1978 The New House Part Two

Those huge wooden stairs led up to my least favourite place in the house. I always had a bad feeling about the top landing, and since then my sister has also admitted she didn't like it much. To the left of the landing led down to 'The Flat'. There was a dorm just before it but it wasn't used much. The Flat was a self contained area with a bedroom and it's own bathroom. When my father first started his job at the school the rest of the family were still living in Kent. Funnily enough, while he was looking for a house he spent 6 months living in The Flat.

The Flat was where our guests used to stay. It was also were my mother slept with my sister many years later, when, whilst working on a farm in Wales for her gap year from an Agricultural college, she witnessed a friend and colleague go under the wheels of a tractor right next to where she was stood. My sister was only about 19/20 at the time, and as you can imagine, suffered with terrible nightmares for a long time afterwards.

Heading in the other direction from the eerie landing brought you to another favourite place; the airing cupboard. This airing cupboard wasn't just any airing cupboard, it was the king of airing cupboards! It was where all the bedding etc for the dorms was kept and it was, again, HUGE! It was a small room and you could walk right into it. It had a large tank against the far wall and lots of shelves from floor to ceiling all around the walls. You can imagine how, as a child on a chilly day, this made one hell of a den. We weren't meant to go in there, and most times we were never caught but we would get busted by the cleaning ladies every now and then.

Most of the upstairs of the house was taken up by more dorms and washrooms, but up a couple of little steps and round a corner was our private accommodation. We had three bedrooms and a bathroom all lined up down a corridor. I shared a bedroom with my sister. It was a lovely big room, but my sister and I clashed pretty badly. Being five years older than me she wasn't really interested in me, and I just wanted what she had.

Thinking back, I just don't know how my mother ever coped with us kids in that massive house. Ok our actual private accomodation was no bigger than your average three bed semi, but it was so spread out! And then there were the extras like the airing cupboard and cellar to hide in. The bedrooms being so far from everything, for example, I know I rarely went to sleep on time. The door at the end of our private passage was quite noisy, so I always knew when someone was coming. I used to sit at my door reading by the light in the corridor ready to jump back into bed at the first creak of that door.

One of the things I remember most about this house was the fire alarms. It was an old system with very noisy old bells. When I was small I hated passing the alarm bells and frequently covered my ears and ran passed them. The smoke detectors were beams of light that would trigger the alarm when they were broken, in theory by smoke. Living in a big old house brings one common denominator, spiders. I'm sure every now and then they would get together and discuss setting of the alarms. We used to go through patches when they seemed to go off on regular basis, and more often than not it seemed to be at night.

Because the house was a boarding house my father had to call the fire brigade every time the alarm went off, whether there was a fire or not. We never actually had a fire, thankfully, but the fire brigade was called many a time over the 13 years or so we lived in that house! Sometimes ambulances and police cars would get dispatched too, filling up the street outside the house. As I got older I used to enjoy the fire alarms. It meant I got to go and stand outside with all the boys in their pyjamas! And I'm sure that's where my 'thing' about firemen came from.