Houses are not identified merely by erf numbers, street addresses, architectural features and market values. More particularly, the identity of a house is shaped by the memories it houses.
Houses are not identified merely by erf numbers, street addresses, architectural features and market values. More particularly, the identity of a house is shaped by the memories it houses.
In the first chapter of In the Dark Room (2005), Brian Dillon reflects on the notion of a house as a repository of memory – whether in the form of things and events associated with particular spaces, moments recalled as still life scenes, hauntings from either its own or its occupants’ pasts, or in the archaeological sense of bits of personal history embedded in the architectural bones and layers of the building.
An example of the latter Dillon mentions is a small square aperture above the door of his childhood bedroom through which light from other rooms shone at night in the shape of a blunted cone on the ceiling until the last lights were dimmed when his parents went to bed. But when one night his mother was rushed to hospital, the cone of light remained on the ceiling till morning.
To wake in the night and find that the light from the opening above my bedroom door was once again stretched across the ceiling was in later years my greatest nocturnal fear. …(I)t signalled a danger … an emergency.
His curiosity about this gap, where exactly it led and why, also recalls his own growth: for by the time his legs were long enough to straddle the door frame so that he could climb up to investigate, his head was too big to go through the gap.
Such memories attach to all houses, unique to each.
Imagine the house, and you picture a passage from empty space to tangible things. So, too, each room is a separate passage into the past.
On stress scales, moving house is indicated as on a par with events such as bereavement or divorce. There is, of course, something of both about moving house: a sense of loss in physically separating from part of not only one’s life history, but one’s identity. For a house becomes as much part of those who live in it as they are of it. One therefore never fully leaves a house when one moves. In the house of our memory, we’re always present … .
The memories associated with houses make them sacred spaces for those who’ve lived in them.
Houses also become monuments to those who’ve moved on. In small towns like Grahamstown, one’s address is often referred to not by its street number but by the name of a prominent previous owner. The longevity of this is humorously illustrated by George and Dorothy Randell in We All Lived There (1977), their book about The Retreat on the corner of Prince Alfred and Somerset Streets.
On asking the elderly owner of a local shop to charge their purchase to their account, he recalled their address as the same address as Mrs Streatfeild. There had, however, been seven owners of the house between the time Mrs Streatfeild lived there and the Randells’ purchase of it 30 years later. And since then they themselves had already lived there for around a decade!
Imagine the house, and you picture a passage from empty space to tangible things
