WßD Upon Departing

Windsor Street Days

Part Four

Chapter Three

Upon Departing Pittville Mount Park for the Last Time


THE FAMILY ARRIVED on Friday, 6 October 1967. We departed on Monday, 27 January 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 weekend approached. How strange. The ships are in mothballs. The paintings are 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. Oftentimes I wish I had not been party to them.

I drop the keys at the agents in the office - the very room - where 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 time to codify that which some being floating about in the sky had whispered only to that single ear? Really? When imagination is presented as truth, lies multiply a thousand-fold, tumbling down every century right into ours now.

Some good, some bad, but when good and bad are 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, yes, and guises. But allowing the Present to see the heart's desires and Presence will somehow work with the 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 downstairs, but upstairs the windows opened end-to-end in this beautiful home, bringing a light summer evening breeze. Cocktails, later coffee and relaxation. A pleasant walk along the corridor, paintings to be admired, the treadle sewing machine, and ‘the picture window.’

The Picture Window

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?

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?

The window frames an amazing view of parkland, ancient trees and the larger of the two lakes. All the poplars have now gone… Some thirty years ago. They came down all in one night in the Great Storm of 1987. Those on the island withstood a short while longer 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 through their years ahead.

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 then await Summer’s early arrival on the patio and grace her Presence in the summer house.

*

It is time to move out and 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 anew.

There is vibrancy and excitement in the air.

A Chapter has simply closed.

The New Chapter now is open,

and the contents dazzle and glisten,

as with a Medieval or Anglo-Saxon Manuscript.

© 2017 KTW




4 February 2025
All Rights Reserved


LIVERPOOL


© 2025 Kenneth Thomas Webb




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

Imagery is © 2025 KTW unless otherwise credited

We lived on the West side of the Park. Here, is the East side and to the left off lens is the Evesham Road, the Park then continuing onwards and eccompassing the smaller lake and Pittville Pump Room. In 1944 Pittville Park was a huge military encampment in preparation for D Day 6 June 1944, the encampment extending the full length south to north and taking in Pittville Pump Room, also. This encampment comprised thousands of troops of all nationalities. KTW

Pittville Pump Room and Bandstand on the height of the North Edge of Pittville Mount Park on 28 November 2017. KTW

Ken Webb is a writer and proofreader. His website, kennwebb.com, showcases his work as a writer, blogger and podcaster, resting on his successive careers as a police officer, progressing to a junior lawyer in succession and trusts as a Fellow of the Institute of Legal Executives, a retired officer with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, and latterly, for three years, the owner and editor of two lifestyle magazines in Liverpool.

He also just handed over a successful two year chairmanship in Gloucestershire with Cheltenham Regency Probus.

Pandemic aside, he spends his time equally between his city, Liverpool, and the county of his birth, Gloucestershire.

In this fast-paced present age, proof-reading is essential. And this skill also occasionally leads to copy-editing writers’ manuscripts for submission to publishers and also student and post graduate dissertations.