WßD ~ Chapter 27 : Upon Departing Pittville Mount Park for the Last Time (Revised Edition)

Windsor Street Days

Chapter 27

Upon Departing Pittville Mount Park for the Last Time

WE ARRIVED on Friday, October 6, 1967. We departed on Monday, January 27, 2017 as the keys turned twice one final time.

I turned and surveyed the scene at which I had gasped fifty years earlier.

The smoothness of the engine eased my mind. I will away.

*

I pondered, as the last week-end approached. How strange. The ships are in mothballs. The paintings wrapt. The spirit of this house has departed. There is an emptiness. Curiously, I do not mind though. It is a good thing!

I walk away and turn my back on half a century. Oft times I wish I had not been party to them.

I drop the keys at the agents in the very office I had trained in law in 1982, three, four, five, six and 1987. Pleasant days, pleasant memories. Well, pleasant-ssh! Nothing to do with the people and friends I worked with. Rather, the period. We thought we knew it all. Christians and Muslims and uncle-tom-cobley-n-all, all thought they knew a deity’s will, while a load more argued, and still argue, we are just happen-chance.

Oh would I love to sit down and have a chat with the first chap or lass who decided that it was to time to codify that which some being floating about in the sky had whispered only to that single ear.

Some good, some bad, but when good and bad is mixed, downright evil follows and seeps across the floor like deep red blood from the deepest wound. The result? Many innocents suffer.

*

The past belongs to the past. The future is yet to arrive, and there is no certainty on future's dalliance. She is a curious creature; one who delights to outwit, to trip up, to lead down the garden path; to seduce.

The Present is here. She comes in many forms and phases. But allow the Present to see your heart's desires and Presence will somehow work with Present, and between them contrive a life worth living, an ambition accomplished, and eventually, peace restored.

Darkness comes with the night, but there is joy in the morning.

*

Live for today!

Delight that this wonderful house and home will in due time become an equally wonderful home to the family about to enter.

The Piano has fallen silent. The lid, unusually, closed.

An act of finality in a room, once drawing room, then lounge, then piano room. Warm summer evenings, too warm down stairs, but upstairs the windows opened end to end in this beautiful home, brings a light summer evening breeze. Cocktails, later coffee and relaxation. A pleasant walk along the corridor, admiring paintings, the treadle sewing machine, and ‘the picture window.’ Hark. Was that Mum in her heyday? Striding, fast pace the full length of the house, low heels, slightly raised, a compromise with earlier days of high heels and ankle straps - Are my lines straight, Ken? You must tell me if you see a ladder, there’s a good boy! - checking that all is in order, swinging the french doors open, drawing the curtains, then silently pulling them closed, walking back, running her hand on the treadle, pausing at the window, surveying parkland, an eye out for Dad walking back across, with any number of the golden retrievers, or further back, Sadie, our Alsatian?

In truth, the picture is a frame for the most amazing view of parkland, ancient trees and larger of the two lakes. All the poplars have now gone … they came down all in one night in the great storm in 1987. Those on the island withstood a short while but then, they too, agreed that Nature shall have her way.

The new family, whoever they are, have not an incline of the delights about to call upon them and accompany them each day.

The first year will be three hundred and sixty five earth-shatterings.

Every dawn a single event, every colour never to be seen again. Just a similar colour.

Wildlife. A garden burgeoning into life. Spring walks in, then awaits Summer’s early arrival on the patio and graces her Presence in the summer house.

*

It is time to move out and to move on. Never look back. Never visit these lands and parks again. Never look upon these street lamps again, nor the skyline and chimney pots at dusk as the moon rises high. No. They are of an earlier remembered life. I want no part of it now.

A Departing marks the fine line drawn across the page with my fountain pen.

Come!

Let us create life anew.

Let us wander pastures new.

There is vibrancy and excitement in the air.

A Chapter has simply closed. The New Chapter now is opened, and the contents dazzle and glisten, as with a Medieval or Anglo-Saxon Manuscript.

23 April 2024
All Rights Reserved


LIVERPOOL

© 2023 Kenneth Thomas Webb

First written 9 November 2021
from my original notes penned in 2017

Last published 4 May 2022