Sitting in my sister-in-law’s kitchen alone, quietly relishing the opportunity afforded by a cigarette to flee the pell mell carnival that occurs in her lounge when our family’s unite, I found myself gazing at and considering her kitchen cupboards. The units are white wood, solidly built and there’s a copious amount of them. They should last a good thirty years. Her children would grow up with these cupboards, come to know where everything was located so that the whole kitchen could be related to with unpractised ease. I realised that to live in the same house throughout your childhood is a privelge of sorts, to always return from whatever adventure to the security of an unchanging home.  

Our family house was 3 Cinderash Avenue. It was large and rambling on a wide suburban street lined with old trees and it temmed with character, nooks and crannies and unexpected surprises. The original owners built a solid two storey three bed house on an acre of land. The next inhabitants finding themselves cramped built a huge three bed extension, the same size again as the original, mum and dad arrived and added a vital single storey double kitchen/ utility room extension and a huge patio, all essential for extended family gatherings. Later, in the financial glory years of the 1980’s Wimpy business, some patio was removed and a superfluous extension built which generously accomodated Dad’s snooker room and Mum’s dining room.  

The result of all the building was a house that meandered and twisted internally. The walk from the snooker room in the newest part of the house to mum and dad’s bedroom in the far corner of the oldest part of the house, involved crossing through two other rooms, going down two corridors and up a flight of stairs. The corridor upstairs was a particular delight as it was three different widths (normal- then wide-then narrow), turned two corners in opposite directions, had little natural light,contained two hollows panels where doors had been removed and contained a treasure trove of our family’s formerly loved and now discarded books.  

This odd cornucopian library traced our individual histories and recorded our interests. İt had kid’s encyclopedias’s, the worthy novels and plays the three of us had to read for English GCSE and A-level, mum’s Mills and Boon and Mum’s Turkish language Mill’s and Boon, and dad’s university books about politics and history and his later specialist stuff about Turkish history It especially housed dad’s pleasure reading which ran from thrillers, spy and mob stories in the 70’s, science fiction in the 80’s and fantasy fiction in the 1990’s. As my Dad has got older he has withdrawn from the wide social life where we went out a lot as a family, he went football, we all went to museums and school and ate out and at relation’s houses. In our teens he built the snooker room and instead of him going out his friends came round and once we left home in the 1990’s he retreated to his den, the TV room. The fiction he read paralelled his gradual drawing away from the world into the soliatry pursuits of a man who can create another world in his imagination but has little interest in the variety and riches of life outside his front door. 

The second owner of the house had built an attic room (presumably for their maids) which could only be accessed by a steep flight of stairs. No matter how strong a bulb was in the light, the stairs always stretched vertically upwards to unseeing darkness at the top presaging danger and fear. The attic was decidedly spooky and for years I would force my younger sisters to go up before me presumably so if any of the horrible creatures that lived in the attic cupboards attacked us I would have a better chance of escaping. The flat rooves were well loved by me in my teens when a ladder strategically placed during the day (on pretence of retrieving a tennis ball) meant I could climb down at night, roll my dad’s Mini Metro out of the drive and hotfoot it away up to London.  

Downstairs was the Dark Room, not named with any reference to the aformentioned Evil Stairs, but because the vagaries of new building around had left it totally enclosed buried at the center of the house. İt led off the kitchen to nowhere and was Mum’s personal store room for the hoover, her filing, our toys, her enormous photograph collection, sowing machine, ironing board, spare gifts, old birthday presents and her boxes of what she calls ‘Memories’. They house our childhood art and school time offerings and her letters,postcards and greeting’s cards. They are a testament to the countless birthdays, anniversairies, Mother’s day and Christmases that our family has celebrated together. They are a record of us beyond school curriculums and proscribed reading, a peek into each of our characters from her point of view, they are more interesting than the library but she rarely lets us go through them. 

We grew up at 3 Cinderash Avenue and returned to live there at various times in our twenties and even me in my early thirties. Despite mum’s best efforts to modernise by repainting and moving the furniture around, it withstood and remained timeless, like a capsule you bury in the ground for future generations. It houses a new family now with children who will come to love it and relish the opportunities it offered for exploration and imagination. Mum and Dad moved to a new build modern house, lavish with marble floors instead of threadbare patterned carpets, replete with internal glass wall so that a dreaded Dark Room or Gloomy Corridor, need never appear again and with toilets that flush when you pass your hand over a motion sensor. We come here now with our own families and, like our children this is a new generation house, İ like it but İ miss 3 Cinderash Avenue.