Sam Johnson-Schlee

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Engineered Wood
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My grandmother’s wheelchair moves easily over the freshly laid floor. In the new house it is easy for her to move around, subject to no one else. The pale engineered wood runs all the way through the house, hard and smooth. In one place four square metres of vinyl with a contrasting wood design have been loosely laid down to stop oil paint getting on the floor. There are only a few pieces of furniture, my grandfather would like to have more chairs. Before the fire, he used to hang chairs on the wall to keep them out of the way, most of them were broken and waiting for repair.

On the table in the middle of the room are piles and piles of paperwork, he is looking for something. A lot of papers survived protected by the large chests of drawers which have now been moved back in, albeit thoroughly scorched. While various family members unpack things he sits at his computer looking at his emails. Everyone is pleased he is sitting down.

There is a box of stuff: a gardening glove, a tape measure, a screw driver, an empty jar, a protractor, paper plates, coffee filters, another glove which does not match the first. This is the detritus that will soon clutter their briefly pristine home. The residue that gets left behind by living packaged up and relocated. An index of looking, of thinking, of wanting just the thing for just the job and forgetting about it half way through the task. Other packing boxes contain assorted kitchenware. Things that have been assembled from junk shops, supermarkets and donations from kind neighbours. Thrown together by necessity, we unpack them all onto a large trestle table – this will do until there is a better solution.

In my grandmother’s room there is a chair that her guests can sit on while she speaks to them. She is pleased because in the temporary flat, where they lived after the fire, the living room was also where she slept. She did not always get to decide when and where people came to sit in her room. Now the blue upholstered armchair is entirely hers and the people that sit with her must look at her alone. Once while I was talking to my grandfather about house insurance at agonising length she wheeled herself back against the resistance of the soft carpet and put her hand in the air and said ‘I want to be the centre of attention now’.

Outside her window the garden is still growing on the other side of a metal fence. The house is still surrounded by construction materials. They have yet to complete the decking that will mean that she can go back and forth and observe the garden in the fresh air. Soon she will be giving instructions to whomever she has charmed into completing a task: digging a pond, moving a plant, weeding around something, potting up a tree she has grown from a fruit pip. I say, ‘When the builders have gone the deer might come up to the window to see you’. ‘Do you think so?’ ‘Why not?’

The house that I grew up in, and where my grandparents still lived burned down in a fire. The fire ripped through the wooden bungalow one morning in March. My grandmother’s physio was visiting and he was able to help my grandparents and their carer to escape. It was a windy day and the fire moved quickly through the house, it was destroyed in hours. I came to see it a few days afterwards. I swung on the swings that still hang from tall trees in the front and back of the house. I walked around the chimney stack and the hearth, the only parts made from brick. I looked at the piles of burned books and dug through ashes to find pictures of myself as a child. My grandmother said to me ‘the garden is still growing’ and when I went to the house there were peonies sprouting from beneath scorched earth.

When my parents separated in the early nineties my mum, my brother and I all moved down from Dundee to live with my grandparents. My bedroom had yellow walls and a cork floor. It was small like I was and it was very much my room. I had a small stereo, I used it to listen to the radio and books on cassette. It was brittle plastic and at some point the cover for the cassette deck broke so I would just wedge the cassette in – it still played just as well. I read a book which included a character who painted horses on the walls of his room so I tried to do the same but after one very odd looking animal I gave up. One night I was investigating a box of art materials that belonged to either my mum or my grandfather when I found a scalpel blade. Unsure what it was I touched it against my thumb and was surprised by the cut which bled everywhere. They were awake next door in the living room watching David Jason in A Touch of Frost or the equivalent, I was held until the bleeding stopped then put back to bed. I liked to climb in the trees, but this was not always encouraged. After damaging an apple tree I was once told: ‘how would you like it if one of your arms was broken’. I didn’t think that I would like it very much. There were a number of tree houses, always without a wall, my grandfather told us that if there was a wall we would be more likely to fall out. Things that most people try to keep outside often came into the house. The oil paint spattered brick floor in the studio would conceal most kinds of dirt and we would trail in and out and through as we circled the house playing one game or another.

Before I lived there, and only a few years after my grandparents had moved in, I received a letter from my grandmother. It was illustrated with drawings of her and my grandfather trying to catch a bird that had gotten stuck in the studio. Inside the envelope was a feather left behind by the bird. Plants would sometimes find gaps in the wall to grow through, it was not unusual to see a tendril of something or other making it in through the corner of a window or even a hole in the wall.

