The House of Opposites

The old man tried to keep one room clear of clutter. There were tangled heaps of unrelated things behind closed doors, filling both cupboards and rooms, and there was evidence of his hoard slowly establishing itself in the hall. There was, however, one meticulously tidy room and it was a sanctuary of sorts. Order and disorder co-existed in stark contrast under his roof, but more importantly in his mind, and given their increasingly uneven distribution it appeared chaos was winning. “It is important to keep one room tidy in the event of an unexpected arrival”, he said, but other than myself (a neighbourhood message boy), I wasn’t aware of anyone ever crossing his threshold. 

If he was proud of his sanctuary he was ashamed of his hoard. After a short burst of his shrill and somewhat deafening doorbell he could be heard hobbling around in the hall on his crutches, closing closets and pulling doors towards him until they clicked shut. It took a while. To hurry things along I would sometimes announce myself by whistling through the letterbox, at which point he would immediately ease up and release the chains, bolts, locks and latches, their unmistakable sound echoing in the tenement stair. Lest anyone should glimpse the jumble that lay beyond, he opened the door no longer than was necessary for me to quickly slip in with a box of groceries, an effort on his part that no doubt served to fuel the curiosity of his neighbours. Yet he didn’t conceal his haphazard heaps from me. Indeed, I was often sent on complex missions behind enemy lines to retrieve items from those warrens of clutter, being just small enough to squeeze between the bags, travel trunks, tea chests and cardboard boxes.

After delivering his groceries I usually hung on for a chat. Indeed, I looked forward to our conversations, for the old man had a wealth of knowledge, and I had an insatiable curiosity — as much then as I do now — about the perilous state of humankind. They didn’t have atom bombs available in that war or they would have used them, but they were used towards the end of the war that followed, and I had no doubt they would be used in the next: the world’s end. But for the moment, in that era of mounting nuclear arsenals and bomb testing, just twenty years after Hiroshima, we talked about his war. I learned about machine guns that fired 500 bullets a minute to instantly cut down men in their thousands, about bayonets and how they were trained to use them to twist a man’s gut, about chlorine, phosgene and mustard gases that asphyxiated, burned or blinded over a million people — a war crime of which all belligerents were guilty — about trenches and going over the top, and about trench heights, trench fights, trench lookouts, trench tunnels, trench miles, trench foot, trench mouth, trench lice, trench toilets, trench stench, cholera, puttees, amputations, artillery bombardment, shell shock, enormous craters, helpless soldiers, blundering generals, the letters home, hard biscuits, mad songs, crazy mates and majestic horses. 

The old man really only wanted to talk about mates and horses, especially horses, and though I pressed him for all the details imaginable on the grisly stuff, he was not so forthcoming on the subject of gore. Nonetheless, I learned that in one horrifying moment — in the change of an instant, as he often put it — a shell blast took his horse, his leg and the lives of his comrades, scattering them across a cratered battlefield in France. I visited that scene many times. I heard the shells whistling through the air and the devastating explosions that followed, I felt the dirt sting my face as it fell from the sky, and I saw the torn bodies hanging on the barbed wire.

Whilst he could swiftly and surreptitiously redirect conversations about trench horror to trench humour, he couldn’t ignore the creeping barrage of junk within his house. It is possible, I suppose, that the shambles within his rooms unconsciously symbolised the carnage of the battlefield, and perhaps the otherwise pointless objects piling up on him signified displacement in some way from the memory of his dead comrades. Not easy to let go of the dark stuff, I should think. When Archimedes advanced his principle of fluid dynamics in relation to objects, he might have extended it to the study of memories, for they also have a certain buoyancy. The deeper they are submerged the greater the pressure and upward thrust. I imagine memories lying dormant in an ocean of sorts, suspended at various hidden depths, occasionally bobbing unbidden to the surface. Much as we may wish it, we can’t undo what has been done, and memories, those parcels of experience, don’t necessarily decay.

The sanctuary, it seemed to me, constituted the old man’s last dignified stand on Earth. Things of quality found their way to this tidy and presentable room. Albeit with missing parts, a dazzling crystal chandelier distributed prismatic colours around a highly organised space, one that accommodated an out-of-tune piano, a suite of crudely patched furniture, and those accessories of memory adults called ornaments. I distinctly remember the pewter-framed photos of horses and army comrades positioned thoughtfully on the mantelpiece, his rack of meerschaum pipes with sinister faces, the display cabinet of curiosities from across the Empire, the fierce and in many ways eerie African masks on the wall beside the enormous mahogany bookcase, and the cage with a tweeting mechanical bird perfectly poised on a perch swing. 

