Cece And Me

The dense Dorset mist tightens its grip around the house, creeping in through keyholes and disappearing with the woodsmoke that warms the inside air. The faint clank of stacking china echoes down the corridor, and an image of the lamp on the side table forms on the frost-bitten window pane: an ornate, gold-plated mask over the hostile night. It’s just the two of us – Cece and me – the small black notebook on the floral footstool between us. Embers pop shyly in the fireplace, as if hoping we won’t notice. Theresa, our old chocolate lab, is snoring on the low, striped sofa which lines the wall on the far side of the sitting room.

Even in winter, when the English countryside is washed in muted grey, Hampton Lodge is a fairytale. Low stone walls line the dusty driveway, curving gently up at the little bridge across the stream that runs through the garden. Between hedgerows busy with Hydrangea that hide until the springtime, the lawn stretches around the house: flat and perfect. From a heavy iron gate wrapped in ivy, a gravel path runs through the middle of the lawn to an arch doorway, where pairs of wellies lean against flower pots waiting for tulips. Imposing oak trees line the field on the west side of the house, casting morning shadows over the garden and protecting the lawns from the harsh salty winds of the Atlantic. The slow slope of the valley forms a basket: holding the grounds in subdued suspension from reality. Mum and dad called it Hampton Heaven, and no matter how much fun we had on holidays as children, we were always overwhelmed with happiness when we returned home.

Inside the thick stone walls, under the slanting slate roof and mismatched chimneys, the house is a rich and muddled array of old dusty shelves and memories of conversations.

It was mum and dad’s funeral earlier in the day: the village church crowded with black-clad locals and friends from across the country, vitamin-D deprived and drained by the ceremony of Christmas. Once the oak coffin was lowered into the earth, the house filled with mourning acquaintances straining for conversation, glasses of pinot clutched in chillblained hands. They left as Grandma cleared the last plate of sausage rolls from the dining table, and the grey sky had turned to black.

The funeral had been beautiful, because mum and dad had been the kind of people who left a sparkle in the lives of everyone they met.

Their story was the kind reserved for Richard Curtis movies: imbued with a heart-wrenching love that seems impossible unless you’ve witnessed the glances they shared when they thought nobody was watching. And now it was over, but we – as we were told repeatedly by every guest at the wake – were their legacy.

Mum and Dad met in America in the summer of 1984. Mum was styling a shoot for Harper's Bazaar, and Dad had been transferred to the San Francisco office for a one year placement: designing warehouse conversion apartments for hip, techy twenty somethings.

Mum had been out to an industry party: champagne and cocaine in an over stylised basement. Erica was driving, and at the lights on 23rd and Mission, they collided with a man on a motorbike. Dad was on his way back from DNA Lounge, his head still pounding from the bass when it hit the tarmac.

Barefoot, her heels discarded as soon as she’d left the bar, mum rushed to his side. Spinning from synthetic serotonin and the adrenaline of disaster, they fell in love under San Francisco streetlights.

After two years travelling the world together, they moved to London, straight into a one bedroom flat in Primrose Hill.

They stayed in the flat for five years. Five Christmases between Devon and Berkshire, vol-e-vents and Marks and Spencer’s profiteroles at Grandma’s, Alice’s trifle spiked with Limoncello. Five summers spent between home and the heath: swims in the pond, hazy afternoons, never ending evenings. Three hundred and twelve morning coffees from Harry’s Cafe, warm lips kissing goodbye on the platform. Nine hundred and sixty two pints at the Bull and Gate: on spring Sundays after lazy games of tennis or Wednesday’s after work.

Thirty seven al fresco pizzas at Lucio’s, cold cheeks and knees touching knees under red and white tablecloths.

Sixty two sunset picnics: baguette and brie on Parliament Hill as the London sky turns orange.

Forty six shared Tiramisus from Alimentari, one with Grandma’s emerald ring at the bottom, upon Dad’s request.

One wedding: a marquee in Alice and Grandpa’s garden alive with laughter.

Mum fell pregnant with me and Cece the following spring. They moved to Tufnell Park: the garden flat with high ceilings and the eccentric neighbour. We were born on the night the Oxford Street Christmas lights were turned on, when London became a fairytale. Dad says everything lit up that night.

Neither of them read any books on parenting, but somehow they did everything right. They spoiled us with love, frugal with things. We made toys from cardboard boxes and went to sleep every night tired and smiling, healthy bodies under feather down duvets. Bath books bed, kisses and cuddles, lingering smiles from the doorway “Sleep tight, happy day tomorrow”.

We lived in Tufnell Park until the summer we turned six, and although we lived in one of the world’s richest cities, we lived a life of simple pleasures.

