Unmoving

Awakening with a sense of displacement due to the wardrobe looming awkwardly between me and the window, supposedly compensating for lack of curtains, I recalled its emptying the day before, in readiness for carrying downstairs by the removal men. It broke my mother’s heart but after just 2½ years we were leaving this house of her dreams and moving eighty miles to a two-shop village in the Hertfordshire countryside, to a brand new bungalow she had never seen, although we had pored over plans (the drawing of which by my father was the sole evidence of his youthful dream of becoming an architect) and had chosen paint colours for the distempered walls.

This move was taking place after several months of separation, months when my father had stayed, uncomfortably, with his sister-in-law’s family, assimilating a new job and trying to find a suitable house, his first choice having been turned down flat by my mother and any further visits to view possibilities vetoed because of the expense.

My memory of the move itself is as squashed as we were in the cab of Patterson’s shiny green pantechnicon – twitchy with anticipation, too diverted by the novelty to notice my parents’ apprehension, too young to realise that this move would re-direct our lives. But when we arrived – another mean-wired stone-shot plot around sharp red brick, but wide and bright inside – I did sense my father’s anxiety and my mother’s martyred determination to dislike. She had already written the script for this chapter in her life, one which invariably ended with the phrase “and I never ever sang around the house again.”