 

Now it has been replaced by a timber frame, brick-clad, perfectly insulated new home. But it is still the wooden house that informs my own internal architecture. More than memory. These were the rooms in which I learned the boundaries of my self, I still walk through them looking for thoughts, memories, feelings that I may have misplaced. The dream I used to have of falling into water and my breath being forced out of me when I woke, or the dissociative feeling of being cut off from my own senses that I used to have, as if everything I heard was passing through someone else before it got to me: doubly inside. I could sooth myself by running my hand over the yellow walls or, peering through the window with my face against the cold pane to check that I was still there, or by taking a compass to the cork tiles and gouging out pieces of soft orange wood. The bungalow held me in place when nothing else could, and it still does. Smelling the ashes was unsettling, but walking through the detritus I also felt reassured that I had not also vaporised.

After the house burned I learned that despite all of their stuff, my grandparents had not measured their life in possessions. They were remarkably calm about it. Everyone in the family confessed one by one that as well as horror we had felt a sense of relief that the contents of the house would no longer need sorting. A silver lining to the billowing smoke.

They do not seem particularly afraid of death, except that they might be interrupted midway through something. And there is always something, a painting to make or something to write. Since beginning to recover from her stroke my grandmother has maintained two mailing lists she calls ‘share a poem, and ‘share a prayer’ which she sends out each week to separate but overlapping groups of friends and family. In the weeks immediately after the fire my grandfather begun to plan his next exhibition. They also sent a book to print, in their latter years they have taken to self-publishing. My grandfather wanted to give their endeavours some gravitas so they called it Academy Press; they have published several books of his paintings and two essays by my grandmother one about only children and another about the gardens at Rousham, I believe they are available in the British Library.

 

They did miss their books. One of the most uncomfortable sights from the burned out house were the remnants of their library. My grandmother started ordering replacements immediately. They had to make a bookshelf in their flat but instead of buying a permanent replacement they stacked up bricks and scaffolding boards to make shelves. Of course the bookshelf has come to the new house, they like it now and against a large white wall it has taken on the look of a sixties art installation. This improvisational style is not just a response to crisis, they have always lived in a montage: a canoe hanging from the ceiling, a skull over the door, a cow bell on the door handle, the American post box, a grand piano covered in a dust cloth and piles of art materials, paperwork, and other stuff, a real orange tree with fake plastic oranges in it. When I was a child my grandfather would cut out the cardboard cats from the front of boxes of cat food to attach to sticks and put into his pot plants to try to stop the cats from pissing in them.

Then there is my grandfather’s home made television stand, a grey plastic laundry basket with a television on top that has been fastened to the basket with wide clear plastic tape wrapped around and around the plastic, set on top of some shelves on wheels. He likes this precarious arrangement because it is adjustable, he tells me that he is going to keep it – he likes it. It is good to have furniture that does what you want it to do. My grandfather has always resented things that confuse him, for a long time the portable telephone and the remote controls had packing tape wrapped around them to obscure any part that he did not view as necessary.

The new house is very different from the old house. Instead of ancient space heaters and a coal burning stove it is heated by an air source heat pump. Certainly this house will not be as welcoming to the outside as the old one, though the larger windows mean the garden is always visible. They will be able to roll out onto the decking at the back, as they did before, and sit and drink tea together while they watch birds hop between the rotting apples that have fallen from the tree, not picked up soon enough to be eaten. My grandfather keeps trying to persuade them to turn down the temperature, the draftless interior feels good to me, but he has concerns. Perhaps plants and animals will still be able find their way through their home as he inevitably leaves the windows and doors open in nostalgia for the drafts of the old house. Maybe there will be birds flapping dangerously around the ceiling fan again.

 

It is strange how familiar the house feels. Suddenly we are moving in the same ways and standing in the same places that we did in the old house. The layout is very similar and the proportions of the communal rooms are more or less identical. But the crisp walls and picture windows are different. My aunt wonders if it is the light, does it come into the house in the ways that we are used to? Is this why it feels so hard to remember the fire as I sit talking to my grandmother in her room, or as we eat salad from plates on our laps next to the sofa built as a replica of the one my grandfather secured via a classified ad which read ‘wanted, seven foot sofa for a six foot loafer’? Their habitual untidiness is creeping in, already the signs of their life, their liveliness, are proliferating.

