Maureen has a biscuit tin of photographs, and last Wednesday lunchtime, 13 May, she let me take the lid off. It's a shortbread tin with a Highland cow on the front, and inside, in no order at all, is the street from about 1968 onwards.
She moved in next door in July 1968 as a newlywed, with Ron, and has lived there ever since. She'll be 80 this year. When I said "nearly sixty years", she corrected me: "Fifty-seven and ten months." I'd only popped round to collect a parcel she'd taken in. She poured the tea anyway and told me about our house.
Before Dennis
When Maureen and Ron arrived, our house belonged to the Gregorys: Mr and Mrs Gregory and three boys. Mr Gregory kept pigeons, thirty or so of them, in a loft at the top of the garden. "Where your shed is," she said. On race days, she said, he'd stand on the back step with a clock in his hand and his neck bent back, staring up, and the boys would go quiet, which was the only time they did. In the photograph, he looks like a man who is about to be disappointed by a bird.
The Gregorys left in 1979 and Dennis and June came. Dennis was 41. June was the one who planted: she did the roses along the steps in the garden, and Maureen says the dark red one by the bottom step that still comes back every year was hers. I had no idea. I've walked past it all spring thinking it was a bramble with ambitions.
The night the gutter came down
I mentioned the back gutter, and the mould that had grown in the corner of the back bedroom. Maureen put her cup down. "That corner," she said. It was a night in January 1990, the night of the big wind, when half the slates in Walkley went off and a gutter came down off the gable into our garden at two in the morning. She and Ron stood at the back door in their coats. At first light, Ron and Dennis put the gutter back up with a borrowed ladder and some wire. "Dennis said it would hold," she said. "It did hold. For a while."
So the corner has history. I'd always assumed the problem was the wall, and the wall is still cold, but the gutter had been wired together for 35 years. I wrote about fixing it last September, and I think about the wire every time I look at that corner.
Street parties and a green door
The tin has a photograph from the Silver Jubilee in 1977: trestle tables lined up across the pavement rather than the road, because on this street the jelly slid. There's another from 2012, when Dennis came out with a trifle that June used to make. He'd been on his own for a year. Maureen says everybody pretended not to notice that he'd made it from the recipe card with her handwriting on.
When I said we were thinking of painting our front door in the summer, she asked what colour. I said green. She asked what sort of green. I said a deep one. She said brown had been on that door since the Gregorys, and Dennis kept a tin of it marked "front door", and that I wasn't to pick anything from a card with a name like a spice. She'd like to see the colour before it goes on. It was not a request.
She sees Dennis at the care home in Hillsborough on the first Sunday of each month, with something in a Tupperware. He asked her whether the young couple had kept the pencil notes in the meter cupboard. I said we had. "Ron always said that house looked after people who looked after it," she said. I thought about the gutter and the consumer unit and the £3,800 we didn't spend, and said we were trying.
