A corrugated brass key unlocks the panelled front door of the new ninety-year-old home. Sold to fund state care, a whitewashed bungalow exchanged for a single bed and unlimited daytime TV. Newlywed, Maggie and Andrew bought the home after promising to have and to hold, until death did them part. Embarking on sixty years of life together, they crossed the threshold carrying their joint dreams.
The bungalows of King's Park Avenue sit on a coal seam, land intricately stitched with layers of sedimentary and volcanic rock. An area known to the local Victorian as ‘the Cathcart Coals’, parks and gardens now cover the once mined land laden with ancient minerals. Shards of black diamonds crumble through rich, treacly earth feeding neat rows of roses and rhododendrons. Coal, sandstone, silt and limestone seep between strata, three hundred million years of packed decomposition, now topped with tarmac and tree swings.
King's Park was designed with large gardens and open spaces, purposely far from the overcrowded city tenements. Before rising enthusiasm for post war high rises, 1930s Glasgow residents flocked to the newly built rural areas with the promises of fresh air and fresh paint, fast trams and train stations. But as tramlines disappeared from Glasgow streets, town planners made way for petrol and pollution, surrounding the once rural bungalows with parked cars and smooth concrete before Maggie and Andrew moved in.
Andrew’s Ford Cortina took daily commutes to the steelworks, weekend trips to the seaside, holidays in the Highlands. On pay weekends, it remained parked at the door as he took Maggie dancing in the city, polka dots and paisley prints, mustard yellows and ketchup reds, drop hooped earrings and backcombed hair. They twisted nights away in sweaty, smoky dancehalls, fuelled with Tartan Specials, gin and tonics, Benson and Hedges. Caught up in the energy and electricity of their youth, they danced, laughed, kissed, cavorted, revelling in their modern lives. Trundling home on rowdy, rollicking last trains, they shared last cigarettes in packed carriages, kipper ties and fishnet stockings well smoked. Makeup melting, beehives sagging, the night trains took the glamorous youths back to their less glamorous lives.
Back in suburban life, Maggie and Andrew’s garden provided a constant source of work and joy, love and peace. Growing, mowing and hoeing, planting, ploughing and picking, they tended their land, exchanging neighbourly cuttings and tips. On summer evenings, Andrew arrived home with colourful flowers and foliage, bringing life to the flowerbeds in pompoms of yellow and orange, Maggie’s favourite marigolds. ‘I married gold’, he’d laugh, reaching for her, tumbling towards the bedroom in the hope their desire would plant new life of their own.
When the sleepless nights and tiny toes failed to arrive, Maggie and Andrew filled their days with work and food, garden centres and golf. Time passed but they never talked of their grief, not even to one another. The feelings of loss they felt for something they’d never been allowed to have felt shameful, so they carried it silently with them, burying it under snowdrops and daffodil bulbs. Birthing new life in yellows and whites, mother nature bloomed early each spring as they tended their garden with redirected love and devotion, feeding and nurturing a nursery of crawling vines and climbing roses. Summers spent bedding plants, training trailers, caring for their tumbling, towering blossoms. Passersby marvelled, green-eyed with green-finger envy, pausing prams to take in the display as their infants slept soundly in the lavender scented air.
Spring after spring, the seedlings grew into towering trees, bringing an autumn of aching joints and aging ailments. Maggie filled the home with seashell-shaped hand soaps, rose and bergamot bath salts, bed sheets scented with lavender talc. She busied around in the morning light, drawing floral curtains, plumping velvet cushions, opening airing windows. The kettle boiled constantly, a range of ceramic teapots sat colourfully on display. Friends and strangers were all met with the same welcome; an open door, whistling kettle and sweet treat. Maggie kept her famous baking in an old Quality Street tin; rich treacly fruit cake; buttery stodgy bannocks; crumbly melty tablet. Cheese scones were sent weekly to Father Michael, cream sponges to coffee mornings. The tiny kitchen produced a continual smell of home, lentil soup and ham hock, braised beef in shortcrust pastry, lamb stew with suet dumplings.
