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- Story Listed as: True Life For Adults
- Theme: Drama / Human Interest
- Subject: Drama
- Published: 01/13/2021
The outside bolt
Born 1948, M, from Kent - garden of England, United Kingdom.jpeg)
The outside bolt.
When I look back, I wonder what enticed us to buy the house. Outwardly it was just right for our family, in a pleasant and quiet village setting and structually sound, although very neglected, both inside and out.
The photo on the agents card indicated a gabled and tile hung red brick country house of mid nineteenth century style with bay window and overhang style porch, and having a manageable front garden bounded by a spiked wrought iron railing and gate.
The family who had lived there before had done little or no work on the exterior during their forty year tenure, and absolutely nothing on the interior, apart from painting the walls and floorboards in a half hearted and scrappy manner.
Their children had apparently all grown up in the house and had seemingly stayed on well into adulthood, not an unusual thing in the sixties and seventies, as a serious housing shortage in England was endemic following the bombing during the second world war. In large towns it was even more difficult to find an affordable home as folk gravitated from the villages to the towns seeking better employment than the hard and poor paying agricultural work in the country.
In London and other large towns house building was slow to begin as massive clearance of war damage was the priority before work could start, and council housing estates and high rise blocks of flats took priority over private housing to accomodate those made homeless and displaced by the war.
We though, saw the countryside as a new start away from the increasing polution, petty crime and rush and crush of London, buying a house which, though in a very bad state, did have potential for real improvement into a large family home. We would work to give it new life and to improve it to be worthy of a twentieth century family going forward to a better way of living.
As a restorer I saw it as a challenge to bring it back to life.
Our first few months in the house were more like a camping expedition than being at home, as there was no real bathroom, just a tiny cold WC, and all of the ground floor rooms being riddled with serious damp. The house is Victorian, and had originally been built with no facilities of any kind. The WC was in the garden, alongside a small brick log store for firewood, both places filthy and dilapidated to the extent of having being unused for years.
The stairs to the upper floors, steep and narrow, made their twisted way to the spacious top floor, which was where we made our temporary home as we started to restore. The lighting in the house was sparse and dim, as electricity had only been laid on in the early nineteen thirties, so the wiring in the house was very basic, and mains water and gas supplies had only come a few years before then, when a new road was driven through the village, bringing these basic services with it. Previously the house had been lit with candles and oil lamps and water had been taken from a well with a hand pump outside.
I made a start on the restoration on the ground floor, tackling the problem of the damp by digging a trench around the outside walls to once again expose the damp proof course and to dry the brickwork inside and out. At the back of the house the garden had actually encroached through the brickwork to the extent that a large bush was growing right through the wall next to the kitchen, its thick gnarled trunk pushing the brickwork out of place and causing the small broken window to sag to the right.
The place was a complete mess, but in my eyes the house really had potential, and especially at the low price we had bought it for!
As a Victorian house the building does have some quite interesting and desirable features however, as for example, all of the original cast iron fire surrounds and grates remain in place and the main reception room features a very large and imposing gilt framed mirror to one wall. This mirror is almost floor to ceiling and reaches across the wall from door to door, apparently once having had a support bar, as used by ballet dancers, across its face. The original fixings for this hand rail still survive.
The first floor opens off of a narrow landing from the stairs which rise up from the hall. There are four rooms on this floor. At the front and looking out over the village cross roads is a large bedroom with a small closet room adjacent to it. This little closet will become an ensuite shower and bathroom in time, as we get on with the work.
At the very back of this floor was another double bedroom which has two narrow windows, although we have now modified this into a sumptous and large traditionally styled Victorian bathroom, something the house was sadly lacking when we moved in.
It now looks splendid, with the modern luxury features of a heated marble floor, marble lined shower and an old fashioned stand alone roll top bath and matching wash basin. My finishing touch here was to add a glass chandelier and stylish dressing mirror.
The fourth room is somewhat smaller but is also a double. Originally a gloomy and claustrophobic chamber, its window opens onto a plain brick wall on one side and has a very restricted view over the rear garden.
