The House on the Corner
Lahaina, Hawaii 2019
My grandmother, my mum’s mum, lived for a long time in a house on a corner in a town by the sea on the North Norfolk coast. The house fitted into the awkward corner at the end of a terrace row.
The windows were tall and low in the front room on the ground level, making it easy for people to look in as they walked by. Maybe my Granny had hung net curtains. I don’t remember.
A narrow pavement bent around the house, following the corner from one street to the next. When a large truck rumbled past, the whole house trembled.
When my Granny was losing her mobility and nearing the end of her life, she would climb the stairs to her bedroom on all fours. She would come down the stairs backwards in the same manner. My mum tried to persuade her to find someone to move her bed to the ground level. My Granny, an extremely stubborn woman, was having none of it.
The house on the corner became the last house my Granny lived in.
The house was probably a shop once. It’s probably a shop now. Maybe I should look it up on Google. The garden was a small sharp-angled triangle at the back of the house, an area paved with concrete slabs and decorated with pots of flowers and herbs and home to my mum’s tortoise, Timothy. I remember Timothy when I was a child. He was my mum’s pet when she was a child. One day, Timothy went missing from the corner house. No one knew where he'd gone. I think I remember someone telling me that people, unsavoury folk, will steal tortoises and sell them. Poor Timothy.
Our neighbour from our old house in Brighton used to have a tortoise named Percy. He liked to play football. He was in the local paper once.
FOOTBALL PLAYING TORTOISE SENSATION
Or something like that.
I tried looking for the article online but couldn't find it, sadly. If I remember rightly, our neighbour's grandmother found him, lost, wandering the pavements of Brighton many years ago. She took him in, adopting him as her pet and giving him his name.
One sunny afternoon, as we were sat eating dinner, Percy came into view. He appeared, all of a sudden, crossing our garden at some speed (for a tortoise). We ran out, picked him up and handed him back over the fence to our neighbours. He’d found a perfect tortoise-sized hole in the fence between our gardens.
Maybe he was looking for a new home.
