Harry Writes

New Ownership

It was when we stepped through the gates that the world changed. Into the grounds of the manor where no influence from outside could enter. The iron gates, with lettering in peeling gold paint which proclaimed the house’s most recent occupation as a school, were a buffer to everything beyond. Even passing cars, from which my friends and I hid, ducking low behind the drystone wall, cruised past with barely a whisper. The trickle of the stream receded and birds ceased their song in reverence of the adventure we embarked upon.
The long driveway followed the contour of the hill in a sweeping arc. The hedges on both sides were unkempt, almost meeting in the middle the closer we got to the house. It arrived in view from behind the brambles and we snatched our first look at the old stone features, all the anticipation washing over me in a wave of boyish euphoria. An imposing turret at the corner of the building; bay windows, still miraculously glazed, reflecting the sun; a complex roof of dormers, gullies, ridges and spires; an empty archway bridging the gap across the driveway to a lone stone pillar; and beyond this threshold, a mysterious other world left to wild and decay.
The house was surrounded by what might once have been pristinely manicured grounds, within which nestled a broad lake. In the years that had passed since the school's closure, the pasture had grown less tame and the lake had relaxed into a stagnant pool covered in brown-green algae. A wild island in its middle offered a promise of adventure. A few times we crossed the wooden bridge, until a board cracked beneath our feet and tumbled into the water below. In the little window the timber created on the water's surface, we could see fish swimming inquisitively towards the disturbance. We gave up our exploration of the island after that for fear of trapping ourselves there like young rural castaways, and refocused our attention on the house itself. It watched us play in its untamed grounds with a mysterious pride. It dared us to venture into its halls.
The more often we visited the manor, the more intimately we knew it and the less daunting it became. It invited us to view the extent of the aging behind its mask. It had been empty and uncared for since before I was born and beneath its facade of grandeur, it sagged wearily. Time had stripped away austerity and left fatigue. The roof had developed a droop. The grey mortar crumbled into dust from between the large stones, creating pits and troughs on its face like wrinkles in which the shadows clung.
We set foot through the large oak door, its chain slack enough to allow an opening for a small boy, and made our base of operations in the high entrance foyer. A staircase swept up to the first floor. Playing in the wan light from a misted skylight, we imagined ourselves as regal kings, descending the stairs to a waiting crowd of adoring guests. The majesty of the house so surpassed the fields in which we normally played, with sticks for swords and fallen trees for pirate ships.
The kitchen became an abandoned spaceship, all chrome fixtures and stainless steel surfaces. The few remaining utensils hanging at an industrial cooker became futuristic tools. We played in there until the illusion was shattered by a dead rat and her brood, discovered under a bench. In the pantry we found abandoned electric items from a decade past and laughed about our archaeological finds. We toyed with toasters and tried to experiment with microwaves but could find no working power.
We found our way into an overgrown car park and up moss-laden concrete steps into the old workshop. The wind blew through the broken windows and created drifts of leaves mingled with old saw dust. A friend of my father's had shown me pictures from his time teaching carpentry here and I recognised the bench with its heavy record vice. We took the remaining hand planes and broken tools back to our den in the foyer, creating a hoard along with the dormant microwaves and ladles and shards of decorated tile.
The house spoke to us in strange ways. Every creak was the dying sigh of an old and weary soul. Each unexplainable crack or knock or clunk was a plea for help, the relaxing timbers and sagging plaster struggling against the house's fate. And with our games we rejuvenated it. We gave new life to the house, as it collapsed slowly around us. In response to its death rattle, we gave it a joyful song.
The more time we spent inside the manor, the more it became a home, a safe refuge from the petty worries of our young minds. Its shouts became softer, its utterances more kindly. Even the ghosts we imagined no longer set us on edge. The old manor with its creaks and cracks and crumbling walls became comfortable and familiar. It became ours. In our inexperience, we could not have comprehended that the house belonged to anyone. It was abandoned and therefore ours for the taking - finders, keepers.

After a few visits, my younger brother grew curious about what we were doing. Eventually, we allowed him to come with us, on the proviso that he not tell our mother of our adventures. He trailed a few steps behind us, uncertainty and trepidation on his face, and watched from the gravel drive as we entered the house first. I stuck my head back through the doorway and called him to hurry up. Reluctantly, he worked his way under the chain and through the gap, his coat snagging on the door handle. Inside the house, he looked around, his face changing from timid concern.
"Wow."
I walked behind him and saw his small frame silhouetted against the bright summer sun in the tall windows on the ground floor. His head tilted back to look up to the decorated ceiling. He stood for a while, gazing around the space and then looked back and smiled at me like I had just given him the greatest gift he had ever received. As we shared our new domain with him, each room garnered the same reaction, his wonder renewing our own sense of excitement at our secret world.
We showed him our collections with great joy, the shiny metal objects with their patina of rust. He handled the old tools with a deft reverence, turning them in his hands and examining their forms. "Look at this." my brother said one morning, as he ran up to me clutching a tin soldier. Beads of dew clung to its stiff body. The paint had faded after too long outdoors.
"Where did you find it?" I asked him.
"Back there."
He used the soldier to point the way to a courtyard which was grown into jungle. He projected his own imagination onto the space and soon we were explorers in South America on the hunt for undiscovered species. The tin soldier became his mascot and he placed it inside the front door to be collected again on every visit.
The house became as much home for my brother as it had done for me and my friends. The house was his as it was ours. When we weren't at the manor, he longed to be there and each day he'd sidle alongside me as we walked away from the school bus.
"Can we go to the house tonight?" he'd ask. And I'd grin back at him and suggest a new game for us all to play, or an area of the house which I was convinced we hadn't explored for secret rooms.

