Pieces

Once, long ago, I was taken to visit one of my father's aunts. I didn't really understand the relationship at the time, and was too young to ask clearly. Out in the middle of the country, a house by the side of the road. No heat, plumbing, electricity, I presume an outhouse somewhere. The aunt was a large, very elderly, flower-print wrapped swaddle in a decrepit rocking chair. The uncertain floor covered with something thickly papery and worn through, newsprint covering the walls, no place to sit. Probably she and my father only spoke in French, since I have no recollection of the conversation. A stove sat there, cold, and a vent pipe wandered away from it.


It was a way of life, and a deep poverty, that I observed anthropologically. But it was a stray puzzle piece that never fit to any other bit. Presented to the ancient relative, I don't recall any interest from her, I was only a bother, potential noise. I'm sure there was an odor, of neglect and damp. Since I made the rounds of the elderly neighbors at home, the smell of age wouldn't have bothered me. Instead, there was a sad pall over the one crumbling room.

I had a soft spot for little old ladies, so my detachment felt strange, even at the time. Repulsion, even, far beyond my shy reserve with strangers. I knew my father enough to realize I had to be meticulously polite - and I'm sure I was.

Perhaps the photos over at Shorpy remind me of this odd interlude. And the passage in Smiley's People with Connie Sax.

It was a house of day and night at once. At the centre, on a pine table littered with the remains of toast and Marmite, an old oil lamp shed a globe of yellow light, intensifying the darkness round it. The gleam of blue rain clouds, streaked by sunset, filled the far French windows. Gradually, as Smiley followed Connie's agonizingly slow procession, he realized that this one wooden room was all there was. For an office, they had the rolltop desk laden with bills and flea powder; for a bedroom the brass double bedstead with its heap of stuffed toy animals lying like dead soldiers between the pillows; for a drawing-room Connie's rocking-chair and a crumbling wicker sofa; for a kitchen a gas ring fired from a cylinder; and for decoration the unclearable litter of old age.

- John LeCarre

One of those indelible childhood memories I have no idea what to do with.