The Porch

The house originally was a typical two rooms up and two rooms down affair. Built with large lumps of stone, making thick walls and windowsills feet deep. This old cottage needed much work and to be made bigger to accommodate our growing family, so dormer windows were added to the attic, an indoor toilet tucked under the attic stairs and a single story flat roofed room on the front of the house.

The new room had more windows than walls, giving the effect of a glass box with a lid .This room became known as the porch. A place to sit in the sunshine and have expansive views to our garden and the views beyond.

On the side of the new porch room a door was installed that faced the road. The old front door became part of the interior porch room wall. To emphasise this redundant doorway a long low chest of drawers was placed in front of the old front door, essentially barricading it in and rendering it unusable.

Inside the porch there was a large entry way made into the rest of the house where you would access the small cottage kitchen.

The front door of the porch would remain open in summer, and with its top half glass and bottom half wood even when it was cooler and the door was shut we could still look outside, and be surrounded by green.

The porch housed lots of things, some of which changed location from time to time, two wooden arm chairs with high backs, a settee that was upholstered with wooden arms. The fabric of which was orange, yellow and brown, the warm colors of the 70s, with an arm chair to match, this set never moved from the porch. There was a square pine kitchen table between the windows that faced the garden with large turned legs and this was big enough to house the never used tumble dryer. Over the top of the whole thing a cotton table cloth in light yellows and browns, simple stripes made lumpy by it being seersucker. The table was really a surface to hold assorted sized plants in pots. These were all cheek by jowl, in them some succulents, and fancy house plants, begonias, cyclamen, and boisterous strong smelling geraniums, the ubiquitous spider plants and all their babies hanging over the sides of the table.

Opposite the table that was between the front large windows of the porch was the ever closed old front door was the long low chest, like all the furniture that was wood it was painted white. Mum didn't like any other colour for wood, so windowsills, chairs, chests and doors were all white gloss. On this chest were cati, succulents and more house plants of flowery nature which covered every inch.

The windowsills all the way round the porch were low and only big enough to hold a medium sized plant pot and here were the sun loving plants, the cati, waiting for small hands to find those pickles, which my little hands did

"Oh Miranda watch the Cati,!!! Oh you'd haven't broken it have you, the beared old man?"

this would be whailed at me, the admonishment and the question. None of which I would answer as I bawled my eyes out and looked at my palm filled with tiny hairs of spikes, almost too slight to see, but you knew they were there as they smarted.

This particular fall near the front door was where the cacti seemed to gather and despite their obvious danger, I loved them, the flowers, the interest of them, I could even forgive them the cobwebs that formed lightly over their fine spikes and caught tiny winged bugs. I loved their shapes, some fat and squat, tall and sentinel, numerous and gathered in all the shades of green, the mostly pale greens, almost blue shade being my favorite. Most of all It was their spectacular flowers that drew me. We would wait and wait and the sparse buds would appear and soon the trumpet and then the most glorious reds and yellows as the flowers burst from their prickly surface. This was worth the pain and wait. Of all the plants these cati were my favorite, the blousey floppy house plants couldn't match the splendor of the cacti, the drama that they were. The close second favorite was the succulents that mum had millions of. The succulents with their fat juicy leaves that you could take off the plant in a satisfying snap and squeeze the sap out. Of course damage to the plants of any nature was not allowed and that would induce a sharp smack to the backs of the legs for doing so. So snapping succulents was done sneakily and evidence hidden deep in the soil of the plant pot.

The plants were loved and nurtured and it showed, the porch was a veritable greenhouse of exotics, colors resplendent in the square unfeatured box of the porch now hidden with this riot of life.

But the porch didn't just hold plants; there were built-ins, one of which was a coat cupboard with an improbable amount of items in it, housing dads overcoats, mums faux leather and sheepskin trench along with assorted anoraks, shoes and wellies and with waiting spiders making it too scary to open. The latch to the coat cupboard being so efficient meant that you had to yank it open, almost forcing you to land on the coats inside.

The cupboards near the entryway to the kitchen, had more accommodations for spiders and held the vacuum, brooms and the homemade ironing board along with shelving for glass vases and pitchers, matching dinnerware and eggcups, all of it jumbled and ready to topple at the slighted provocation. Alongside this was a low set of cupboards. In these were items never seen but mostly containing the unworked clay in bags and pottery animals that mum made in various stages of production. The cabinets were never the main feature with their solid doors clicking or sliding. It was the surface that they provided for the plants of the porch; these were the main event and their gloriousness was always evident.