The original room had just a built in wardrobe and small open fireplace with a simple pine mantle, but we have now transformed it to be bright and airy and decorated in a light and colourful scheme.
But it was not always like this.
We call it the 'room of dreams'.
On first moving into the house we used this back room as a storage place for boxes of family stuff, our large book collection and all of the bits and bobs we did not immediately need. It was packed with boxes, bags and wooden crates from floor to ceiling. We shrouded everything with dust sheets to protect our belongings from the dust of the crumbling lathe and plaster of the walls and ceiling which seemed to rot away even as we looked at it.
We had a lot to do elsewhere, so the room was very rarely entered as we began the hard work of restoration in the rest of the house.
The family we had purchased the house from had left a heavy sealed bag with the estate agent for us. This bag contained every key for every lock throughout the house, doors, cupboards, gates, garage and garden store. The locks are all original, good antique Victorian metalwork at its best, and the large keys are all original to these locks, which in the main are of solid iron and brass, through bolted to the doors in the traditional and old fashioned manner.
The door to the storage room was somewhat different from the others in that, although the outward design is exactly the same, the door is substantially much more solidly built and of considerably thicker wood too. The frame is set slightly askance in the wall, but the door has been constructed to fit exactly, with a close fit to the rebate of the architrave. The lock too is very substantial, and has a unique key, a key which will only operate this particular lock, although the other door locks in the house are able to be opened with various of the room keys, albeit some with a little trouble.
Near the top of this door but on the outside of the room was a thick iron hasp held by four screws, and the door could be secured with a strong brass hook from the door frame into this. A foot below this, a heavy locking slide bolt was fitted to the door stile, sliding into a steel tube set into the wood of the door frame. Along with the lock, bolt, and hook and hasp, it seemed that the door was intended to stay firmly locked and closed from the outside!
I do not know if my wife or son ever gave much thought to this, but I certainly did.
It occurred to me that only an adult would be able to reach the hook or bolt, and the hook itself was an extra assurance if the bolt was slid back and forgotten at any time. Above the door a nail had been driven into the wall, and a deep crescent of worn plaster below indicated to me that the brass key to the bolt, shorter than the main iron lock key, had been hung there during its many years of use. In fact, it had hung there long enough for the key itself to have worn smooth at the nose or bit end, whilst the bow had similar wear from hanging on the iron nail. It had probably hung there for over a hundred years, I thought.
We continued with the restoration work and within a year or two the ground floor was transformed, our house was begining to look like a home.
I had installed new oak floors, replastered the walls and ceilings, extended the rear of the house to give a larger kitchen and dining room, and had even incorporated the old delapidated outhouses into the main structure of the house, having removed the inside bush and other vegetation.
Refurbished, these two rooms although not large, made an excellent utility/meditation room and a warm pleasant separate 'loo' for the extended kitchen area.
As we finished each room and decorated, we brought our beloved items down from the storage room to furnish and decorate them.
I had built a large break front bookcase to divide two of the ground floor rooms and this was soon filled with our favourite books, and was nicely set off with the trinkets and curios which our family had collected on our travels. The new kitchen was fitted out with the unused pots, pans and equipment from storage and the gloomy room upstairs was becoming emptier every week.
Friends soon to be visiting England from abroad made it important to get more bedrooms ready for use, so we cleared the remaining jumble and boxes from the room down to the garage as a temporary resort and made a good start on the first upstairs floor. The front bedroom was in generally good condition and only needed a plaster skim to the walls and ceiling before painting and fitting out, although we also took the opportunity to rewire the electrics, renew the pipes under the floorboards and put in radiators and a blind, - job done.
A new purpose made bed, glass chandelier, interesting artwork and attractive curtains and colour scheme made it a welcoming room, the finishing touch being a splendid padded tapestry headboard to the bed, handmade by my wife, with pretty antique gilded angels with outspread wings as the corner supports.
After having a well earned rest from working for a week, I next made a start on the now empty and sad, gloomy storage room. I had not realised what a terrible state it was in as I had filled it with our storage boxes and junk, or indeed, as I emptied it. Now that it was cleared and at long last had a fresh 'bright' lightbulb and newly cleaned window glass, it looked a complete wreck. I had known before that the plaster was in a bad state, but now as I looked, it seemed to have been deliberately scored, scratched and damaged. In fact, in some places it was grooved down to the wooden lathes under the plaster, and the ceiling seemed to have been hit about with heavy objects being thrown at it.
