If...

If all goes well tomorrow

the 1960s home of my childhood will no longer be part of our family. It will have new owners.

It is five and a half years since my 89-year-old mother came to us for the Easter holidays. She never went back to her house - my childhood home. 

Easter Sunday 2014 was the beginning of a new journey for our family. Mum had rarely been ill and on Good Friday she took her usual sprightly self off into Bath and enjoyed tea in the Pump Room. But on Easter Sunday morning she said she felt a little unwell. I was listening to The Archers and at 11:15 that morning I heard her groan as she came upstairs. Nothing unusual there. Her 89-year-old bones occasionally made her moan as she reached the top of any staircase. A few minutes later I went to check she was feeling ok. I found her crumpled on the sofa bed.

Mum had flopped on to one side, her eyes were flickering and she couldn’t raise her left arm. When I questioned her she did speak - 

in a monotone gutteral - 

‘I’m not feeling very well.’ 

‘Not very well’ was a massive understatement. However she made sense and understood what I was saying to her.

I called 111 who put me straight through to 999. The ambulance arrived within minutes and they confirmed what I’d already been told. Mum had had a stroke. 

The extra difficulty that day was the treatment to halt the worst of the stroke. Thrombylosis was performed on mum within the recommended time but it had to be reversed as her face swelled and she couldn’t breathe. It had given her an anaphylactic shock. By the time we got into the acute stroke unit we were greeted with

‘You’ve had a very rough ride.’

We knew no different. We hadn’t ever been in A&E before. Mum’s stroke alone was bad enough. We hadn’t appreciated how difficult the anaphylactic shock had been for her and the emergency team. After the drama the consultant brusquely said mum was unlikely to live. She’d had a very deep stroke. I had never felt so upset.

Next day another consultant said they would attach a drip as mum was speaking and was awake. In other words they weren’t just going to let her be... the route to a slow death. Things began to look a little brighter. 

In what felt like a very long time from that day on she was able to sit up and drink tea and eat small meals, after many months of a liquid-only diet.

Meanwhile spring 2014 turned to summer. Mum’s garden flowered and grew. Summer turned to autumn and we had to manage mum’s property and get power of attorney. With luck my brother is our family solicitor. My elderly aunts cut mum’s lawns and trimmed the hedges and we weeded, cut back shrubs and roses and spread bark on her flower beds. 

By Christmas 2014 mum had been transferred to a medical nursing home near my brother’s house. He and I had shared mum’s nursing needs by getting in carers during the day: 3 months at my brother’s house and three months at our house in Bath. Mum was no longer a guest but a patient who had carers all morning and most of the evening too. But after months on her back - she wouldn’t use a hoist nor a wheelchair - mum’s bedsore was not improving and she needed turning in the night.  A fulltime nursing home was the only option.

Christmas 2014 - five years ago as I write - saw me clearing her house of valuables and glassware, silverware and china. I believed the builders were coming in. I hastily bedecked her room in the nursing home with Christmas decorations but, back at her house, in her sitting room on Christmas Eve I felt a new sadness. For so many years I’d gone home on December 24th to see mum heating mince pies and hanging up her Christmas cards while listening to ‘Carols from Kings’. 

This time there was a pile of adverts dropped in her letter box. No Christmas tree. We had ordered a new kitchen and bathroom for the house. (My brother and I thought we could rent it out. His firm of solicitors are also estate agents and they deal with rental properties too.) Instead of cards and a mini Christmas tree her sitting room was full of new kitchen units and bath panels. The builder was ready! But we weren’t going to enjoy another Christmas there ever again.

Then the real fun started. Our family builder couldn’t proceed to improve the house as there was a crack in the kitchen wall and above the bathroom. After months of wrangling my brother got a surveyor to inspect the property. He recommended that the council remove trees on the field next to mum’s house - the roots were causing mild subsidence to the foundations and a new kitchen and bathroom had to be put on hold.

It took two years for the council to do anything about the trees. 

By December 2016, however, as mum’s house was going through repairs her deep stroke worsened and she had a series of mini attacks. Her funeral was on December 2nd. She’d felt no pain. 

A further year after the trees were finally removed time alone allowed the soil to settle around mum’s house. And suddenly we were in 2018. My elderly aunts were no longer doing mum’s garden and had engaged a professional gardener.

By early 2019 the cracks in the house had been repaired and the surveyor said it was in a fit condition for renting out. The property had a certificate to that effect. The new kitchen and bathroom went in and by Easter this year, five years since mum had her massive stroke, the hallway, landing and stairwell, kitchen and bathroom had all been revamped and decorated. But my brother, exhausted by the five years of negotiations, decided to sell mum’s house rather than rent it out. And I agreed.

Owing to a slipped disc in 2018 I hadn’t been there since 2017. By Easter of this year I dreaded seeing cobwebs, messy carpeting, an overgrown garden and general gloom.

But, no. Last March Richard, a family friend and I went home and prepared the house for putting it on the market. The day we arrived my brother had arranged for an auctioneer to clear mum’s house. I feared the worst. I expected to see poor wallpaperings and stained carpets left behind after the clearance.

On the evening we arrived I was remarkably relieved. Yes the back garden was overgrown, in parts. But inside, thanks to my family doing weekly cleans and checking the heating was working, the house was fresh and warm.

We spent six days redecorating. Walls, ceilings, skirting boards, doors, door frames and the staircase were given a few coats of white emulsion and Farrow and Ball eggshell.

Yes it was hard work. But I didn’t get a sinking feeling as I saw mum’s house for the last time. It didn’t look dreadful with no furniture and it made it much easier to wield a paintbrush and roller without having to move tables, sofas, heavy bookcases and the like. 

When we closed the front door on mum’s house for the last time Richard’s arms were in shreds from a vile bramble which he’d tugged at and removed. I’d opened up mum’s rose garden and made her pride and joy as tidy as I could. We had been working in her garden on one of those hot days we’d had during this year’s heatwave. 

Finally the house went on the market in August and sold within a week to a lovely woman who had been mum’s hairdresser for twelve years. We all felt happy with the outcome. 

However it has taken until today, December 5th, for the exchange of contracts. Tomorrow we should complete. Tomorrow mum’s house will have new owners. 

It has been a long journey from Easter 2014 until now, Christmas 2019. And it’s the end of my childhood home. But rather than being sad to say goodbye to the old house I am mightily relieved it will be going to new, kindly people. Five years and eight months after mum left home to visit us in Bath someone else will be boiling the kettle in the kitchen.