SEVEN MEMORIES

1 - Number Thirty Two

I used to live at Number Thirty Two, Whitehall Road. It was my grandparents' house, and was joined to their two small shops. One sold sweets and tobacco and that was where my mother worked; one sold fishing tackle and that was where my grandad spent most of his time tinkering with rods and reels. My parents and I lived in a two roomed flat above the shops but I spent a lot of time down there in Number Thirty Two, and I still dream about it. Sometimes it is warm and full of heavy furniture and the scent of baking, just as it was then. But sometimes it is empty and distressing. And sometimes in the dream it is more than derelict. It is an ancient house, richly ornamented, the stones older than I ever remembered, tunnelling deep under the bedrock of the city, and those are the strangest dreams of all. Number Thirty Two was older than any of us realised. Many years later, I bought a facsimile map of the city of Leeds in the seventeen hundreds, and there was my grandparents' house, surrounded by open fields. So it must have been a house with a name, not a number, in those days. It had probably been a farmhouse before the city choked it . When I think about it, that tall thin house, the shops, the flat, a bunch of old stone outbuildings and a yard at the back where no grass grew must have been one whole farmhouse. It is only in my memory that they are quite separate entities. Petty's Printers had engulfed it. Factories whined and trains rattled all around it. The air was grimy and stank of rotten eggs. Only the rural names remained:- Whitehall, Springwell, Holbeck.

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