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Motoring Saturdays for the Ghosts in the House

It was what I call a motoring Saturday, a laughing lament I like to lend, a nod to the old days where men wore goggles and elbow-high calfskin gloves and women wore hats with nets and riding coats over their frilly French frocks. On a weekend day you get in the car and go motoring through the English countryside, looking for everything and nothing, someone and no one. I wear a bright red Gap hat complete with bright red bow, and in a nod to color-blindness I wrap a thick purple woolen scarf around my neck to keep out the winter chill. We get in our Alfa and put in my Spandau Ballet CD and pretend we are people who have motoring Saturdays, people who have somehwere and nowhere to go.

We laugh easily and Angus takes the winding twisting backroads slower for me. For me, a chick from a big car country with big car roads, who now gets car sick. We joke and invent new words, new strings of insults, and talk about the daily lives we lead outside of each other.

On this motoring Saturday, we go to what are called reclamation yards. Reclamation yards, a kind word for graveyards which house the floorboards and bricks of houses that are gone, the gardening decorations and lamp posts that no longer have a path to light. You wander around the yard and can buy up items of the past for what (to me) seems like relatively little money for what you're getting.

Reclamation yards are a mishmash of old and new, of building materials and fixtures, of anything a house could have been purged of. Windows stare blankly unblinking out of lead-lined panes and bathtubs sit forlornly gathering fallen autumn leaves and water bugs within their claw-foot anchors. Victorian fireplaces that linger against fences, giant white statuesque pieces with Italian tiles curling up the frame to echo in the warmth. Some finds are gold-an iron bed made from King George's own stock tucked sagglinly into a corner. Some finds are embarrassing reminders to when we had no taste-a 1960's avocado-colored sink that mocks the white sinks around it.

We love these places. Angus loves them as it makes his finges itch to buy a home and tear out the kitchen, the bathroom, the lounge. To buy old items from reclamation yards and put them in a home as a tribute to the past, a reminder. To take back history, when items were made with care and by hand, and put it back into the forefront.

As for me, I too want a house. I too want a kitchen I can rip out (for I love to rip out household fixtures. Give me the crowbar and stand back, for I will be ripping away my problems and banging out my issues as I tear the timber out.) I want an enormous claw-foot tub and a 1920's style bathroom (they had such style, the 20's. Such style.) I too want to bring the old back into the home and prove that once we were capable of great ideas, we will be capable of them again.

I think about the ghosts in the reclamation yard. I wonder if the stained glass windows that are stacked in a row have images of their former owners-Gibson girls with thick dark hair and little boys in sailor suits. Are there fingerprints on the outside of the hand-hewn bricks? Are there imprints of baby's first steps on the floorboards that lay awaiting more baby feet?

I wonder if the fireplace remembers what it was like to have stockings hung up on it and little children's faces peering up inside, looking up, wondering about Father Christmas. The garden decorations with their stamps of King George or Queen Victoria once lined a garden wall with pride are now sat, stained with rain and lichen, wandering lost around a reclamation yard. And a large stone, engraved with the words "This is the boundary of the Property of Mr. E Jeffries, 1862". The stone outlived its owner, and now must feel so lost without him. It has nothing to protect anymore.

We drive to Guildford to buy a few things for our home, and over a Pizza Express lunch we draw up paper napkin dreams of what we want in a home. We discuss where we can find and draw in every possible penny we own to put as a down payment, his fingers itching itching to build in a house and my fingers curling, curling over a tennis ball to throw to a dog. We want the same things-an old house that needs work. We want to do the work ourselves, to shape and stretch our back muscles and rub the callouses of our hands as we survey the work we're doing, hands around each others' waists. We want to fill our new old house with reclaimed pieces, authentic pieces that need work cleaning up before taking up a space as a constant homage to what life has seen before.

I want a large water tank and a bathtub, a shower head the size of a dinner plate. He wants to be able to re-do a kitchen, and as he is the one with better visions out of the two of us, I want to try to envision it with him. I want a dog and a garden with lilacs and roses. He wants an en suite. We want an island in the kitchen and an Aga wouldn't be amiss. And together, we both agree that if it's important to the other person, we will try make it happen.

After our motoring Saturday we motor home, Spandau Ballet replaced with 80's anthems, songs you have to sing to, songs you have to like. We stop at Sainsbury's to buy food for dinner and I laughingly point out the shopping carts in the ditch by the side of the road-they are making their break for freedom, and I hope they make it.

At home Angus goes online and starts searching for houses, while I do laundry and play tidy up the nursery. He finds a few just within our price range and we start making notes to get ready, to know what's out there. We are not moving yet-we have his house to sell and we are under a lease on the one we are in. It will be a while.

But we know we will be moving-you can only stop itching fingers and dreams of a loping dog for so long.

I tell him I saw a commercial that had a guinea pig in it, a wibbling bit of fluff whose squiggling giggling sounds made me laugh, too. I tell him I want one. He tells me no, that guinea pigs are for children. I tell him I am a child, a child who wants a guinea pig. He tells me to wait until we have children and then I can pretend their guinea pig is mine. I thread my fingers through his. Maggie comes and sits on his lap, a first, a tribute, a tiny act of self-serving love.

We are a family.

My itchy-fingered man and I sit down and watch tv in the glow of candles and chardonnay, and when I sleep I have Kafka dreams. The ghosts in the house gently nudge my shoulders and whisper me awake. They guide me to the toilet to splash some water on my face and pet my hair as I rub the awfulness out of my eyes. Then the ghosts guide me back to bed and tuck me in, whispering that its just a dream.

I want to take these ghosts with me, when I go.

I want them to meet the next ghosts I will have in a fireplace, a windowpane, an old countertop. I think they could be friends. I want to take care of them, and make sure they never have to wander around a reclamation yard, wondering if they can be loved.

Because I am loved I will love them too.

H.