Windows...

A last blip from this flat. I’m writing this the day before - won’t have time on the day!

I’ve spent many hours gazing out of this window while washing dishes. I was thinking of all the times my grandparents and then my parents gazed out too. There were not many trees in my grandparents’ time - I have a photo taken on the back green in the late 60s.

I was also thinking of my grandfather and then my father in his time, standing there, looking out, wondering how they could carry on, when their respective wives had just passed away.

Scenes from windows are memorable. I remember re-visiting a house we used to live in when I was teenager. It had been the school house, but it had been completely remodelled since our day, and it was now council offices. The stairwell had been moved, the rooms and doorways were all different. When I was inside it, nothing was familiar.  I was rather disappointed...

But then I went and stood at a window, and immediately I was that teenage girl again. So I went round each window in turn, and remembered events as if 50-odd intervening years hadn’t happened...

I remember looking out my parents’ bedroom window while my mother told me President Kennedy had been shot - she had just seen the news on TV.

Same window when my mother tearfully told me my big (still teenage) brother was ‘having to get married’  - very shocking in those 60s days.

From another window - though I pretended I wasn’t looking - the family went off for a Sunday drive in the newly acquired car, without me. I  had refused to stay in my Sunday School clothes any longer than necessary. They were tolerated for compulsory church visits only.

I remembered sitting at the dining room window, with the old bakelite wireless, listening to Children’s Favourites religiously every Saturday morning. (The Runaway Train, The Laughing Policeman, The Ugly Bug Ball -  innocent stuff in those days).

From my bedroom window I remember looking across at all the kids sitting the Eleven Plus in the school hall without me. I was ill, can’t remember what with, but I was certainly delighted with my timing. I did sit an easy peasy alternative test later, and fluked it into the A stream at high school. (But they rumbled me when I kept failing ‘O’ Level Arithmetic…)

I shall miss this view.

But hey! The new place has a dishwasher!