With just a small scullery off, the old man slept behind a velvet-curtained recess in that room, one just large enough for a bed with built-in drawers underneath. On the wall of this small enclosure there was a much-faded framed print of the angels ascending and descending a staircase, which I think now may have been Jacob’s Dream, or ladder, as imagined by William Blake. It would be the first thing the old man saw when he woke each morning, and I wonder how he imagined existence at the highest steps. He certainly knew the steps to hell. It is, however, no one’s destiny to be trapped there, and I believe the old man sensed this. For all his dark experiences and his daily struggle with the hoard, he was optimistic, and I greatly admired that. Indeed, I aspired to it

In stark contrast with the sanctuary, the everything collection on the other side of those hastily closed doors blocked all but a hint of daylight from entering. It included piles of decades-old yellowed newspapers, a large button-eyed teddy bear sporting a tartan scarf, and a dog-sized animal with tusks — I think now that it may at one time have been a boar, rendered macabre in its re-creation by an amateur or perhaps drunken taxidermist. “I’m a bit of a hoarder,” he occasionally confessed with a little laugh, though that of course explained nothing. I may have been one of the few people to have witnessed his hoard, having climbed over and through it often enough — on one occasion, and with immense difficulty, I had to retrieve a bridle from over the heaps in order for him to complete one of his stories about his horse — and I was perhaps the only one to have ever looked inside his cupboards. 

I opened the wrong cupboard door once to fetch something for him, and an avalanche of objects tumbled out: spent shell casings, tobacco tins, boxes of brass buttons, a bashed battle helmet, press cuttings, pamphlets and eerie puppets. Unperturbed, he calmly helped me cram all the items back into the hall press, explaining the history of each as he did so (all of the old man’s stories carried a moral on the triumph of perseverance). The last time I saw the old man he gave me a gift from one of those cupboards, a belt clasp of the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders, his former regiment. On being secured to a waist belt strap, this interlocking clasp bearing a boar’s head in the centre could, I suppose, be a soldier’s weapon of last resort — being of sufficient weight to crack a man’s skull — but I have no doubt that for the old man it was simply a buckle. I treasured it.

Apart from the view, the great advantage of living on the top floor of a Glasgow tenement is the long slide down the banisters — once the brass nodules have been removed — and I did just that after every visit to the old man’s house of opposites. I remember I had this habit of counting each step under my breath as I climbed the stairs to his flat: “just seventy to go, just twenty, just ten”, stopping at each landing with his box of groceries for a brief rest. Every week he made a grocery order in copperplate handwriting for Louisa at the local delicatessen, a kind lady for whom I also did odd jobs, and who had an amazing long-haired cat called Fluffy that shed vast amounts of hair whenever I picked her up. By virtue of careful dietary modifications on Louisa’s part, coupled with persistent cognitive stimulation, Fluffy lived for thirty human years, which must have been at least a hundred and thirty in cat years. But Fluffy cuddling apart, my mission was simply to deliver the note, pack the box and execute the delivery, thereby making an easy five shillings a week (in those days we called that a dollar), which I then gave to my mum who in turn spent it on food at Louisa’s. The circle of life.

One day after school I went up to see the old man to check if he needed anything, though also with the intention of hanging around for one of our great talks. I rang his doorbell, banged on his door, rattled his letterbox and whistled through it, but there were no lights on, no sounds, no doors clicking shut. It was not until his neighbour shuffled out onto the landing in her ridiculous faux fur slippers that I learned that Joe, as she knew him, had passed away. She had most likely looked through her spy-hole and recognised me, though I had never before spoken to her. As her words sank in, the slippers were no longer ridiculous but offensive, and increasingly so, yet I couldn’t stop myself from focusing on them, their button eyes staring back at me. My dad always took the time to put on his jacket and to button it before answering the door, and that was for nothing, but she wore slippers to inform me of my friend’s death. Bare feet would have been preferable. And she casually used his first name. I had never used his first name, not once. It was always respectfully Mr Anderson when I was speaking to him, and the old man when speaking about him. I was angry with her, and wanted to call her an idiot for being so indifferent, but instead simply pressed her to be sure we were talking about the same person. Yes, we were talking about the same person, she said, as she retreated into the stuffiness of her house. He’s just dead, son, that’s it, he was old. She closed the door firmly, and I heard something chime in the old man’s apartment.

The war ended for the old man in 1916, some fifty years before I knew him, but looking back now after more than half a century it seems likely it continued throughout his life. The organisation of his home into divisions of clarity and clutter was perhaps a reflection of his inner conflict: two fronts blotched into a strange chiaroscuro, one where he was hoarding enormous heaps in closed dark spaces, and another where he created a bright, presentable space for others, or simply for himself. There would be much among his cluttered heaps that triggered memories of the people he cared about, and certainly of his passion for horses, but other memories would more likely be nightmarish. I doubt if anyone could come back from hell unscarred, and the loss of his leg was perhaps the least of it.

I ran off, holding back tears, and for the first time did not even think of sliding down the banister. I felt a mixture of anger, betrayal, and an inexplicable sense of guilt. I returned to his flat a week later and looked through the letterbox. The light was coming through to the hall from all the rooms, their doors flung open, but it revealed nothing. It was as if he had never been there. The only trace of him that remained was a button-eyed teddy bear with a tartan scarf, a remnant of his hoard now mockingly pinned to the grille of a bin truck that did the rounds in our area. No doubt they had cleared his rooms, and I bitterly imagined them having a good laugh doing so. 

At my lowest point, my dad retrieved the old man’s Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders’ clasp from among my own kind of muddle, and placed it alongside the carefully chosen few on our sacred altar, the mantelpiece. That, I guess, was what amounted to grief counselling back then, not comforting words or long hugs, but simply that of giving the memory of the old man a permanent place in our living room. And it kind of worked.