On selling our parents' home
After my mother died, I would drop in one morning a week to see how my father was getting on. He was over 90 years old by then, in great shape and living pretty independently.
I never felt like I was a carer calling by. I was just a son paying his father his due. It felt like we were both catching up on lost time. Even if there were long periods of silence between us it didn’t mean we were bored. In fact sometimes we would both drop off in front of re-runs of ‘The Repair Shop’. But that felt to me just a mark of how relaxed we were finally becoming in each other’s company.
At first I would arrive via the spanking new Elizabeth line station 10 minutes walk away from the house. It had always been a standing if somewhat macabre joke with my parents as to whether they would make it to the opening of the line.
It was announced 20 years ago but delay upon delay meant it was going to be a close-run thing between my parents’ longevity and the cutting of the ribbon. In the event they were both alive when the Elizabeth line opened but only my father got to travel on it. I made sure of that.
Their house was an Edwardian semi at the crown of the road, commanding the heights of Hanwell. It was full of stained glass, Tiffany-style lamps that my father made as a hobby. There was barely an inch of wall without a print on it.
After a month I decided upon a more circuitous route to get to their house. Winter had turned to spring and I could get off at a tube station a couple of miles more distant and get in a good walk into the bargain.
After a short stretch of main road, I was soon at the playing fields behind the secondary school my children had attended. Going down a slope to the Grand Union Canal, I saw at least a dozen rabbits quietly feeding. I had always known they were there but I had never noticed their habitat around their warren. The whole area was quite overgrown, really untidy by the standards of Ealing, the London borough known as ‘the Queen of Suburbs’. Then I noticed a nearby information board that revealed why it was quite so unkempt.
In the 1970s a local history teacher, Luke Fitzherbert led a campaign to protect a string of separate green spaces in west London that followed the course of the River Brent from the canal up to the A40 near the Hoover Factory.
This year marked 50 years since that group that he formed - the Brent River & Canal Society - got its plan approved by Ealing council and the Brent River Park was formally inaugurated. That is when the stretch of canal and river side that I was on gained protection from development and the landscape was left largely to its own devices.
Over time, the general biodiversity of the Brent River Park improved markedly. I remember riding my bike down the towpath nearly 30 years ago and being astonished at the sight of a grey heron perched on a weir amidst all manner of human detritus. Now they are commonplace. There is one who has a particular patch at a pond by Brunel’s Wharncliffe railway viaduct.
In the background of the walk there is always the hum of the traffic on the M4 elevated section, the rumbling of the Piccadilly line into central London or the planes going into Heathrow overhead. But the wildlife of the Brent River Park add their own accompaniment in the form of the machine gun burst of the Cettis warbler, the melodious decibels of a song thrush or even the harsh ‘kreear’ of a tern in the summer.
From the school playing fields the walk to my parents breaks down into four distinct sections.
First there is Warren Farm, the former playing fields, now re-wilded home of skylarks and more. I have written about it previously and how it reminds me of Berlin1.
The next stretch runs alongside Ealing hospital where I often took my parents for their check-ups and thence to Brunel’s railway viaduct crossing the river Brent. It provides a plucking post for the hospital’s resident peregrine falcons who don’t even flinch when a high-speed train passes within feet of them.
The third stretch of the walk to get to my father’s is Brent Lodge Park, known by our family and locals as ‘the Bunny Park’ after the children’s zoo there.
In summer the wildflower meadows there are a highlight. They nestle in the picturesque shadow of St Marys, a Gilbert Scott church, parts of which date back to the 12th century and possibly earlier. It also has the advantage of having no passing traffic which allows filming uninterrupted by traffic noise. For that reason St Marys has often featured in TV weddings and funerals.
St Marys was also where my mother attended an Alpha Course, in her personal search for meaning late in her life. We don’t know if she became a Christian before she died. We are not a family that finds it easy to talk about faith or feelings. But we’ve hedged our bets by getting her and my father a tree to remember them both that’s overlooked by both the Bunny Park and the church.
The fourth and final leg of my personal odyssey to my father’s house brings me to the Brent Valley golf course that my parents’ house overlooked. I don’t think of golf courses as hot-spots of biodiversity but perhaps it is the over-spill of nature from the Brent River Park that brings in green woodpeckers and all manner of wildfowl when the meadow floods behind the 14th green in the winter. The golf course was our go-to spot for meet-ups with my parents during socially distanced times.
Perhaps you can appreciate now why this walk has been important to me since they died in quick succession in 2023. Often the arc of my visits and their frequency told me more about my journey into grief than the feelings I could detect within me. Once my father was on his own, there was a metronomic regularity about them. I was doing this walk for him, in as predictable manner as possible.
When he died that frequency dialled up. I was burying myself in the probate process and walking kept me going through it. I felt sad each time when I left their house and there was no-one waving me off down the road but that was important too.
Once the house went up for sale, I did that walk less. Perhaps I was in denial that the last vestiges of my parents’ presence on earth would soon be gone.
After the sale, I have still kept up the walk but I cut it short before the golf course. I didn’t want to catch a glimpse of their house. It was never the house I grew up in but it was the home my parents chose once they’d got rid of their kids. It was made in their image not ours. And now it is someone else’s.
Beautiful write-up, Mark. I hope you'll keep taking that walk in years to come.
A touching account, that prompted me to look on a map to see where Hanwell is in relation to places I know. Having lived in rural East Anglia for almost all of my life, I have to stop and think when reading about wildlife and nature, in what I've always considered a densely built up city. In fact I wonder now where London stops and the countryside begins.
I now live just a mile from the bungalow where my parents were living when they died and even after 43 years, choose not to walk down the cul de sac to see what the place looks like today, with trees in the garden I planted half a century ago probably now large and mature.