If, like me, you lived in a downstairs flat as a child, especially if the flat was in a one hundred year old Victorian villa, then an attic is somewhere that you’re desperate to explore. In children’s stories there were always mysterious boxes and chests stashed away up there, with the occasional drum or antique rocking horse dotted about in dusty corners.
I never got to explore the attic but we did get an opportunity to explore ‘The Mysterious Cellar’, as I recalled in my Exercise Book Encyclopaedia, on page 456 . . .
Stephen Cassidy and the rest of the club were inspired to go down the cellar.
Stephen lowered himself down the depression into the unknown. He opened the door to the cellar. The floor was not on level with the ground. Stephen decided not to risk jumping in.
I decided to go and jump down. It was death or glory.
Luckily it was glory – the floor was a few feet below.
We explored.
And had, for a while, a club in the cellar.
Original page from my exercise book, from spring 1965 when I was 14 years old.
The little wooden chair was one that we’d had as children. We just managed to manoeuvre it into the cellar but it must have expanded in the damp atmosphere as we could never get it out. The ‘bench’ was a table made from large Yorkshire flagstones. The stairs on the right led up to what had been the servant’s back stairs but they’d been boarded over during the conversion of the house into flats and our electric and gas metres were in an under-stairs room we called the lobby.
The candle is in a ham tin. Tins of Old Oak Ham were a staple of Christmas hampers.
On the wall opposite the hatch that we came in by, in large capitals written with the sooty smoke of a candle, was the graffiti inscription:
J ROBB
1946
We got busy with candles too to add decorations to the walls: an electric guitar and, at the entrance to the little passageway at the back:
‘Tunnel of Love’
Although I thought that wasn’t the sort of ambience that we should be aiming for.