ABSTRACT
The poet Simon Armitage, reflecting on a stay in the spare room of a house during a long-distance walk, observed how such rooms are nearly always reliquaries or shrines, museums of past lives or mausoleums devoted to a particular absence, a place of mothballed clothes, stockpiled books, musical instruments, locked in cases, photographs under cellophane, framed certificates, For those in long-standing family homes, such objects proliferated – there was no compulsion for them to be moved, they just got passed on to the next generation – houses ‘full of things’ (Bella), just ‘stored away’. The large archival spaces of such homes became emblematic of family continuity, and thus granted benign value. Burials, with or without memorial stones, are another way personal and home histories become entangled. Chris and Josie, for example, pointed to a line of three gravestones in the back garden, dating back to the 1940s, close to the side wall of the house.