The floor was in a similar state when I removed the filthy dark red paisley carpet. The floorboards were gouged and worn, the wood cracked, splintered and stained with years of dark liquid of some type soaked into it. Unusually the boards had been screwed down rather than nailed, many of the old and rusted slot head iron screws being damaged or exposed by the wood having been dug away around them.
The small black fireplace with its cast iron insert was in good condition, but the stone hearth was cracked and broken. The chimney itself was blocked with old bricks and other debris behind the iron insert, indicating that the fire had not been used for many years. Another stranger feature was that four strong steel plates had been screwed to the floor in a rectangle in the middle of the room. I had discovered these when the ugly old carpet and old newspapers used for underlay were removed. This rectangle was approximately six feet long by three feet wide, with the long sides running along the length of the room. Each plate had a short hinged bar welded to it, which folded flat to the floor, and each bar had two offset screw holes.
Neatly fitted into the floor within this rectangle was a small metal flap door, hinged to lay flat to the boards and with its own Brahma type lock - the only key which we did not have.
Now, Brahma locks are virtually unpickable, very secure and a Victorian invention, still made and used for high security purposes today, so, suspecting that this might be the door to some kind of safe, strongbox or hiding place, I managed to break open the flap after a lot of work with a cold chisel and hammer, only to find it concealed just a simple pair of brass screw terminals alongside a strange electrical device with a big copper coil and a dried out glass leclanche battery. Why was a piece of Victorian electrical equipment locked into a strong box in the floor between the joists, I wondered. Still, it might be worth selling at auction as an antique I thought, and made a mental note to get someone in to look at it.
Begining early next morning, I started to assess how much work there was to be done in the room. The built in wardrobe was in generally good condition inside, although, like the rest of the room, the outside of the door and its frame was in a bit of a state, also being heavily gouged and scratched from top to bottom. I decided to replace it completely and proceeded to remove the door and take apart the frame. The cloud of dust and plaster released as I pulled the frame away from the wall filled the room, and wishing it not to go further into the house I tried to lift the sash window to allow it to disperse. The sash would only open an inch or so before becoming stuck fast, so the room was left for the dust to settle before making another attempt.
After having coffee and making a couple of amendments to a script I was writing, I returned to the room, and on closely inspecting the window discovered that the upper and lower sashes had been stopped from opening any more than an inch or so by hard wooden blocks screwed into the sash boxes, where the weights hung on their cords. Once these blocks were removed the window opened fully, but only after removing the thick clogged paint that had been applied over many years, from the runners.
Hoovering up the dust, I once again turned my attention to the wardrobe, now just hanging with its ripped wallpaper and curtains of cobwebs after the frame had been removed.
Something unusual caught my eye.
The back panel of the wardrobe was papered with an old fashioned floral print, but it seemed as though a raised strip of something was set under the paper across the back wall. Removing the paper, I discovered that the back panel of the wardrobe was hinged about thirty inches from the floor. This was cleverly concealed by the wallpaper inside, and very difficult to see when the door and frame had been in place. Now it was apparent that the back panel could be folded down out of the door, and thus had formed some sort of narrow table. On removing the door I had noticed a wooden ledge screwed onto the inside, and now realised that this had once been used as a side support for the table when the door was open. Behind the table in the wall was a shallow space with three shelves, and, as I lowered the table down fully I had a sudden shock. It seemed that the lower shelf was full of wriggling brown snakes falling out on me through the dust!
I slammed the panel shut, realising immediately as I did so that these could not really be snakes, there had been no movement at all on the shelf or any noise behind the table, and besides, the covering of dust had been undisturbed until I lowered the table.
Slowly dropping the panel again, I saw through the gloom and now rising dust cloud that, what I had thought were snakes, were in fact a number of ancient worn and perished brown rubber tubes, stiff in places and thick with dust. A mouse nest was in the corner of the shelf and strewn around was the shredded wool of an old red blanket which had been nibbled apart, laying alongside a disgustingly dirty and perished hot water bottle.
