There’s a funny sort of echo in my kitchen this week. It’s hard to describe, but the acoustics are definitely off.
It’s this echo that reminds me that our floor experienced some serious trauma on Saturday – that, and the massive plank of ply wood that is covering up the metre-deep hole just to the right of my dishwasher.
I find it’s O.K if I don’t think about it, because there’s actually something really sinister about a dark, wet, human-sized hole under your floor. It smells a bit, too. Of damp, old mud that hasn’t seen the light for about half a century.
So I am pretending it’s not there.
Big Seymour dug the hole with his own fair hands. He’s good at digging. I watch him dig and I feel quite woozy, especially if I have a little go to show willing, and then realise that he is, in fact, considerably stronger than me, and give up.
The Four Little Seymours got involved with the renovation this weekend, too. The trench (which is possibly now referred to as “The Oversite”, although I’m not entirely sure) still didn’t have enough rubble in it. So we set the Little Seymours to work, hunched over the rubble field that is to be our patio one day, collecting small stones to top up the trench to the required level.
They worked well. Little Seymour Number One took charge of Number Two and Mini Seymour, who reminded me of the poor little mites you often see on Children in Need appeals, scrabbling in the dirt for a living. I gazed at them and thanked our lucky stars that this was a novelty for them, and not an unending reality.
My reverie was interrupted by various clangings and thuds as Boy Seymour couldn’t settle to the job, and was milling about, eyeing up Dangerous Stuff, and hitting things. His method of adding rubble to the trench was with crazy lobs, which were bound to kill someone if we weren’t careful. I encouraged him to play with the wheelbarrow instead.
Later, during Phase Two of the day’s agenda, the Four Little Seymours experienced a touch of cabin fever whilst the floor was being dug up in the kitchen. There was mud flying everywhere and it was cold outside so they were – briefly, confined to the western wing of the Funny Little Bungalow, which consists mainly of bedrooms. I stubbornly refused to turn an electronic device on, and told them all to go and play with their toys.
Well! You would have thought I had asked them to walk barefoot to Brighton on a bed of hedgehogs.
They clearly didn’t want to play with toys.
They were grumpy. All of them.
Boy Seymour was in one of his devilish moods. All he wanted to do was to be with Big Seymour, watching the house being sent further into a state of disrepair. There’s nothing he enjoys more. But, owing to the mud and the dust and the debris, and the planks across the kitchen floor, it was best if he stayed in the West Wing.
I asked him to make his uncle a birthday card, which kept him busy for five minutes and twenty three seconds, until Little Seymour Number Two decided to fling the pencil box over his head and shower him with Daler Rowneys because she had been strongly advised to do her homework and wasn’t too keen. And Mini Seymour started a slanging match with both of them when she dared to take Boy’s best Sharpie and write her name on a chest of drawers, and then stomp all over Number Two’s embryonic homework, which was scattered all over the floor.
Little Seymour Number One had ignored my screen ban, and cleverly managed to secure her place at the desktop computer, in a room we lovingly refer to as Baghdad, under the premise of doing her own homework online. I’m not sure how much French she got done though, as the screen looked remarkably youtubey whenever I popped my head around the door.
But escapism is rather a clever coping mechanism when your house is crumbling around you. And it just so happened that, on Saturday, there was a jumble sale on at the village hall to distract us…
When I could take the bickering no longer, I told the Four Little Seymours that, if they stopped arguing, I might take them to the jumble sale. Soon, it would be safe to traverse the kitchen, and escape to the outside.
But because of the level of discord we were all experiencing, this took rather a long time.
I assured them that, unless they tidied the stuff up that they already had out, we sure as Hell were not going to go and buy more.
This was futile really. Because even after the pencils had been picked up and the card-making debris had been cleared away, and the beds had been made and I had asked Little Seymour Number One to pick the bleedin’ wet towel up for the eighty-eighth time, the house still looked awful.
It was also futile because, in the kitchen, there was Big Seymour, waist-deep in a hole, digging my floor up. That’s never going to be conducive to a tidy house. So I chose to turn my eyes off to the mess, and instead, focus on the exciting prospect of a jumble sale.
I cannot describe how much I like jumble sales. Seeing the Four Little Seymours with their pennies, and what they choose to purchase is a science in itself. This one didn’t disappoint, and several hours later, we rumbled home to a dark house. Big Seymour was nowhere to be seen and the lights were off. But, considering the state of the kitchen when we left, I was pleasantly surprised. It only looked slightly worse than normal, with it’s snazzy new addition to the flooring hiding the cavernous hole beneath.
And, it’s fair to say that it was worth tidying up before we went. It left the Little Seymours – every one of them, with space to rifle through their jumble finds. I didn’t see Mini Seymour for an hour – she was too busy spilling acrylic paint all over a sheepskin rug in her efforts to paint some ceramic Easter eggs that another child had already decorated. There’s now paint everywhere.
Little Seymour Number Two spent ages parading around in assorted pairs of over-sized Karen Millen heels that she had managed to acquire for the grand sum of 50p.
Boy Seymour did quite well and landed himself, free-of-charge, a full set of Manchester United figurines, complete with display stand and box. He hasn’t a clue who any of them are, but his proud little face lights up whenever he looks at them.
And Little Seymour Number One nearly had a meltdown when she realised that her feet are too big for the Karen Millens, but rallied and began playing with the second-hand Play-Doh tools that some other parent had managed to dispatch successfully to the jumble sale, and which are now littered around my house instead.
The Council Man is due to visit our new hole this week. He will look into it, raise his eyebrows and then go away again, satisfied that he has earned a suitable proportion of the £660 I paid him last week. I will resist the urge to push him in. We need him on side for a while to come.
The dust has now settled in the kitchen, and the hole is covered for now. I have got used to the smell, and if I exercise a great deal of self-control, I do not think of all the things that might crawl out of the hole at night. We are not unfamiliar with slug trails in the Funny Little Bungalow, which I find slightly repulsive. But a hole as large as ours could surely lead to other stuff crawling into the house. My imagination runs a bit wild in the dark, and I have watched enough zombie movies to suspect that our hole constitutes a serious perimeter breach. But I shall not fret. Because during the course of this renovation, there are going to be far worse perimeter breaches than a hole in the floor.
Soon, we will have no roof.
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