A frosty sunshine made the fields glitter this morning as we drove to school up over the tops of Horwich and then down through Old Kiln Lane , passing silent sheep. As we dipped down to Bolton school, there was a sudden mist or fog and it spilled up and over the car. My daughter was convinced that Bolton School was on fire and we parked nearby and then found no smoke, just the dark, hungry shapes of the huge windows and some straggling pupils arriving late like us.
‘Imagine though if it was all ablaze’ she said.
‘Imagine that’.
And so I told her about Du Maurier’s Rebecca and Bronte’s Jane Eyre, where dark buildings become charred ruins, symbolically mirroring cleansing away the terrible secrets incarcerated within these grim sprawling edifices. I told her about poor ‘mad’ Bertha Rochester leaping from the ramparts of Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre, Rochester blinded and maimed by Bertha’s fire requiem to his rotten marriage.
Buildings are places filled with trapped time, psychical metaphors for the emotions played out within their walls. Or perhaps they are like caskets of time and feeling; ambivalent, tempting, uneasy.
I once went to look at a house near Chapel-en-le-Frith as as a child with my mother and brother. I can’t remember why we went and I do know that we did look at several houses at various stages of our time in Chapel and that these visits affected me powerfully enough to linger in my memory. This house was set in the middle of a field, with a stagnant pond in the garden surrounded by sick looking bushes and trees. I had heard adult rumours about the owner’s young wife going mad there, with whispers about lead poisoning and worse. We did live in a village then, a place governed by both the church and the local school and people and places easily became mythologised. when they stepped away from convention for whatever reason.
I wouldn’t even go in that house with my mum, so my brother and I stood near the pond instead and imagined what dark secrets the green water hid from our young eyes. Even now an anxiety comes over me as I remember the despairing gloom of that garden.
I don’t know if the house was ever sold, though part of me imagines a builder bought it and made it into something unrecognisable and clean, free of the lead pipes that had slowly poisoned the young wife’s mind , until she was put away forever in yet another house governed by darkness and fear.