A smell of aged decay spead out into the room as I slowly took in these items.
The upper shelves held jugs, antique medicine bottles of various shapes and colours, bits of rusty wire, several knitting and crochet needles and an old rusted medical scalpel and scissors. Packs of tissue covered bandage and cotton wool were stacked near the base, alongside a strong and long wide leather belt, the brass buckle now green and aged with verdigris. A small medical handbook, its covers dirty, foxed and stained, was wrapped in a filthy canvas striped apron of the type that butchers once used, and the corner of an old envelope peeped out from between its foxed and discoloured pages. A pair of rusted old fashioned police handcuffs hung from a small hook and a large glass syringe rolled slowly back and forth with the disturbance.
Bringing in a cardboard box, I just dropped these items in it, off of the shelves, pushed the box into a clear space and continued to clean out the corner of the room where the cupboard had been. I now wish that I had thought at the time to take a photograph.
It was getting late in the afternoon, and the setting sun had now left the room dark and chilly, so I finished work for the day, looking forward to a comfy weekend with the family, and maybe even a nice trip out to the nearby coast for a day of beach fun and fish and chips.
With our guests now expected to arrive in just ten days time, on the Monday morning I made a fresh start, clearing away the dust, plaster and dirt from the floor and stripping what was left of the shabby wallpaper. The frame, door and table from the cupboard went into our recycling skip, the rest into the rubbish bin. The cardboard box I put into the garage for later investigation, just in case anything might be of historical interest.
Well, in short, the plasterers came and did a great job of the walls and ceiling, I sorted out the sash window with new double glazed units and removed the bolt and other hardware from outside the door, and went hell for leather at it, painting and decorating the room as soon as the new plaster had dried sufficiently.
We now came up with a plan, bought a new bed, carpet and other furniture and very soon had a beautiful bedroom ready for our guests. Just the smell of fresh paint and the glow of the newly furnished room was a delight to both of us. Hopefully our guests would enjoy it too.
The ancient electrical instrument which had been removed from under the floor now found its way into my office for further research - when of course I could find the spare time to actually do some.
Two weeks passed pleasantly, with the family introducing our newly arrived friends to the locality, enjoying the old pubs, beautiful beaches and many interesting historical places nearby. So much so, that the curiosities of the room slipped from my mind.
However, our guests had had some sleepless nights and many weird dreams during their stay, but we did not hear of this till much later.
Whilst I was being busy with the house and restorations, my wife had been out and about around the village, getting to know the local shops and weekly market.
Of course in a small country village a new face soon becomes noticed and within a month my wife had been introduced to many local people.
An elderly lady had asked her where we were living in the village, and when my wife told her which house, she asked if we still had the large mirror. "I used to practice ballet at that mirror" said the lady, "but of course that would have been in the early nineteen twenties, well before the last war, I was only four when I started to dance".
Within a short time my wife had heard the full story of the lady's dancing career, which she had started in our house. She had gone on to be a successful dancer, both in England and on the continent, only stopping at the outbreak of world war two, when she had joined the RAF as a radio operator and plotter. She now lived alone in her small cottage, along with her memories and photographs.
Of course, she was invited to come for coffee and to see again the old mirror that she had trained in front of, and in due course there we were, sitting at the table and chatting like old friends.
Mildred, for that was her name, had many stories of the village events, and even at her great age she had very good recall. We were told that our house had belonged to a Mrs De'ath, who ran what she called a 'Dance Academy' from the house, largely teaching the younger girls and boys in the village the niceties of ballet and ballroom dancing, a social grace of some importance at that period in the early century.
According to Mildred, Mrs De'ath had come to live in the village around the eighteen eighties, at which time we guessed she would have been about twenty five years old, as Mildred told us that she was around forty when she knew her, and she apparently had later died in London, during the blitz in the nineteen forties.
