours are making their own lives but come back for Christmas, which still involves the Christmas Day kick about on the Rec and regularly stop over for the odd weekend.
But they have left and the house is a quieter place.
Long ago I swore I would never wander the rooms looking for a piece of dirty and discarded clothing to wash as a way of justifying my existence and that has pretty much worked.
In the space which was about caring for them I spend researching, and writing.
And things go on as they have done for the forty years I have lived here.
Each room is full of memories, from the birth of our Saul in the big bedroom to the time the dining room was the play room and back beyond that when I shared the house with Mike John and Lois.
There was the time when there was no heating in the house save a gas fire, and the arguments revolved around whose turn it would be to face the cold and make the coffee.
And somewhere in the dining room there are still the holes John drilled in the floorboards when he was bending timbers of wood for the boat he built in the back garden along with the model paint that the kids spilt while making their War Hammer models.
And of course there are the photographs of parties, Christmas events including the boat turning celebration, and the night Mike lost his socks after a particularly long session in the Trevor.
But none of all these memories intrude, instead they sit beside each other adding to the general history of the house.
Sadly what are missing are the photographs of Joe and Mary Ann and the house as it looked from the time they moved in 1915 till Mary Ann’s death in 1974.
Bits of their story and the big events that went on around them have come to light and have been reflected in the sixty-two stories which I have written about the house since the first in December 2011.
I remember in that first story pondering on how all of us are custodians of the place we live and it matters little if that place is Blenheim Palace or a post war prefab.
And I concluded, I would “write about our house. [which] was built a hundred years ago, and has had only four custodians, of which we are the only ones to have had children here.
More than that this is the only home our eldest three have known and it was where one of them was born.
It is also a place where countless friends have come and stayed before moving on, seen Christmas parties, a boat turning event in the back garden, and a succession of decorating fashions.
So over the next few months I want to tell the story of this one house set against the bigger picture of what was going on here in Chorlton and the national backdrop.”
Well those months stretched across five years and I am not sure whether this is the last.
We shall see.
Pictures; the eldest three, circa 1996 and the dining room in 2008 from the collection of Andrew Simpson,the advert for Birds Eye Foods, from Woman’s Own, January 12 1956, and the house in 1974 and 1977 courtesy of Lois Elsden
*The story of a house,
http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20a%20house
 |
| Events in a story ...........1996 |
It is after all a big place and there must have been times when some rooms just never got used, and when their conversation echoed through those empty spaces.
I say that because I am reflecting on the passage of time with our own kids.
Three have left to set up their own homes and while our Ben is just down the road, Josh is in Sheffield and Saul in Warsaw which just leaves Luca who really just has a reservation on his bed which he uses once or twice a week.
Now that is perfectly normal and is after all exactly what I and most of my friends did.
We left home arrived in a new city with a shedful of bravado and optimism, vaguely committed to a degree and study but really just relishing being away from home.
 |
| .......... 1974 |
And that again is just as it should be.
All of ours are making their own lives but come back for Christmas, which still involves the Christmas Day kick about on the Rec and regularly stop over for the odd weekend.
But they have left and the house is a quieter place.
Long ago I swore I would never wander the rooms looking for a piece of dirty and discarded clothing to wash as a way of justifying my existence and that has pretty much worked.
In the space which was about caring for them I spend researching, and writing.
 |
| ............. 1956 |
Each room is full of memories, from the birth of our Saul in the big bedroom to the time the dining room was the play room and back beyond that when I shared the house with Mike John and Lois.
There was the time when there was no heating in the house save a gas fire, and the arguments revolved around whose turn it would be to face the cold and make the coffee.
And somewhere in the dining room there are still the holes John drilled in the floorboards when he was bending timbers of wood for the boat he built in the back garden along with the model paint that the kids spilt while making their War Hammer models.
And of course there are the photographs of parties, Christmas events including the boat turning celebration, and the night Mike lost his socks after a particularly long session in the Trevor.
But none of all these memories intrude, instead they sit beside each other adding to the general history of the house.
Sadly what are missing are the photographs of Joe and Mary Ann and the house as it looked from the time they moved in 1915 till Mary Ann’s death in 1974.
 |
| ............... 1977 |
I remember in that first story pondering on how all of us are custodians of the place we live and it matters little if that place is Blenheim Palace or a post war prefab.
And I concluded, I would “write about our house. [which] was built a hundred years ago, and has had only four custodians, of which we are the only ones to have had children here.
 |
| ........... 2008 |
It is also a place where countless friends have come and stayed before moving on, seen Christmas parties, a boat turning event in the back garden, and a succession of decorating fashions.
So over the next few months I want to tell the story of this one house set against the bigger picture of what was going on here in Chorlton and the national backdrop.”
Well those months stretched across five years and I am not sure whether this is the last.
We shall see.
Pictures; the eldest three, circa 1996 and the dining room in 2008 from the collection of Andrew Simpson,the advert for Birds Eye Foods, from Woman’s Own, January 12 1956, and the house in 1974 and 1977 courtesy of Lois Elsden
*The story of a house,
http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20a%20house
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