On Saturdays we’d get the tube to South Kensington: hours of I spy in the museums, gloved hands clutching cups of homemade hot chocolates by fountains in the park. On weekdays we’d go for walks on the heath, or swimming lessons in Kentish Town. We’d bake gingerbreads and decorate them with raisins. After bath time, with Nick Drake on the speakers and a bottle of red open on the island, mum and dad would roll one of us up in a big navy towel and deposit us on the Persian rug in front of the fire. “There’s a slug in the sitting room! Who let the slug in?!” We’d hold our breath until our sibling was at our side “It’s not a slug! It’s not a slug! It’s not a slug it’s Jamjam!” Cece’s voice by my ear, her tiny hands on my towel wrapped head. Mum and dad would hold each side of the towel, stand at the end of the big bed in their room and swing us three times before letting us spin out onto the bed sheets. They’d sing “hang the duvet” to the tune of Hang the DJ by The Smiths, carry us to bed swaddled in duvets.

When we turned four, they converted dad’s office to a playroom; moved in the dressing up chest and the crates full of craft stuff, laid a carpet over the dark oak floorboards. The walls were already plastered in our artwork, swirls and smudges of primary colours on pastel sugar paper. The table which lives in mum’s new studio is still covered in poster paint, smudged outlines of A4 from afternoons potato printing.

Dad would call when he was heading back from the office, and mum would hide us under coats in the airing cupboard. “I don’t know where they’ve gone” we’d watch her through the keyhole, loud and dramatic. “I’m sure they were here just a minute ago”. Dad would play along, every day, picking up cushions and rifling through the boot box, until finally opening the airing cupboard door and yelling “found them!”, throwing us both over his shoulders. The frequency of this routine dwindled as we got older, but never lost its charm.

We moved to Dorset in late summer, as the blackberries turned putrid in the hedgerows. We were turning six that November, too old to share a bedroom, and dad had been offered a role as a partner at a studio in Bath. We packed up the garden flat on an August Tuesday: I remember warm air and leftover lasagne from tupperware tubs.

Hampton Lodge is an old coach house on the edge of an estate, with thick stone walls and wonky windows. The front door is painted yellow, the garden is a menagerie of bugs and hedgehogs and native flowers.

.From through the windows on the east side of the cottage, the Dorset countryside falls out into the distance: muddy fields melt into rich woodland, the ocean forms a triangle between sloping hillsides. On spring mornings, the valley fills with a dense mist which burns off slowly, disappearing into beech leaves. On midsummer nights, the sun sinks into the sea and the sky around it turns green for a tiny tenth of a second. Mum’s eyes would often well up on those nights, and she’d hold us in a long hug and tell us how it reminded her of the first holiday her and dad had taken to Dorset, just weeks before we were born.

Dad converted the barn at the bottom of our garden into a workshop: filled it with a workbench and lined the walls with draws and racks of tools. On rainy weekends, after scrambled eggs and walks to watch the wild sea whip foam into the wind, Dad would work for hours building cabinets and tables, pencil in his mouth to mark the wood. I’d sit on the old red armchair in the corner, singing along to JJ Cale and watching with hypnotized eyes. My carpentry skills developed slowly over time: first a block I painted purple, then a toy helicopter with spinning blades, then a bookcase for mum’s fiftieth birthday, her name engraved on the side – Rosemary Lilian Richards. I inherited dad’s brain; numbers, logical thinking, illogical taste for adventure. Cece inherited his eyes; pale blue and gentle.

And both of us, we learned – sitting in the soulless lawyers office the day before the funeral – had inherited his fortune. Along with stacks of formal papers outlining the inheritance – which was more money than we could have imagined, more than we ever expected mum and dad to possess – Mr Selby had produced a small black notebook from the case labelled Mr and Mrs Richards. He’d told us that mum and dad had left this for us, and that it was important that we read it together after they were gone. Although we wanted to know what they’d written – to add to our bank of terrifyingly finite links to them – somehow neither of us felt ready until after the funeral.

“You read it,” Cece passed the book to me across the floral footstool, so I began:

"Our darlings,

By the time you read this, you’ll understand a little more about the inheritance – about your new found riches.

We wanted to write this little book to list all of the adventures we’ve been on together, the ones we think you should take too.

Enjoy your travels, and live in the moment: love is worth so much more than anything money could buy, and sometimes the most exciting adventure's are more simple than you might expect.

We love you forever,

Mum and Dad x"

It became clear as soon as we began flicking through the little black book, that they’d started writing this list long before we were born. On pages marked with a date in mum’s cursive font, they’d noted the address of every place they’d both loved: a Chinese restaurant on Valencia Street in San Francisco; an Ashram in the hills of Peru. And finally, three weeks before we were born, Hampton Lodge. Sellotaped to the page opposite is a polaroid of a young mum outside our yellow front door, beaming at the camera, and holding her stomach which ballooned with the promise of us.