"She was a strange lady in some ways" said Mildred, "she kept to herself, made few local friends, but obviously had some money as she wore beautiful and fashionable clothes and often traveled. Young women would come to stay with her for a few days now and then, but we rarely saw them about the village, we thought that they may have been her former pupils or students, as she was reputed to have been a well known stage dancer and choreographer before she came here".
"My mother thought her rather common though, a 'music hall type', she called her". Mildred sipped her coffee, dunked a biscuit and carried on. "Her husband was a strange man too, we hardly saw him in the village. He was tall, well spoken and very well dressed but would have nothing to do with anybody around here, a bit of a mystery really, but of course it takes all sorts to make the World go round". At this point we slipped back into local small talk, but my curiosity was aroused.
We tried to find out more of course, but few of the older folk in the village either had known, or now maybe, did not even want to talk about Mrs De'ath and her dancing academy.
We found a clue later though!
The top floor of the house, although also very dilapidated, had huge potential for installing a master bedroom as a self contained suite at the front. If I was to give up the clutter of my "office" up there it could actually become a medium sized but well presented separate apartment, we thought. I had taken over the top floor back room as soon as we moved in. As an office it enjoyed a nice view, and also made a great escape place for me to write and paint in, away from casual interruptions.
A gable to the front of the main room, big enough for use as a walk in wardrobe, is ballanced on one side of the room by a three pane dormer window on the other, with a beautiful outlook over the rear garden and countryside. With a south facing view and the clear dark night skies that we enjoy, I currently use it as an observatory for my telescopes and as an art studio during the day.
So I set to work, designing the room to be something special for us both to enjoy, spacious, elegant, warm and airy.
It was whilst removing some skirting that I found the old visiting card.
Neatly printed on fine cream laid board in a scrolling script of gold embossed letters was the legend "Mrs A. De'ath, qualified dance instruction and other services." Under this was an address (though not ours) in the village, and a old four figure telephone number, which we later discovered to have once been on a west London exchange. The card had obviously slipped down behind the broken skirting from the window sill and was still in excellent condition, although around eighty or ninety years old.
I slipped it into my wallet and carried on with the work.
Buying a dilapadated wreck is fun, like starting a painting on a fresh canvas with clean brushes and unopened tubes of paint, you become the artist and are able to create your ideal home. With the cash saved by buying the house cheaply, one can invest in having what you really want, rather than having to go with the mundane ideas of builders or previous owners. In fact you can expand your mind into your home.
Our guests had now returned from their personal travels about the UK and were preparing to start packing to return home. We took them out for drinks to a local hostelry and in the course of conversation they asked us about the house.
We gave them the rundown on what we had achieved in the couple of years since moving in.
They were particularly interested in 'their' room, and admired the decoration and pictures and commented on the comfortable bed.
"A funny thing though" said Paul, "is that although we have both slept well, we have both had disturbing dreams".
It seems that these dreams, largely forgotten soon after waking, were of strange and sometimes terrifying content. "People screaming, clinking noises and a feeling of confinement and fear have often been part of my dreams, but Lucy has been more affected than me" he continued.
Lucy had actually been frightened by her dreams and had woken up crying with fear on several occasions, feeling that she had been harmed in some way. Paul told me this privately, Lucy would not talk about her experiences to me.
She did talk to my wife though, and confessed that she had had the feeling of being constrained, violated and left alone in these awful dreams.
"It was as if I was tied down, drugged somehow and molested, but aware at the same time that I had agreed to this. Often a face was close to mine, staring at me and holding something over my mouth, as I lay looking towards the ceiling, I felt terribly cold, without love or care and desperately alone". She would rather not talk about it, said my wife, who then told me not to mention the matter to our guests again. "Lets make their last days here really happy". And so we did, the dreams not mentioned again.
It was a week or two after they left that an old friend came to call. We went off up to my office, which he calls 'the toy shop' to chat and have coffee.
Now, I like junk, as an artist everything has potential and so my office is crowded with both useful and useless stuff, exactly the stuff that Jim also enjoys.
He particuarly liked the look of the old electrical device and poked around with it, cleaning the contacts and checking the wires. "You know what I think this is?" he said. "I think what you have here is an old induction coil, probably a quack medicine device from the old days". Of course I told him about where I found it and he was intrigued, so much so that he asked if he could try to make it work.
