The Joy of Shared Houses.
For a couple of years in the mid nineteen-eighties I lived in a shared house in the inner-city Newcastle of Tighes Hill. When I first moved in, I shared the house with an old friend from uni. I needed a place to live and I knew that she had a spare room in the house that she shared with the young man who was in the process of buying it. I lived in that house for a little over two years, but it still pops up in a lot of my writing and is a major character, if a building can be a character, in my novel Erosion that I expect to publish later this year. In the novel, the house is referred to as the ‘house in the shadow of the steelworks.’
Living in an Industrial Suburb.
In the mid nineteen-eighties, operations at the Newcastle Steelworks were in full swing and it was, of course, a twenty-four-hour, seven day a week operation. Between our house and the steelworks there was another street of houses, a four-lane major road and railway marshalling yards. The noise and light from the steelworks were a constant in our lives – sirens from the cranes and beeping from mobile vehicles, the clanging of steel falling from cranes and the other noises from the making of steel, while underpinning this was a constant hum that sounded like pure energy as if the steelworks were alive.
I was speaking to one of my old housemates recently and she still thinks very fondly of her time in that house. I suppose we were all so young and the world held so many possibilities, but, in another sense, the house was also like something comforting and protecting in our lives at that time.
House in the Shadow of the Steelworks
That such simple weatherboard and iron
could pass into personal myth
would seem, back then, improbable,
containing in its horse hair plastered walls,
threadbare carpet floors and lino tiled kitchen,
a narrow life of broader dreams,
facing down an infinite unknown universe.
To always return to this house, if not in reality
but in words, to arrive, same place, same time
was not expected then, but maybe welcomed.
A life that does not return is a shadow,
Kundera said, in that book read in that house,
when all the world it seemed was shadows
or something hiding in the shadows.
Late night, the sirens scream,
the steel drops from a crane in the distance
and rail cars crash in the shunters’ yard,
the echoes from another, different life
intrude into the room built from words
and sheets of paper scattered on a mattress,
stained sheets and recriminations.