When I first told Jude about the Presbytery, I said I had been to look at an old property. At the time it was hidden behind brambles about six feet deep, and I had already allowed myself to imagine what might be behind them. Then I mentioned, as casually as I could, that I had kind of bought it.
Jude was seven months pregnant with Jack, and we had only recently finished decorating his nursery in our two-bedroom terrace.
“You can’t kind of buy a house,” she said. “You either do or you don’t.”
“Okay. We’ve bought a house.”
Her dad thought I was mad. He had some justification. Beyond the brambles was a building requiring rather more imagination than most people would consider sensible with a baby on the way.
I could see our family home.
By the time we moved in, the Presbytery was no longer semi-derelict. Semi-refurbished would be fairer. I had decided we would be living there by Christmas 2007, and on Christmas Eve we finally moved in.
The house was ready enough for us, which is not quite the same thing as being finished.
Nearly nineteen years later, it contains plenty that I could never have imagined standing among those brambles.
The front door is about nine feet tall and came from a church demolished decades ago.
It is a couple of hundred years old, with a key so large it looks faintly ridiculous in your hand.
The lock on the downstairs toilet came from a flea market in Bruges. It is genuinely beautiful, although beauty has long since become the less interesting part of its story. There is a knack to opening it, and over the years dozens of visitors have discovered this only after locking themselves inside.
Everyone who lives here understands the lock perfectly.
Everyone else eventually learns.
The hall walls have filled with photographs. Among everything else, there is my signed photograph of Sylvester Stallone as Rocky and Jude’s treasured signed photograph of Marilyn Monroe.
Nobody planned the wall as a collection. Another photograph was simply worth putting up, then another. Eventually there were years of us looking back at ourselves.
Most of the things in the house have equally particular reasons for being there. Some belong more obviously to Jude, some to me. Some have come from places we’ve been. Others have been around for so long that Jack has simply grown up with them.
We don’t really notice most of them anymore.
The enormous key is just the front-door key. The temperamental lock is just the downstairs toilet lock, usually accompanied by a warning whenever somebody new disappears behind the door. The photographs are just the hallway.
Someone else could buy the Presbytery and reproduce almost everything visible within it.
They could find another old church door, another antique lock and the same furniture. They could hang pictures in the same places and arrange the rooms with extraordinary accuracy.
It would still be a different home.
They would be missing all the reasons.
Back in 2007, I thought I knew what the Presbytery could become.
In one sense I was right. It became the family home I had imagined when everybody else was looking at brambles and unfinished rooms.
I just couldn’t have imagined what would eventually make it ours.
