Granny's vanishing

Granny's vanishing

I am living in Langeais, in the center of France (the Loire Valley, the Chambord castle and the whole bullshit for tourists). In this little town (3000 souls), we have a XIV century castle, and the government's technocrats had decided to build a motorway, 200 meters from it. So they decided to place a compulsory purchase order on the houses of about twenty families. I love democracy.

Eight years later, they decided the motorway would go through woods 5 km away from the city. In fact, 4 years after this second decision, it's not even quite sure, for the now-planned motorway course is crossing private hunting grounds that are belonging to a friend of a minister.

Nevertheless, families had to sell their houses (a good price, but can one value a family's memory?). Those houses were mostly one century and an half old, built with stones. After they had been deserted, they had been squatted, devastated, dismembered of their plumbing, wiring, floorboards, tiled floors, windows, doors, and so on. Many had become very dangerous, for the roof were damaged, and the rain had made the wooden frameworks of the floors unreliable, and sometimes, collapsing.

Yet, something kept on driving me to"visit" those haunted houses. By "haunted", I mean those houses were full of their last owner's memory. It's not a ghost story, but, despite my materialistic way of mind, it often reminded me the novels of H. P. Lovecraft, when he was describing the decay, the smell of mould, the crawling presence of death.

Along with the houses were the gardens, in which I have stolen flower plants, rose trees, and so on to build my own garden.

Even if this page is about Granny, I must reckon I did "salvage" many things for my benefit, mainly old things neglected by others : gardening tools (I make it a point of donor to have only old tools, my aim being to garden like in good old times, before chemicals and electrical tools), door locks (smith-made, with their key), books , photographs, postcards, letters, posters and bills, catalogues, newspapers and any kind of interesting papers. Look in the other pages of this site.

I wonder if you are interested in collecting old things. It's like an addiction : you are addicted or you are not. Many friends of mine are totally indifferent when looking at a French calendar of 1943. For me, it's like the holy graal.

When I began as an haunter, I intended to do a kind of archeological or ethnological study. I thought I could observe without being involved. How wrong. But I can say now that these visits were some kind of "trips", that they have changed me. I can recall that sometimes I was talking to the "owners", in fact: alone. Visiting ruins, I was becoming a ruin myself. I now recognise that I intended to build up my own psychical house on a graveyard. At the worst time, I couldn't live without the smell of death that was emanating from them. It was a kind of obsession. I succeeded in getting rid of it, but I won't tell you how, not yet. Just say through some analytical work. Since the very moment when most of them have been demolished, in fall 1999, I've never been back in those places.

Most of the houses I visited were inhabited by old people. That was obvious by the debris of furniture, clothes, decoration, ... The air was full of smells : oldness, mould, decrepitude, ruin. The silence was deafening. But it was peaceful. Among the devastation, it was a bit like being home.

I will now tell you some anecdotes about some explorations I've done. My souvenirs may seem a bit fuzzy, but I've ceased for a long time to haunt those houses. More than this, there are only five out of twenty that are still remaining. The other ones, on the two sides of a dead end, have been razed to the ground, after they had been used by firemen as a training base.

House n°1 : a one-storeyed house, with a garage and a semi underground vaulted cellar, surrounded by a little garden.

• In the cellar, a well, with a crystalline water at 4 meters from the ground. It was better not to fall into. Behind the door, dungarees, an apron, a leather belt, the whole covered of dust and spider webs. At the bottom of a wall, a pair of gumboots. On a shelf, 200 issues of Rustica, a French magazine of gardening.
• In the garage, bamboo fishing rods, with the landing net. On the shelves, sachets of seeds, unidentifiable spare parts, cans of painting and other toxic products.
• In the house itself, children drawing and exercise books (it's a permanent feature in deserted houses as in junkyard but I will talk of junkyards someday) and lesson books. Some books were clearly catholic-oriented. The Holy Joe's house.
• In the fallow garden, a huge wooden portico, with links for three swings. Each time I went back to this house, I looked into the letter box. One never knows.

House n°2 : a one-storeyed house, with a garage on the ground storey surrounded by a little garden. As this house had been built in the seventies, not much to say. The garage had been converted into a workshop. The ground, the shelves were covered with dismounted electrical machines. Grandpa was found of electricity. Some of his odd jobs were remaining. Gasp! Obviously, they were functional, but terribly dangerous. I remember the arranged fan : no case for the motor, no grate for the propeller. I can't recall the second storey.

House n°3 : a two-storeyed old house, with a garden. The house had been built beside the dyke of the river, so the first storey was having no windows on one wall, the second storey was at the level of the road at the top of the dyke.

