The Last Day At Home

John Alexander Scott

Dad was nearing retirement so both he and Mum had to leave the house we had all lived in for over twenty years. It was a big old house that held many happy memories. My brother, sister and I had all grown up there.

The three of us had all moved away but we kept our old bedrooms so that we could still stay over. Today was the last day that I would visit before my parents finally moved out. It was a day that I hadn't been looking forward to.

I was the only sibling still living the single life, and tended to visit more than the other two. Sometimes I stayed over to coincide with a Dunfermline home match. Sometimes I needed to escape the confines of Glasgow, with its noise and pollution, for the rural quiet of the house. Other times, quite unashamedly, I just craved the congenial company of my parents.

I'd arrived off the early morning train one Saturday at the end of September during a warm hazy Indian Summer. As summer proper had been pretty reasonable, the countryside I'd seen on my journey had looked parched. Likewise, our garden, as I walked through it to enter the house.

Mum and I had a coffee in the kitchen to catch up with each others news. Dad was away on a trip for a few days so Mum was not only packing away the last of their belongings but was also trying to get the garden into shape - pulling out dead flower stems and burning the first piles of fallen leaves.

When we finished our snack, I took my rucksack up to my bedroom and stared out the window at the Firth of Forth. You could see Berwick Law over on the left and just above the trees on the right you could just make out the Forth Bridge. How I'd miss that view.

I then went downstairs and out to the garden. I'd forgotten how big it was. Surrounded by a six-foot-high wall, it had a large area of lawn in the middle, and was edged with a thick border filled with clusters of tall flowers and large bushes. At the bottom were a few apple trees. The garden seat was now so old and broken you daren't even perch one buttock on it. Instead, I sat on a part of the lawn that I remembered sunbathing on during student summers, reading my way through large Zolas, Kafkas and George Macdonald Frasers. If my parents were on holiday I would raid the drinks cupboard and pour myself a large G & T.

At the side of the house was a huge Pampas Grass that quite possibly was as old as the house itself. As small kids we used to chase each other round it. First this way then that. When we had the dog we chased her but never caught her. When she got too hot she would lie right in the core of the bush and let the draughts that swirled around the lower fronds cool her down.

I got up and walked round the corner of the house to look at the bush. To my amazement, it wasn't there. Instead was a large burnt circle on the lawn with a tiny blackened stump sticking up out the middle. I must have stared for a few seconds before hot-footing it into the kitchen to ask my mother what had happened.

She bit her lip, averted my gaze and tried to stifle her laughter.

She explained that every autumn Dad would crush up some newspapers and stuff them right into the base of the plant and then by lighting them one by one, positioning the match against the wind, the small controlled fires would burn out the dead grass.

Mum decided in retrospect that she had been slightly over-enthusiastic with the quantity of paper and had also forgotten completely the wind-direction part of the instructions. After the first few satisfying seconds of curling smoke and quiet cracklings, a huge gust of warm wind (probably up from the Sahara) ignited all the balls of paper instantly, causing the whole bush to combust into a raging inferno.

Now, my mother is a patient woman, who often expresses the belief that things will work out well in the end. So she indulged this part of her personal philosophy for a critical few seconds, until in fact the flames started licking at the paintwork of the upstairs bedroom window. At this point she started to panic and thought of dialling 999 but then she remembered the garden hose. She ran round the corner to the outside tap, (the hose was always attached), then pulled its length to the scene of her horticultural arson. No water came out, however. She ran back to the tap and switched it on.

By the time she breathlessly returned, it was all over. The flames had rescinded as quickly as they had appeared and all that was left to do was douse the embers and watch a few slimline pieces of ash float away on the breeze.

I had been full of trepidation coming to the house for the last time. I was shocked and annoyed at what had happened to the Pampas grass. A bit of our history had gone up in smoke, but listening to Mum's story had made me laugh so much that I'd regained my perspective. Mum told me that in time the plant would grow back and I thought about other kids chasing other dogs round and round on a hot summer's day and I felt reassured.

The story itself is now part of family history, often brought out at family gatherings alongside the other treasures in mother's portfolio of eccentricities which include the story about her talent for basic photo-retouching using scissors and a black ball-point pen. But that, as they say, is another story.