Long Street House

It’s up for sale again, the Long Street house of our childhood. This cream chrysalis once housed our lives. Fresh paint bandages deep cracks as old as history. Inside its rough cast façade, memory tours each room and roams the backyard. The fence pillars I climbed as a child that seemed so high, are small. The almond trees are gnarled and bent. The vacant land next door where rusted out old boilers grazed like dinosaurs in the long grass, has been replaced by a block of flats. On the other side, Mr Oakey's cottage is now a triple fronted brick veneer. The secrets that he once hid in the dark shadows of vines and overgrown trees have been sealed beneath a mote of paving bricks. Back then his driveway was a tunnel of treasures, with tiny bits of coloured glass and pottery pieces imbedded in gravel. I would pick them out and take them home to keep in a Bex bottle hidden in a drawer beside my bed. It was like stolen loot. After all this time, our house seems almost unchanged. All is familiar. The old shutters haven't moved and hang like petrified wings on the sides of each front window. Afraid to leave, you look out from behind a curtain onto this world where I am, unable to get back inside.