Our house…

…well, I say “our house”. It’s five hundred years old and it’s been “our house” for eighteen years so it’s not really our house at all – although it very much feels like ours. We love it. It’s looked after us, sheltered us, kept us safe and worked with us for eighteen years. We’ve done our best to care for it, respect it and keep it safe. Kind of a symbiotic relationship.

Our house is old. Very old. So old that the walls have too much history to contain – there are spirits in our house. When I took over as Manager my predecessor told me about the time that a child of about one, maybe one and a half years old, was standing at the top of the steep stairs, just about to teeter forwards and fall straight down when he was visibly yanked backwards. Not the kind of voluntary checking you’d get with an ‘oops, I shouldn’t be doing this’ realisation at any age but an obvious yank – although who or what did the yanking remained unseen.

While I’ve been working in our house we’ve had a Filipina woman in who took it for granted that we knew there were spirits there. We always played it down because it spooked the women to think that there may be “ghosts” amongst them. After all, they had enough ghosts of their own. But this woman was from a culture where ancestors are revered, not feared, and she felt the spirit presence as benign – which they were. Other women showed us the ghostly shadows in the group shot pictures they’d taken with their phones and said, horrified, “This place is fucking haunted!” We denied it but we knew that. We, the staff, were very familiar with our unseen residents who have looked after us, all of us, during our time with them.

When the office ceiling collapsed, directly above the computer, it did so at the weekend when no-one would be sitting beneath the cascade of debris. Even the fabric of the building has cared for us.

In the last eighteen years upwards of seven hundred and fifty families have lived in our house. Some have taken great pride in keeping it pristine – clean, sweet smelling, tidy and cared for. Others have neglected and abused it, taken it for granted. Some have broken the rules and been downright abusive but the building didn’t reject them – I did.

That building.

It’s been the place where so many women learned to laugh again. Where so many deep and lasting friendships were made that wouldn’t have stood a chance in any other circumstances. Where so many women ‘found’ themselves again after years of systematic abuse. Where patriarchal cruelty was named and shamed for exactly what it does to people. Where so many children got their first good night’s sleep ever.

Personally, I just love the building for what it is. Did you know that, when they were erecting buildings in this country five hundred years ago, they used timber from sailing ships that were no use anymore? So all our beams have these fuck off bolts in them or huge notches carved out of them that obviously served some purpose in boat-building. I look at them and I wonder just how old is that wood and where in the world it’s been.

I’m an outsider though. I just work there. For upwards of seven hundred and fifty families in the last eighteen years this building has been ‘home’. There are so many stories I could tell you – successes and failures – about the work that’s been done in that place but if we’re talking about the building I remember one family in particular.

They weren’t from this area. They had family fairly close by but they knew nothing of this area. When they first arrived the woman – let’s call her Christine – had tears pouring down her cheeks the whole time. She wasn’t actively crying; she was just in tears all the time. She would knock on the office door but would never come in. She’d open the door and then stand half in, half out – ready to run. Post, for her, was something to be dreaded. Always bad news, always a challenge, always someone saying “I don’t believe you”.

Christine and her children stayed in what was my favourite room. It had a timber arch in the ceiling for no apparent reason, a set of bunks and a single bed, a wash basin and a built-in wardrobe. It had small, leaded windows and looked out onto the back garden. Of course they had use of the shared facilities – the kitchen, the sitting room, the laundry, the playroom – the same as every other family but for them, this was truly ‘home’. This was the first place in her entire life that Christine was acknowledged as in control of her own self. She found it very scary but she loved her room and she loved the house.

When the time came for her to leave she didn’t want to – nor did her children. They’d only been with us three and a half months but we were their first real ‘home’ and they didn’t want to go. When they went past the building, as they frequently did on their proper way home from visiting family, they talked about getting off the train and going ‘home’ to the refuge, to ‘their’ room instead for months after moving out.

Christine is a qualified youth worker now. Her daughter did a parachute jump for charity this year. It’s been tough for all of them but they’ve made it – thanks, partially, to the building that was kind to them, helped them feel safe, helped them be safe, helped them start their recovery.

I feel very, very sad about leaving it. I feel kind of responsible for its future somehow although I know I’m actually not. We’ve moved on to a purpose built, state of the art refuge and I was consulted every step of the way so there’s a lot of ‘me’ in the new house which is going to be much easier to manage than the rabbit warren that was the old house. It’s going to be a more pleasant place to live (all rooms en suite – no shared bathrooms, etc.) but, at the same time, I know and understand just how much the old house looked after us all, cared for us all and facilitated the recovery of so many women and children.

I have so many memories of that place. Like the time I found a human poo on a plate in a wardrobe when I was clearing out a room…. like the time I shouted back at a woman who was endangering the entire project… like the time two year old Luke said “I love you”… like the time the woman who arrived with no recourse was allocated housing… There’s more – much more – but they’re my memories and they’re woven together with the fabric of that house.

I just hope the world is kind to it.