It took a while to get a reasonable feel for the place, but the way in was to assemble a plan of the house in my mind. It might have been quicker to use pencil and paper, but maybe not so effective. My knowledge of the house, layout of staircase and how many bedrooms sort of knowledge plus elementary geometry meant that I was able to assemble a quite detailed plan, including the position of the built in cupboards – most of the rooms had them, made on site in the fifties, rather than bought in from the likes of Magnet – and the position of the windows. The windows were a mixture of two and three panes wide, and memory has not yet recovered the layout of the asymmetrical two paners, one of which is visible top right in the illustration.
The weakest link was the coal shed at the back of the garage, to the left of the house as you face it from the road. Was there a coal shed and a tool shed or just a coal shed which doubled as a tool shed? From where I now associate to the slightly older police houses round the corner which came with a laundry room, complete with coal fired tub, in the corresponding position.
But I can place all the shelving, some of which came with the house and some of which was added by my father in the form of elm boards – which bent in the course of their seasoning over the years. Good hard wood once seasoned.
And as both the SenseCam people and Fernyhough suggest, getting the plan right, getting the space right started to trigger all kinds of memories of my life in the house. Odd how memories of space trigger all kinds of memories of other things, presumably keyed in some obscure way to the space. So far memories from childhood, say from the first five of the ten years, rather than from later – with a very early one popping into mind as I type, a memory of our visiting the house when the deck was in place but when the brickwork only reached about six feet up. Ground floor door frames in place, but no rafters. For me a very early memory, from maybe my fifth year. A memory which might mostly be a rebuild from a family snap, but even then an old memory, as I don’t think that I could have seen such a snap for a very long time.
And it is clear that there is lots of dormant memory knocking around the brain box. I clearly have lots of memories associated with or keyed to this house – memories which are normally unavailable. But if I work on the house, some of them come back to consciousness – without needing any help from the family photograph album. Fernyhough reports that this is more or less what Proust was up to in his famous madeleine moment.
I suspect that all this is only going to work with a place that I knew for a long time, long enough for the detailed plan to be accessible now. It would probably work for cycle routes that I used for a longish period, say the one from Wood Green to Aldwych. But probably not for holiday homes that we used for a couple of weeks and then never went back to. Perhaps I will give it a try with a holiday home which we used in five of six recent years on the Isle of Wight and see what, if anything, that turns up.
I dare say I could buy a SenseCam or a commercial successor for not very much at all, but I think I shall desist. Quite enough to read about other people playing with such things, without my playing myself – but you never know; maybe one fine day such a thing will catch my eye in Maplin’s.
PS: streetview not that much help on this occasion, with its view of the house largely obscured by the two nut trees flanking the drive. But at least they look as if they were the nut trees planted there by my father, presumably regularly cut back, while the hedge has been changed and the window top right has been rather badly spliced. But the window does look to have modern double glazing, rather than the fifties galvanised Crittall with which the house was built – and which we left it with.
Reference 1: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/sensecam/.
Reference 2: http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/.
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