Red-brick terraced houses in the westering sun...
The bricks absorb the sunshine and reflect it back with a warmth that makes me grateful for all the years I've lived in the beautiful territory we call England.
Terraced houses. They speak of home for me, and security, and belonging.
I've been thinking about this a lot recently while standing at the kitchen window in the house that Posh Boots is renovating in Liscard in the centre of the venerable old borough of Wallasey.
The window looks down on the backs of two traditional terraces, complete with their communal cobbled alley, chimney pots and back yards.
Cats restlessly patrol the red-brick walls of the yards ... like homesick Roman legionaries on the ramparts of Chester two millennia ago.
The built environment rarely has the power to move me in a spiritual way, to the point of tears, but this certainly does.
This is, after all, just kind of setting that gave me - and millions of other (mainly) working class northern English people - all the space and security we needed through the decades of industrial expansion and decline.
It was the bedrock of our cultural identity.
But it could be argued that our red-brick rows of houses, our backstreets of the heart, also acted as brakes on our imagination and kept our ambitions in check.
To escape from the backstreets was considered an audacious and even snobby desire.
A recent storyline in Coronation Street touched on this ... when Ken Barlow made a bonfire of his vanity (represented by the novel he'd written years ago) in the backyard of his home.
Ken then shared a "Deirdre" (a large glass of red wine) with his wife while sitting with her against the red-brick wall of the yard. Then, slowly, philosophically, he reconciled himself to his lot; including his thwarted ambition to leave the backstreets behind.
Culturally, psychologically, spiritually, some of us are simply not destined to leave the backstreets.
Of course, the days when each terraced house was beautifully kept - the steps whitened with donkey-stone and the windows kept sparkling, by proud matriarchs - have long gone...along with most of neighbourliness we once took for granted.
These days, the terraced house might be occupied by the new poor: students, or the long-term jobless on benefits, or single mums who leave the house only to trot to the local Bargain Booze in their pyjamas when they rise from their slumbers at the crack of noon.
But still, I think there is a lingering affection for the terraced house, and certainly in the part of Wallasey I referred to above.
Some of the back yards have had their walls painted in cream and other pastel colours. Pots of geraniums and roses are dotted around. I'm sure if bourganvilia could be grown in our bighted climate, it would be seen in the back yards of northern English towns, and very fine it would look there.
Because our terraced houses are most definitely beautiful if they are even moderately well maintained.
And the best thing is, they offer us a kind of beauty that can be found only in this country.
Now that's something we can really feel good about.
* I have a poem about growing up in the backstreets, in a terraced house. I plan to perform it at the next Bards of New Brighton meeting, in the back room of the Magazine pub, 7 Magazine Brow, New Brighton, on Monday 8 September, if you'd like to hear it. The meeting starts at 8pm. Admission is free.
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Malpoet wrote...
Sorry Steve. Won't be at Bards on the 8th. We will be in Crete. Be sad to miss you coming over all romantic about terraced houses, but sacrifices have to be made.
REGAN REPLIED: The Bards won't be quite the same without you and Mrs Malpoet. Enjoy Crete and your libertine pleasures.
Posted by: Malpoet | August 27, 2008 10:00 AM