"The principle is simple" he explained, "this coil is actually two coils wound together, putting an electrical current into one induces a current into the other, usually smaller or larger according to how it was wound". He went on to tell me that this type of device was used for giving electric shocks, supposed at the time to be beneficial to the patient, or to stun pain away, although personally I have my doubts.
Now full of enthusiasm for this new antique toy, Jim suggested that we try it out. "You are not giving me any shocks" I told him!
Nevertheless, my curiosity got the better of me, and like a couple of kids with a new toy we got to work. The Lecanche cell was a no no, ancient, dried up and needing acid before it could be charged and used, but Jim had a plan.
The battery from my portable drill was put into service as the power source, connected in an ad hoc manner using some lighting flex. At last Jim threw the brass leaf switch and the room was suddenly brightened by the gold and blue flash of a four inch spark flying between the brass terminals, along with the acidic smell of ozone. It was like a moment from a Frankenstein movie!
Anyone who had a model railway as a child would recognise this strange electrical stench immediately.
Of course, when our eyes cleared we did not leave it there, and continued our experiments with the glee of five year olds, completely oblivious of the dangers. We tried this and that, producing bigger and better sparks, both now wearing sunglasses, with Jim looking particularly mad in my wives yellow frames.
Within an hour the battery was flat, both of us had been stunned by huge electric shocks and Jim had a fair sized burn to the back of his hand. We decided to call it a day, and went for a beer.
It was at the pub that our common sense returned. Jim told me not to experiment with the device again, "too much chance of a serious injury or a heart attack," he said. But we did discuss what had been its previous use in the house.
"I suspect it was used by a doctor or maybe a vet" said Jim. "If I get time I will do some research on old medical electricals. Can I take it with me?"
We agreed on further investigation and went back to enjoying the pub atmosphere.
A few days later Jim rang to tell me that he had more information and that there should be some other parts for the device, maybe I could find them somewhere in the house? It may have been used to knock people or animals out before procedures, he told me. "Medicine was rough in the old days", he joked.
I looked around for more parts without really knowing what I was looking for, and without success, and then remembered the box of stuff which I had cleared from the cupboard.
There were no electrical bits, but I did go through the stuff and found the medical handbook. The envelope still peeped out from the pages, and sitting in the kitchen with a hot coffee I read the contents.
The envelope was addressed to Mrs De'ath (as the address here would have been in those days, well before the war), and the note was scribbled in a shaky hand with a fine steel nibbed dipping pen and ink on paper torn from a small notebook. The ink was blotched here and there with water droplets, or maybe, I now think, tears.
It read:-
Dear Madam,
I have been told by my young man that I need to take a dancing lesson with some urgency. He insists that we cannot be seen together again until I have had your lesson and that you will understand. I have seven pounds and four pence only in my savings and I hope that this will be enough to pay for the lesson. I will travel alone to the village by train and I will be waiting at the church gate on Sunday after the morning service. I will wear a blue felt hat with a feather and rose decoration so that you might recognise me.
I wish that you can help me soon.
With sincerest hope, J.L.
Ps. I can get a little more after Easter.
Well, make of it what you can.
I mused over it for some time, as did my wife, and we both came to the same conclusion, this time with tears in our eyes.
A time old problem that many girls have faced, and sadly, many still do.
This year we started on the garden, and decided that what we needed was somewhere to sit and relax in the summer, close to the sound of tinkling water. We proceeded to mark out a decked area and called in an expert to design and dig out a good sized natural pond. The workers had gone down about three feet before they discovered the skull, and now forensics are carefully excavating the many bones.
There may be several bodies.
We are not allowed into our nicely restored house whilst investigations take place.
We may never want to return anyway.
The bones are all of young women, the sad victims of Mrs De'aths dancing academy and 'other services'.
We desperately hope that some survived to keep the secret of their unfortunate youth. We leave what went on in that terrible room to your imagination.
Copyright Ken DaSilva-Hill 2021
The author retains all intellectual rights to this original work.
No publication in any media, printed, electronic or other, without the authors specific written permission.
Screenplay available.
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