[00:01.63]A Beautiful Memory
[00:03.44]Er...the loveliest house that I've ever lived in was one
[00:09.06]that I lived in with my grandparents when I was a child.
[00:11.90]And the name of the house was Crosslands.
[00:15.01]And I have some very happy memories of Crosslands.
[00:18.43]It was, it seemed, so huge to me as a child.
[00:22.32]And it had a lovely living room with a piano in it
[00:26.27]and a lovely sort of hall with lots of carpets
[00:30.02]and chests and antiques and so on. And there was a mysterious room,
[00:34.08]it was the drawing room, and we only used it on Sundays,
[00:37.56]or when the vicar came for tea,
[00:39.88]or Christmas Day or Easter Day,
[00:42.07]and I was used to be amazed about this room
[00:44.96]because it had the best furniture in it
[00:47.23]but it was covered up with sheets-
[00:49.90]it was as if all the furniture was wearing clothes-
[00:53.08]and it seemed to me ridiculous
[00:55.74]that we couldn't enjoy this beautiful furniture
[00:57.78]all the week through really.
[01:00.07]And probably my favorite room was the kitchen.
[01:03.22]It had a lovely red flagstone floor,
[01:06.35]which was always highly polished, and an Aga,
[01:10.40]you know, one of those big cookers
[01:12.89]that heats the whole room so it was always warm there,
[01:16.25]and there was a kind of clothes horse above it
[01:18.67]that we used to hang all our clothes on,
[01:20.92]and it was just lovely. It was a very warm room
[01:24.46]with baked bread and my grandmother used to make ice cream
[01:27.97]and we'd eat it in there and...
[01:29.72]there was a vegetable garden leading from there
[01:32.28]so I spent a lot of time in the vegetable garden
[01:35.28]picking peas and eating them—my grandmother used to
[01:39.78]get really cross with me because I used to
[01:41.70]pick all the vegetables and the fruit for our meals
[01:44.22]and then I'd eat half of them,
[01:45.98]because they tasted so delicious coming fresh from the garden.
[01:49.52]Now, I went back to it a few years ago and it was a big mistake.
[01:54.62]They've modernized it inside,
[01:57.09]they've got rid of those lovely old fire-places...
[01:59.86]have just gone. And they've knocked a wall down
[02:03.45]so the drawing room and the living room have
[02:06.38]become one big modern plastic kind of room.
[02:08.53]But I think what upset me most about it was the feeling
[02:12.71]that the house had shrunk,
[02:14.31]it had become smaller and that my memory of
[02:17.72]this lovely large warm comfortable house
[02:20.75]had turned into an old house with modernized rooms inside it.
[02:24.89]And it taught me a lesson really,
[02:27.24]that you can't go back on the past and recapture it.
[02:30.55]But there's a beautiful memory there. |