Old haunts

Driving along Great Western Road from Kelvinbridge today, I had a sudden notion to have a look at the flat we bought when we were about to be married, 45 years ago. Actually getting there was an interesting exercise in itself, as the roads round Hyndland have been so affected by cars that there are dead ends where once we could scoosh through, one-way streets and no-entry signs, parked cars making every road half the width it was. And parking? Well, we abandoned the car - only for a few minutes, of course - at the foot of the bowling green, and hoped for the best.

The flat must be one of the tiniest in Queensborough Gardens. Being the ground floor flat - not the main door one, but with a door into the close - it only has three rooms instead of the four that every other flat in that tenement has. The front room was spacious and lovely, with a tiny and impractical garden in front of it. There was the original kitchen at the back and one bedroom, also at the back. The hall had three doors on the north wall: the lobby press, the bathroom and - joy - a tiny kitchenette with a window onto the lane, formed from the original bed recess in the kitchen that we used as a dining/living room.

It was my father who sussed that there was a discrete kitchen - it took us an age to find out who was selling the flat, and we prowled round the outside trying to work out the layout. I shall never forget the thrill of buying it - for £2,800 - in 1970. When we moved, four years later, it never occurred to us that it would be great to hang onto it as a letting option; we couldn't help discussing today how useful it would have been for us now had we done so.

But the place seemed somehow shabbier than I remember; there was uncollected rubbish in the lane and the trees in the centre of the street were overpoweringly large; the road was badly kept and the garden outside our flat overgrown. The original windows had been replaced by inferior double glazing and were dirty, and the close door that had been added some time ago - with attendant row of bells outside - would have meant I'd have felt less free to treat the front steps as my private domain when I wanted a seat in the sun after work.

So no, I don't want to live there again - but I loved it, then, when the walls were freshly painted and we knew every inch of our first house - and when we were young and childless and grandchildless and I carried my shopping home after work in a string bag and did my washing in a launderette. 

The past, in my case, is another city.