This is my piece for the Writing Club prompt ‘W is for Window’.
The window I looked up to the sky through had a cracked pane, the result of my dad flailing a cardigan at an irritating bluebottle. The cardigan had a penny in the pocket – one of those big old heavy pre-decimalisation pennies, blackened and worn smooth through countless transactions in tills and endless jostling against others in pockets and purses. The fly escaped unhurt; the single-glazed window pane did not. It cracked, and for years remained so, whether through reluctance to fix it on the part of the landlord, or reluctance to report it on the part of my parents, I still don’t know. Many years later I made some curtains for this window; I hung them on the rail, and watched in disbelief as the bottom of the curtains went past the window sill, past the skirting boards and half-way across the carpet to the fireplace. A bit of a mix-up on the measuring front. Still, we got some cushion covers out of the excess material.
The window I most remember watching my mum clean was in my brother’s bedroom, upstairs at the front of the house, overlooking the terraced street. I, not yet tall enough to reach the window catch, would watch as she pushed the bottom half of the sash window up to the top, bent under it to sit on the outside window sill, and pulled the window back down onto her thighs. With the top half of her body outside the house and her lower legs inside, she would happily clean all four panes of the window and think nothing of having a conversation with someone passing by underneath.
The window I stared out of on Bonfire Night was in my bedroom. On very cold winter mornings, it would be frosted with ice on the inside; central heating was an unaffordable luxury. Upstairs, at the back of the house, it gave me a great view over at least fifty back yards (not posh enough to be called gardens) and every cold, black 5th November night, after the wide-eyed oohing and aahing at Catherine Wheels nailed to the back gate and rockets set off from glass milk bottles, after the steam-breath cheering for spitfires launched from the roof of the outside toilet, after the giggling and squealing as a jumping jack chased my brother and me fitfully along the path, after the gushing starbursts hurtled from tiny paper volcanoes and roman candles, after the images of our names written in light faded from our eyes as the last sparkler guttered and died in our gloved hands, and when the two five-shilling boxes of fireworks were empty, then, it was time for bed, and I could look through the window at the scarlet and gold and amber glow of other small family bonfires in other small family yards, keeping the night monsters at bay until the morning.
Carol Carman