• The first storey was divided into five cellars, two of them having a window. No light due to the fallow garden : the plants had grown so much that one could have been in Amazon. The ground of the main cellar was covered with flowerpots, broken or not. Some destroyed furniture, a cast-iron cooker, some undetermined clothes hanging to nails. Another little cellar was having two walls covered with shelves , on which were waiting hundreds of empty jars. Some of them were full of mouldy jam or French bean.
• On nearly each step of the stairs to the second storey was a flowerpot with a dry cactus in it.
• On the second storey, a rose tree had invaded the kitchen, going through the openings of the window and the door.
• The bathroom was 5 meters wide, six meter long, 3 meters high. The shower was 3 meters long, 1,5 meter wide. Everything was over proportions. Even the old Bakelite electrical equipment box was indicating that the installation was using 380 volts three-phase current, whereas, in France the common current is 220 volts single-phase current.
• In the entrance, just beside the door, a two wheels cart that are used in France by old people to go shopping.
• The second storey, actually the attic, was divided in three parts. The first one was an empty bedroom. The second one a chaos. "They" had destroyed brick partitions, and piled the debris, mixing them with pieces of wood, wallpapers, carpet, linoleum and other litters. The third one was scattered with books, papers, straw, broken things and rusty other ones. A mine ! To be noticed : a leg prothesis, in a corner.

House n° 4 : a one-storeyed house with an underground cellar.

• The cellar was nearly full to the ceiling of destroyed furniture. Obviously, the owner did not loose time to move.
• The ground floor was empty. In a wall, there was a cupboard. On a shelf, there was envelope of negatives, dating back of the fifties. The holidays photographs of a French soldier in Algeria. To access to the attic, I've had to climb on the roof to enter. Someone had lived for a while in this inaccessible attic. There was a dirty mattress with rags.

House n°5 : a three-storeyed house divided into flats.

• The first floor was beginning by a corridor which was scattered with rusty metal parts and broken things. There was an old worm-eaten cupboard full of jars, the kind of little children are dreaming about in the fairy tales.
• The second floor was the flat of an old woman. The beside slideshow is extracted from a set of photographs of her (the alterations shown on the photographs are due to my attempt to wash them). In memoriam. The kitchen was furnished following the fifties fashion. Her bed was remaining, with a pile of coat hanger on it.
• The third floor, I can't recall.
• The attic was nearly empty, but the X-ray photographs that were covering the ground were a bit despairing.

Here begin the description of the houses that have been used as a training base by firemen. That mean that they set fires to put them out right after. I don't know what the people that had lived in could have thought of the firemen setting the fire to their house.

House n°6 : the biggest, the most interesting, the most dangerous. It was a huge three-storeyed farmhouse with its outbuilding (two barn and other little buildings).
Well, in this house, all the framework were worm-eaten, most of the floors were collapsing. Only the stairs, made of oak were reliable. The smell of mould, mildew, dampness and dust was mixing with the smell of fire. If you have never been into a burned house, a long time after the fire, you can't know the smell of fire : it is choking.

• In a cellar, there was a pile of five cubic meters of old shoes, mixed with rusted thing and litters. Reading the labels on the cans and bottles, it was obvious that the pile had been here for thirty years, not less.
• The two other storeys were inaccessible, the floors were too unstable or collapsed.
  
• The attic was immense. It was full of old broken things. I can recall a curtain with a beautiful flower pattern. I guess it was dating back of the turn of the century. It was falling into pieces. This attic was keeping the very one recent thing that I saw in this house : a pile of issues of "La Recherche", the French equivalent of the "Scientific American".
• In The attic of the barn, htere was a big wooden box. It was a cube which edge was 3 meter long. It was not nailed but bolted, showing that it had not been a throw-away packing.There was no lid, and no way to know what it had been designed for.
• Half of the attic of the barn had been converted to a flat. In a tiny room, piles of old newspapers had been stored. As there was a hole in the roof, the paper had moulded with the rain. On the top pile, had grown a couple of morels, hoplessly toxic due to the lead of the printing ink of the nawspapers.

Others houses, I can't recall, but I'll try to, and write it down from time to time.
In an attic, there were three children bedrooms (posters of singers on the walls) in a row. Facing them, on the other side of the corridor, there was three ... dovecotes, with almost ten centimeters of dove shit on the floors. Daddy was a pigeon fancier. I imagine the life of his children, rocked by the ceaseless cooing, with the smell of guano.
In another one, ther was in a corner of the cellar, a pile of hundreds of used children pairs of shoes. The main room of the first stair was entirely covered by red wallpaper.

I hope I have shared with you some of my amazements. But I shall warn you : one does not leave intact from the houses he haunts. But this page is about granny. I don't know who was this old lady. She is the one of whom I've got the most numerous photographs. But they were covered with dust, so I've tried to wash them. I did not notice that they were in a bad state, and that the colors were falling into small flakes floating in the sink. Granny was vanishing from any memory, even the physical ones.