Eulogy for El Cerrito
May 4th 2024
In the hot summer of 1976, a young builder called Andrew Bolton built my parents a home at the bottom of a hill in Keyworth, a village on the outskirts of Nottingham.
Back then we were a family of eight. Parents; two teenagers; a toddler; three dogs. Recently back from four months in India, living in a rented house.
The bricks were laid in a repeating diamond pattern. The walls were vertiginous because of its levels - and the way in which the lounge sits over the garage - the steep steps running up through the front garden. Sitting in the driveway always feels like being at the bottom of a well. Waiting for the rumble of the garage door, operated by someone who is at home. The red brick a cliff face, climbing to the railings and the pitched roof. Although I am fifty and haven’t lived in the house for more than thirty years, when I am tired or afraid, I still dream of red bricks climbing to the sky, in a relentless diamond pattern.
The door at the top of the steps these days is a modern one. But a photograph taken from the time the house was built reminds me that the original front door was made of wood, with a cross at the centre. That cross, those steep steps and the smell of brand-new floorboards, are almost my earliest memory. Holding my dad’s hand, crossing the threshold of our new home, without handrails, but only the smell of new wooden floors. My three-year-old feet in little sandals picking my way across the wonky floor.
Paperwork, recently re-discovered in an old box file labelled in my father’s meticulous writing, tells us that the house cost them 20-000 pounds. The estimate before the trouble with the drains. The stuff that, as kids, we knew nothing about.
My older brother, who was fourteen that summer, earned himself a bit of money fetching and carrying for the builders, while our house, the bricks, the walls that would contain and listen in on our family for the next forty eight years grew around us all.
It grew around conversations about footings and drains and the difficulties of landscaping the Nottinghamshire clay soil. It grew around the roof and the windows , the guttering, and the distinctive white fascia boards that characterise the split-level seventies homes that my mother had remembered from California summers more than a decade earlier.
In the paperwork the house already has a name. Because the house numbers on the road were taken, long before the old orchard was sold to my parents by the Middleton family, who lived in the village. It was called ‘El Cerrito’, which means ‘Little Hill’ in Spanish. The name of the San Francisco suburb my mother hadn’t wanted to leave. A house. Named after a source of resentment.
On moving day, I remember standing at the top of the basement steps, the plaster still damp on the walls, watching the family piano, the one my sister played, being carried down the stairs. The motor caravan parked on the newly laid drive. Here we finally were.
The house named El Cerrito took a lot. My parents had bitten off more than they could chew, in every respect. We moved into it half-finished. Decorations and home comforts appeared slowly. It swallowed weekends whole for years. Weekends filled with ladders, brushes and spades, and the pensive silence of parental disagreement, while my sister, my brother and I, sat crossed legged on the floor in an undecorated lounge watching TISWAS on a Saturday morning. Our mother fretting and yelling about the garden. My dad, in his study upstairs, keeping very still.
A lot happens over time. When I was ten my grandad came to live with us after Nanna had had enough of his nonsense. The purple patterned wallpaper in my sister’s old bedroom turning out to be the last thing he saw. The undertaker came in the night while I slept, followed in the morning by The Revd Brian Earley, in his cassock, comforting and serene. Nanna half-heartedly threw herself down the steps. Only to return later none the worse for wear.
In the same year, at Halloween, a young girl was abducted and murdered in the village. The shape in the glass at the front door was the police, going door to door, interviewing my brother and my dad. The lounge door shut firmly in my face.
Christmas 1986: I am now thirteen and we are watching the film ‘Tootsie’, with Dustin Hoffman. The phone rings, and my dad gets up to answer it. I follow him out of the door into the hall. I can feel carpet under my bare toes and before I reach the steps he turns around with a big grin on his face and says, “It’s a boy!” The lounge erupts into cheers, as if a gust of fresh air has just blown open a window from the outside. A little boy. Two little boys. Coming up the steep steps in single file in their shorts. Chittering to each other in sweet baby voices. Their sister, dangling in her car seat from her daddy’s hand. They run around the open hall making ‘whoo’ noises, pretending to be ghosts. They bring girlfriends and boyfriends. They make my parents smile.
Much later, another little girl climbs the steps holding her daddy’s hand. My parent’s first great grandchild. Her tiny feet on the big concrete steps. Grasping a railing that I painted green in 1984 when I was eleven years old. She comes to be present as we bury the ashes of our dad in Keyworth Cemetery. The first to go. The beginning of the end. Carried down the steps – bought and built in 1976 – by two paramedics. Once he is gone the house takes on a strange quality. Things begin to slow down, my mother rattling and humming to the echoes of their family life. His books and his hoarded funny things still on the study shelf and her catalogues of cruises she likes to look at. But nothing grows much anymore and the dust begins to settle. There is a sense that we are done, and that maybe, just maybe , that El Cerrito is done with us. She departs in the same way he did. Stretchered down the steps into an ambulance by two paramedics, both women this time. They carry her out and away from her dream, so stubbornly held for so long. She doesn’t raise an arm. There is no farewell salute. I ask my brother if he finds it odd being in their house without them. He doesn’t pause, “It’s our house now”.
As soon as they are both gone the house breathes out and begins to speak its own name. It is quiet and it is light. I remember the old plum tree that grew at the top of the drive and I notice a huge fir tree at the bottom of the garden, twenty or thirty feet high, with its wonky top branch. “Christmas tree from 1985”, says my brother, “The dog chewed it, don’t you remember?” My sister and I open the flimsy wardrobe doors in the spare room that used to be dad’s study. There are two pairs of worn slippers, side by side, that can only have been put there by my mother. Maybe for us to find. Maybe not.
Like every other adult child, clearing a house, scooping up and redistributing two entire lives, I don’t know what to think. How can the leavings of an entire existence, two entire existences, just be discharged? How can this, the most physical manifestation of our family life, be sold? How can we not have a key to let ourselves in? How will we be trespassers if we step onto the drive? How can El Cerrito belong to someone else, when every brick, every corner, every edge of it, belongs to them…Two kids from Shipley who had nothing. This house was their ‘something’. It was what they had to show for their efforts. The container for a thousand slides and the camera that look them. Fifty pots of jam and the hands that made them. Two glass rockets. The numberplates and badges from three different cars. Dad’s copy of Ignition by John D Clark, forever taken on holiday and never read. His banknotes, his minerals, her cacti, her shoes. It is everything apart from us, their children and grandchildren, and maybe dad’s career. The names of his students etched on Ph.D theses stacked in the garage. Their namesakes long gone.
How do you write a eulogy for a house when bricks and mortar can’t die but only get passed from hand to hand. Newborn every generation to the next set of owners who must find out for themselves where everything is. But my parents knew where everything was. They knew about the water tanks in the loft and how the gas fire works. They knew that the bird which coos in the morning and afternoons is the collared dove who returns every year. Everything now waits for someone else. Does the house miss them? “Maybe its ready”, says a friend, “Maybe its time”.
My nephew says this feels like looting, taking their things without permission. But there is no permission anymore. They are somewhere else. He is whistling Spracht Zarathustra under his breath, and she is complaining about something or other. They have left us an old house with a name that is difficult to spell. A letter addressed to ‘ L Three Toes’ found us anyway though, so maybe the house will find us again too one day. I can’t imagine what it will be like shutting the door for the last time and exiting down the steps or maybe ‘out through the garage’ as they used to say.
Yes, we will make sure we push the garage door down properly on our way out.
Yes, we will leave the key to the utility room on the ledge. Just in case you ever need to get back in.
It’s the least we can do.
