Reflections
Copper Pipes
A memoir piece by Paul Marshall on a cold council house in 1960s Sussex, the death of the man who raised him and a family secret learned at fifty eight.
I had just had my evening bath. I could hear my mother in the bathroom next door, clearing up after my bathtime ritual. She had wrapped me in a towel and placed me on the floor of her bedroom in front of a heater. My immediate world smelt of baby powder and felt like love. I was sleepy and enjoying the warm air. It was 1968, so I was heading for my third birthday.
Central heating hadn't found its way into the house and it would be many years before it did. It was a cold house. There was a coal stove in the corner of the kitchen, with copper pipes that ran from the back up to the ceiling and disappeared through holes in the wall. This heated much of the house during the winter months. My mother would spend hours polishing those pipes. Those beautiful copper pipes. I still love the colour of copper to this day, and I have only just realised in writing this that they are the reason. Otherwise, it was Jack Frost on the windows of winter mornings.
The family home was a traditional one. A solid brick council house with three bedrooms, one of a pair, set in the middle of a well kept estate built in the early fifties. The estate stood on a gentle hill of what was once apple orchards, which gave way to the surrounding fields that melted into the fruit farms of the Kent and Sussex countryside. From the back of the house, below the sloping lawn, the view was a patchwork blanket of greens and fawns, stitched together with a labyrinth of hedgerows, old dirt tracks and ancient lanes, all of which met the horizon. So it has remained to this day. Timeless. I never appreciated that view.
Steps led down from the pavement to the front door, shared with our neighbours, who have long since passed. You entered through a large wooden door painted green, with a frosted glass panel and two concrete steps where the milkman left two pints every morning.
To the right was the lounge. The posh room. The room where we sat in the evenings and watched TV as a family. I can still recall the various wallpapers and carpets over the decades. It was also the room where my dad, the man I grew up being told was my dad, passed away, still holding the TV remote by all accounts, while watching a documentary about steeplejacks. My brother took the call from my mother, who told him she thought Dad was dead. My brother called the ambulance. She was correct, and that is where he finished his days.
I remember visiting him in the funeral parlour. My mother took out a tiny pair of scissors, cut a lock of his hair and put it in her handbag. She stroked his cold forehead for a few minutes, smiling at him. He always wore an ironed shirt and tie, and even that day he didn't disappoint. I stood sombre and silent, not feeling much of anything. Waiting for the grief to kick in. I was sad, but the grief never arrived. The funeral came and went. We made a few speeches and met a few relatives I could not recall, and my life returned to normal in London.
I still visit my mother in that house, though now I live overseas the visits are fewer. It has never been a place I have enjoyed going back to. Too many ghosts.
Back to the house. The hallway took you past the coats, hats and scarves, and the cupboard under the stairs that smelt of rubber boots, into the kitchen. Basic cupboards, an electric stove with three rings, and a permanent saucepan on top with a lid, in which my mother boiled my father's handkerchiefs. Next to the kitchen was the back room, the dining room, where we ate, usually as a family. The house smelt of my father's tobacco.
I call him my father for ease of storytelling. As it turned out, and as I would learn at the ripe old age of fifty eight, he was not my father at all. I had long suspected it, with no reason other than an inherent feeling of being a cuckoo in what was never meant to be my nest.
