The house that kept the weather out

My grandmother’s house had four doors and she used one. The front door was for the doctor and the pastor and, once, a man from the council. The back door was for charcoal, then for nothing. The side door, which opened onto the field and the sea beyond it, had been painted shut before I was born. She came and went by the kitchen door, and so did everybody else, and if you knocked at the front she would shout through the letterbox that it was open round the back.

I thought about those doors a great deal while I was writing The Weather Indoors. I thought about how a house decides what it is for. Hers was for keeping the weather out, which on that stretch of coast is not a small ambition. The wind came off the Atlantic with nothing to stop it between there and Brazil, and she met it with heavy curtains, sandbags at the door, a lamp kept trimmed through every storm and an absolute refusal to be impressed.

What I did not understand as a child, and only began to understand when I sat down to write about a family very like mine, is that a house that keeps the weather out also keeps a great deal in. The things we did not say in that kitchen stayed in that kitchen. They are probably still there.

She has been gone eleven years. The house is someone else’s now, and I am told they have opened the side door, which I find I cannot think about for long. I hope they use it. I hope the field comes in.