By the time the summer holidays arrived, we had explored most of the house and the grounds. With the longer evenings, and a more generous curfew, we wiled away hours at the manor. We had created quite a den in the entrance foyer, complete with a throne on which we took turns to sit as the group’s elected leader. My brother was never given a turn, however. After pleading us to allow him on the throne during one very hot day in August, he turned to a tantrum and stormed off through the ground floor, shouting and kicking up debris as he went.
With his clattering and stomping, the loud crash which sailed back to us didn't seem serious at first. But when the noise stopped, replaced with silence - not even a creak as the house warmed in the sun - we grew concerned. We arrived in the room to hear his voice, weak and short of breath.
"Help."
The floor had collapsed. Old timbers cracked inwards where the joists had rotted, creating a huge hole in the middle of the oak boards. Clamouring around it, we saw my brother lying in a dusty heap between the loose timbers, tears on his cheeks. We leaned in and pulled him out of a dark void about six feet deep. It spanned under the entire room and though I didn't voice it in the midst of my brother's anguish, I confess an excitement at the prospect of a hidden space to explore and the chance of finding some secreted treasure. That is until I saw the body.
As we lifted my brother up by his armpits, the excitement drained from me. I saw where he had been lying was a skeletal corpse. A ghastly face with sunken features stared up at me. Pale bone mingled with soil and splintered wood. Fingers like needles clutched tight at thin air. Ragged cloth sagged on a gaunt frame. Many of the bones had shattered where heavy joists had landed.
I fell back onto the oak floor. The room which had been our playground was unveiled. I sat within a tomb.
The others witnessed the horror in my face first, and then looking into the hole, experienced it for themselves. Panicked, we all ran out of the house and onto the gravel drive. We were bathed in warm sunlight which seemed so uncanny.
My brother's injuries were forgotten, his tears were stemmed. We paced around in stunned quiet, looking at each other, chewing our lips. In that moment, our reverie was destroyed. Our ownership of a space of daring adventure, of fun and storytelling, had slipped away. Now the house was owned by the body beneath the floor.
The aging walls no longer called to us to revive them with our boyish games, but hissed at us to leave. The cracking plaster was cold, the windows were dulled and the grand frontage became austere once more. The most distressing thing was that the body had been there all along. Through our summer of games, of laughter, of fun and mischief, an other worldly creature lay inches beneath us. A remnant beneath the floor of something so brutal, so incongruous with what we had built.
As the gravity of the find weighed heavier on us, the tethering of our childhood grew looser and our naivety fluttered away on the breeze.
We didn't return to the house again that week, the rest of the summer, nor ever again. We did not wish to view the ugly sight or set foot in a building which now seemed so alien and unwelcoming. We could not be reminded of the apparition which had stripped away our innocence and left us without the armour against the world which childhood affords. There was something unspoken between us boys. An understanding that we were not prepared for the fallout of this truth.

My brother gave in and told our mother. Still too wrapped in the throes of youth to bear the burden on his slender shoulders. His worry and doubt grew too much to stand and he offloaded to the only safe person he had ever known. In the moment when his world was beginning to shake, he found solidity in my mother's wisdom, rather than in my dubious leadership.
We were told off, of course, and did our best to hold onto the truth about the extent of what we had been doing in the house. She sighed and stopped herself from swearing, and chose not to ask questions she didn't want to know the answer to. But the presence of the body soon overrode her other concerns and she called the police.
We sat, my brother and I, in the middle of the kitchen, in front of a policeman from the local station as we told our story. His cap rested on his leg, the tea our mother had made for him steamed on the kitchen table and he watched us with an intense gaze which required us to speak. An uncomfortable position, on display for this man we had never met, feeling as though our thoughts were bared to him. Each of us unable to meet his eyes, overwhelmed with a sense of guilt. I told the policeman of the hours we had played in the old house and of our discovery beneath the floor. It was clear to him that we had nothing to do with the body, but I could not help feeling that our exploration made us complicit in a crime committed before our births.
The manor was boarded up, steel fencing erected around it. The sudden increased press from our discovery, which made the national newspapers, heralding the cold case brilliantly solved, had alerted a buyer for the old building. They saw potential for retirement flats in its grandeur and idyllic setting.
With the renovations over the proceeding months, something else of my childhood was deconstructed; my innocence further chipped away as the building which contained my formative memories was so drastically changed. Even now, years later, with the veil of adulthood clouding my memory, the house haunts me when I see it, with its pristine render and reformed roof line. I know that beneath the floor, where once a body lay undiscovered, is buried a piece of me, no longer mine. A small piece of a person I will never be again.