They’ve taken down the fireplace!

They’ve taken DOWN the fireplace!

It had been a quarried stone fireplace although fireplace doesn’t do it justice as a description.  It was made of rectangular quarried stone blocks about half a foot wide and a quarter of a foot high and deep.  The front surface was chiselled, making each stone look like a section cut out of a sand-coloured ocean.

We’d built round the chimney breast wall with these blocks; they opened into an arch with an open grate in the centre.  A small shelf to either side was tiled with sea-green and dark grey slate, from the same quarry I think.

Quarried stone wasn’t even the half of it though.  It had taken dad over an hour’s hammering to get a roof joist in to bear the weight. Any items we could find had gone into keeping the archway suspended. The slates had been hand split.

As I looked through the window of our old house all of these memories became just that.  The house was definitely not ours anymore.  That fireplace had contained a part of everyone. The frame of the pram 2 of my younger sisters had been wheeled in as babies, an old door, bits of scaffolding, pieces of wood and board.

I had had a favourite stone.  I used to lie on my back and put my feet up against the wall and the stone they reached was just the right shape to slot my heels into.  I could feel the flame-warmed granite cupping my heels right now looking in, but I couldn’t see it.

What made it worse was they had removed the entire chimney breast wall.  They’d put in a small wood burning stove with a black metal pipe running out of the back into the ceiling.  There was now a blank, naked wall where there should have been solid, earthy stone. Home.

And yet so many other things were still the same, the curtains, the parquet flooring, the kitchen units, both outside doors...  But how small it all was.  I’m sure it was bigger when we were all living here.  It must have been or how could the seven of us have fitted? Were we all strangely shrunken?

It was hard for me to see it like this because the family were still living here when I left. I came back from a year abroad and my home was no longer mine. My family were on the other side of the world.

Looking furtively through the window at 1am like a peeping Tom was strangely liberating and very moving.  Especially because my younger sister was seeing it for the 1st time since they’d emigrated. It was the 1^st time she’d been back.

She was only 2 when we built the fireplace. We have a photo of her sitting amongst the building project, covered in beige dust, bashing a stone as big as her with a trowel. She liked to stand under the archway in silly poses whilst we took pictures, until she got too tall to fit under it. She grew up with, had never known the house without it.

So all either of us could say for almost 5 minutes, gripping each other’s arms, was ‘they’ve taken down the fireplace!’