Four oneiric palaces
Building one:
An old bookshop, also selling antiques, in a marketplace in a river-bank town. The frontage is Georgian bay, recessed under a set of arches. It is narrow, one window and door, and there is a series of rooms stretching back from the front. While ostensibly selling shelves of antiques, it has shelves of books which are always interesting and underpriced. A labyrinthine modern covered market in the same town, a little further out, has bookstalls, cafes, and a second hand clothes shop.
Building two:
An Edwardian town house, three storeys plus basement. The front is a small garden, extending from the top of a wall that borders the road. The house is filled with creeping plants, up the walls, up the tables, across the carpets, and the house merges into an elaborate greenhouse at the back. The garden has an Anderson shelter, but also a large mound, which merges at the back into rubble and an open decaying concrete yard, of some post-industrial nature.
Building three:
A Victorian mansion of five stories, plus basement. The exterior is the tall redbrick secondary school I went to, within the grounds of my old work, and, like that, bordered on one side with a graveyard. The interior is occupied classrooms and dorms, whitewashed, connected, not by corridors, but a variety of small doors you must crawl through. The floors are joined by three staircases left, right, and centre of the building. One outer staircase is narrower and more complicated, and used to be for servants. The basement, which moves between all the buildings, is partly open, partly brick arches, and partly a series of interconnected rooms, dark, and smelling of damp and brick decay. It is full of rubble and excitment. One way from the basement to the buildings above is via an old chimney, actually a palimpsest of old chimneys, which interconnects upwards through complex spelunking into the building.
Building four:
Across the playground from the mansion, is a low series of whitewashed brick sheds, the door into which, on the surface an outhouse, reveals an old woodpanelled interior. Climbing the short stairs immediately inside the door, ahead is a 1950s kitchen, like a cafe, but containing a shower at the back; it is the only thing close to modernity. To the right, a corridor extends. Left of the corridor, up a short set of stairs, is a door. Down to the right is another set of stairs into what seems to be a carpeted dead-end pit, but infact bottoms out at a small square landing and a door. Through the door is a library, with a variety of dark wooden stairs in it leading to shelves. The stair sides, like tree trucks, contain small doors. At least one is blank, while another has a small cupboard containing old waxed jackets, folded into a pile. At the top of one flight is a door to an archive, piled high inside with papers. Returning to the corridor, following it leads up a short flight of stairs to a whitewashed school room, like an old backup for the mansion, and, through this, a greenhouse. The name of the building is "The Foster In".
22 Dec 2023