My brother and I discuss the new house on the phone. He moved to America during the pandemic and has not been to visit since they have moved in. I don’t think he ever went to see the burned out house either – too much, he decided. He reminds me that only the two of us grew up there I forget that not everyone shares in the very specific childhood relationship I hold to that home. When everything appeared to be in doubt the house was a certainty. I keep writing and writing about Galvey, I have dedicated a book to it, as a fantasy and as a dream-place it is where I come back to time and again to walk between rooms, open doors and press my hands against cool window glass. It is the smell of the attic, the airing cupboard, the linen closet, leaf litter and rotten apples that linger in my memory. An obsession I suppose, one I share with my brother and maybe no one else.

 

It could be that this is unhealthy. All of this writing feels to me like a kind of analysis. An associative exploration of the architecture of me, a hope that somewhere in that old house I will find an image of my child self who I can grab hold of and reassure. I have been telling myself that this is the last time I will write about it. The house is its own memoir. But I am making the mistake of looking for myself in it. Like all things that you can buy it is also a record of other people’s lives, everyone who worked to make its components and then to assemble it. I am walking around in the house looking for myself but it is haunted by the people who sold their time for a fraction of the value of the thing that they made. Now it is a house that has been built twice, it is in a spider’s web of social relations. But the house in my mind, the one that is still there, I am trying to keep for myself. Perhaps that’s why I keep writing, like show and tell at school, I want everyone to see it and know that it is mine for fear of losing it.

Earlier this year I took my grandfather to see the house before it was completed. He climbed into the passenger seat of my car, first he sat on the seat then he used his hands to lift his legs in after him. He was anxious because my grandmother was particularly unwell at the time. She had stopped being able to feed herself and was not making very much sense, she had probably had a small stroke. He doesn’t like being away from her but he needed to take some measurements around the house because he was being asked questions about how he wanted the pathways and decking to be built. From the day after the fire when he started sketching out the new house he has been thinking in terms of her wheelchair, he wanted every part of the house to be accessible to her and for them to easily sit outside and look at the garden. He is an emotional person, but he does not like to show it, certainly not to me or his other grandchildren. On this occasion his anxiety was palpable, he bit at his fingers and looked out of the window or otherwise talked quickly about ramps and doors and measurements.

At the house we ducked under scaffolding and walked into the building site. I wasn’t sure how the builders felt about us wondering around but they were kind to him, I think many of these decisions had in fact already been made, but he needed to be certain. He had to be there so he could imagine her there, to know that he would be able to take her inside to show her what he had arranged to be built for her. He was terrified that she would not be able to move there with him. He wouldn’t often express something he felt to me so directly but on our way back down the hill in the car he told me that he knew that she might not live until the house was completed. A car works well for conversations like this because there is no obligation for eye contact, you are expected to keep your eyes on the road. For me and my grandfather, the new house stands in for utopia, just as the old house did. Differently we both have invested in it the possibility of a return to something lost. It is a bourgeois fantasy, the house that saves you, but it is one I find hard to resist, particularly when it comes to this one place. Let me show you a place. But it is a stand-in like the objects of most dreams. For my grandfather it is the life of the woman he loves, the house he made for her so that she could move through it – it needs her to animate it. For me I think it might be the fantasy of a house that I can love without guilt, without the understanding that my security comes at the expense of someone else’s – of thousands of someone elses whose little bits of stolen work have been used to construct it. As a child I was simply alive, and this is how I imagined it worked for everyone. The house stands in for a utopia that I lost as I learned about the world beyond the walls of my childhood home.

 

Seeing her moving through the house in her wheelchair, with the freedom to manoeuvre without being moved by someone else summoned strong feelings in me. I started writing about the house a few months before it burned down. I thought through the ways in which this house had shaped my writing. While I sat with her in the new house I wanted to tell her something that might make her proud. But the only thing that surfaced was a line from her book, Rhine Journey, which I quote from in my own book. In her novel a Victorian woman tries to escape the oppressive respectability of her family, it is set in 1951, in the aftermath of the 1948 revolutions. The protagonist experiences a private revolution and at the same time brushes up against the efforts being made to incite an overthrow in Europe. When she pictures a life beyond the restraints of her family she imagines a new place to live:
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She pictured to herself those whitened cottage rooms where she might quietly extend herself, and moving from room to room, meet and recognise herself in forms unaltered by the pressures of others upon her.
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As I read it to her in her new house I reminded her, ‘You wrote that’. She looked at me seriously. ‘I was prophetic.’