Er ... the loveliest house that I’ve ever lived in was one that I lived in with my grandparents when I was a child. And the name of the house was Crosslands. And I have some very happy memories of Crosslands.

It was, it seemed so huge to me as a child. And it had a lovely living room with a piano in it and a lovely sort of hall with lots of carpets and chests¹ and antiques² and so on. And there was a mysterious room, it was the drawing room, and we only used it on Sundays, or when the vicar came for tea, or Christmas Day or Easter Day, and I was － used to be amazed³ about this room because it had the best furniture in it but it was covered up with sheets － it was as if all the furniture was wearing clothes － and it seemed to me ridiculous⁴ that we couldn’t en- joy this beautiful furniture all the week through really.

And probably my favorite room was the kitchen. It had a lovely red flagstone floor, which was always highly⁵ polished⁶, and an Aga, you know one of those big cookers that heats the whole room so it was always warm there, and there was a kind of clothes-horse above it that we used to hang all our clothes on, and it was just  － it was lovely. It was a very warm room with baked bread and － my grandmother used to make ice cream and we’d eat it in there and ... there was a vegetable garden leading from there so I spent a lot of time in the vegetable garden picking peas⁷ and eating them － my grandmother used to get really cross with me because I used to pick all the vegetables and the fruit for our meals and then I’d eat half of them, because they tasted so delicious coming fresh from the garden.

Now, I went back to it a few years ago and it was a big mistake. They’ve modernized⁸ it inside, they’ve got rid of those lovely old fire- places... have just gone. And they’ve knocked a wall down so the drawing room and the living room have become one big modern plastic kind of room.

But I think what upset me most about it was the feeling that the house had shrunk⁹, it had become smaller and that my memory of this lovely large warm comfortable house had turned into an old house with modernized rooms inside it. And it taught me a lesson really, that you can’t go back on the past and recapture it. But there’s a beautiful memory there.