The most surprising item in the porch was a kiln, a low square solid box. Placed near the front door under the plate glass window. This was a resting place for when it wasn't being used. This would be moved to the kitchen by the small coal fire next to the sink, plugged in from time to time and fired up and we would watch the heat cones bend when the kiln was at temperature. Little eyes being asked to look carefully in the tiny hole into the fiery depths of the kiln. The terracotta animals made pale orange and their white decorations shimmering in the searing heat. How I wasn't burnt, how any of us weren't burnt by this fat squat box is astounding to me, but there were no burns or hurts from this. This along with standalone kerosene heater, cardboard boxes and piles of newspapers, shoes, wellies, wooden drying racks loaded with the frequent washing of a family of 6, and laundry baskets was what the porch contained and here we would gather and enjoy the meagre sun, on wet days and Sundays. While the dinner roasted the windows would steam and we would when not being watched use a finger to draw on them. Something that when caught would elicit chastisement. "Will you girls stop drawing on the windows!" We all knew that the drawings would reappear time and time again the condensation formed on these huge windows. Maybe this is why the cleaning of the windows was a job for us girls! Saturday morning buckets with soapy washing up liquid water to wash the windows and dry them with scrunched up newspapers, forming inky shammies! With blackened hands and stiff shoulders we would remove the finger drawings from the previous week.

The porch was where we gathered in its light, the space crammed with plants, racks and the miscellaneous. Our cats, never singular, always multiple coming and going and of course the dog placing itself in the middle of where any of us would want to step. The laughter and tears that we had. The times the table was cleared and placed in the centre of the room for the birthday celebrations mid summer, plants moved to more surfaces that couldn't house another thing. Racks packed into the kitchen. With the table moved it revealed that yes we did in fact own a tumble dryer, that normally lived beneath the table between the two front windows, would once again be covered but this time with a table cloth and was now a brand new surface for the displaced plants.

A clean cotton cloth top draped on the table, ready for melamine plates and beakers, for glass pitchers filled with orange squash. The crab sandwiches on light brown buttered bread, cut and ready for eating. Maybe Cadbury's chocolate fingers and little fondant fancies. But taking central place on the table would be the home made chocolate sandwich cake topped with smarties on the butter cream, along with the small colourful birthday candles in their little flower holders ready for lighting, blowing out and wishing.

These were the days where the door would be open and we would be visible should anyone care to look our way from the road, not that there were many walkers on the steep hill and we wouldn't mind as we were the rabble of family laughing shouting and crying in our self contained unit. We loved the porch and the way it was and here we would entertain both ourselves and the few that came to visit.

When visitors came and were asked to sit they would be family and friends from far away, their visit known and anticipated, the porch would once again be made ready and they would have a space cleared on the always piled high furniture. Mum would talk and talk and use all the words that the world had, and we would sit then drift away to play and return to big talk and subjects that didn't interest or involved us. All we would know that this was so and so and this was their potted history, a beloved friend from when they had lived in England maybe it was Joyce the lady who had 3 husbands all through no fault or her own, one by one they had died in tragic and sad circumstances, drowned, run over or disease had taken them. But none of this interested me, I would be looked at and told how big I was, or how dark my hair was and how long it was. I might even be asked to do a dance and shown what was learnt at ballet. I would leap about and make them laugh being the lively one, the entertainer, the one with bags of confidence, the youngest and the darling.

The porch held this all in it's big plate glass windows. A carbuncle on the front of the cottage made beautiful with plants and full of chaos. Where there was never a seat for us to sit on that didn't have papers, magazines, clean clothes piles and sleeping cats. These would have to be removed by the sitter and once a space was made guarded fiercely should some other sister steal it. The little space being made and fought over, scattering cats and debris should the fight erupt. "You stole my seat!" screamed into the now sat smug, `cat got the cream face' looking up at me.

The porch was the corridor for entry to the rest of the house and shouldn't have felt like a room, but it did. Maybe it was the way that you sank into the settee with its foam cushion. Maybe because of the light there, so different from in the cottage that was dark with the small original windows with the lights needed even on the brightest days. The porch didn't need lights, only in the evenings were the lamps shielded by the plants would be turned on. By then the porch time would be over and the big windows scary and dark without curtains turning them black and forbodding. We would by now be in the rest of the house and watching the small rented black and white tv in the living room or tucked up in bed in the room above, listening to the blurbering of the tv through the floor boards, lulling us to sleep or keeping us awake! causing us to shout in unison "turn the TV down!" the cheek of it and the daring something that we cared not for.