On pension day, Maggie ritually caught the 21 into town, taking in the characters and commodities of Argyll Street. She stopped new mum’s, placing pound coins in prams, sneaking peeks before moving on with heartfelt well wishes. She bought cards and trinkets for every occasion, no event unmarked without a token gesture. She descended the stairs to M&S food hall, a basket laden with extra-fruity hot cross buns, extra-buttery chicken kievs, extra-chocolatey caramel sweets. Returning home in time for Countdown, she reclined into the freshly plumped sofa, cracking nine-letter conundrums before her tea was cool enough to sip. ‘Yer unbelievable,’ Andrew would say as she beat the clock, contestants, and even Carol Voderman at times. She’d laugh, wiping flakes of jam puffs and cream slices off her M&S blouse, rising to go start dinner as Richard Whiteley signed off.
Maggie boiled the kettle for the last time in 2007, collapsing in the kitchen after placing teabags in the morning pot, water not yet added. Andrew woke to find her on the freshy mopped faux wood linoleum, two empty cups on the counter, the milk still to be poured. Until his memory faded, every morning he woke thirsty for that last cup together.
Andrew remained in the bungalow for another fourteen years, the interior of the house unchanged but his life unrecognisable. The floral scents subsided, the cushions flattened, the windows rarely opened. Andrew made his tea in single cups and shopped at the local Nisa, lorne sausage, tinned soup, a white loaf. The neighbours delivered Sunday papers and home baking, annual Christmas cards he forgot to return. They talked about the weather, the football, the road works, always whilst stood at the door. Until his arms and knees gave way, he maintained the garden as best he could, planting marigolds and pansies. He smiled at the oranges, pinks and purples, taking pleasure in the task he once shared. He stripped off muddy overalls, tuning into Countdown with its ever-changing presenters. Struggling to make six letter words, he sighed, longing for the stability that Richard’s bold ties once brought. He heated Heinz oxtail soup on the greasy hob, the smell of home long gone, his dirty garments lying exactly where he left them.
When the neighbours became power of attorney, they knocked before entering with their own set of keys. Andrew’s bodily functions were giving way, he couldn’t recall if he’d washed or not, when his clothes were last changed. They arranged fresh bedding and meal deliveries, called health workers and cleaners, but his mind was too far gone to know of their kindness. He found the intruders a nuisance, convinced they’d stolen his spade and eaten his madeira cake. Some nights he would appear at his young neighbour’s door, mistaking her for his newlywed Maggie, certain the children were the family he never had. When he was taken into care, he went placidly, requesting they let Maggie know he’d be late home for dinner. He lived out his days in the single floor care home, attempting to leave daily for work or to go plant marigolds. When spring came round, nurses left the bright orange flowers in his room and each time they dressed and undressed him, he would tell them how he had married pure gold.
When Andrew died, the neighbours came to inform me. A man I’d never met yet shared my home and existence with. He lived in my walls, my floorboards, my attic. I cooked in his kitchen, making spiced butternut soups and shaved fennel salads, feeding sharp sourdough starters and straining thick salty yoghurts. I played his Roberts radio I’d found in the shed, blasting ‘Sounds of the 60s’ on Radio 2. His rusty garden tools still turned the soil, sowing wildflower and sunflower, lavender and rosemary, chaotic, aromatic displays. I resumed his defence against the attacking ivy and cleaned the shared earth out of creased knees and caked fingernails. I restocked his bird feeders and stood at his windows, feeling his joy as I marvelled at his world.
I renovated his house, peeling off mint green Artex, patterned carpets, peach bathroom tiles. The dream décor he and Maggie had saved for, stripped without thought, eagerly covered in shades of smoked sage, toasted oatmeal, setting plaster. The kitchen revealed three layers of flooring, changing décors of generational upgrades, layer after layer. Stripped bare, the prised floorboards concealed a 1930’s cigarette packet. Long before Andrew, men had stood in our kitchen in overalls and flat caps, their papery lips siphoning nicotine breaths as they built us our home. In every room, plasterboard and joinery hid once vital, handcrafted fireplaces. Modernised into cupboards and decorative spaces, the upgraded woodwork had been steadied with folded news clippings of Vietnam bombings, Belfast riots, Beatles albums.
The attic revealed Andrew’s decline. Tucked in corners beneath scratchy insulation lay framed photos, an engraved watch, bank deposit books. In his later years, his descending mind had ascended rickety loft ladders to keep his treasures safe from kind-hearted care workers. Attics hide the relics of our past lives, souvenirs too painful to keep but too precious to throw away. Amongst festive decorations and camping apparatus, we hide our dusty memories in spider woven silk and suspend them in rooftops between heaven and earth. The land beneath our homes holds millennia of compacted life, layers of precious minerals hidden under layers of precious, lost memories.