Essay

I’m not saying it was the Windows’ Fault

But it was at that house our family unravelled

I have been meditating on the very great pleasure which a fine window in the facade of a pretty building can bestow.

With apologies to Jane Austen

I’m not an architect and know little of lines and light and angle, but windows move me. Windows are a building’s equivalent of a good haircut.

This realisation struck me because we have had a new window installed in our kitchen. We had the support beam raised, and the opening widened and now have a lovely, deep, broad window that opens to our garden. It’s not finished yet; the builder has to remedy the surrounding walls but I keep standing in front of it and swooning slightly at its effect. Who would have thought a window could bring such joy?

On a walk recently I passed a house, low and solid, with a window that was a broad rectangle with two casement windows and a fixed middle. The window started about half a metre from the ground. Through this window, behind it on the opposite wall, was another window, too distant to see clearly, but its light gave the front window a feeling of depth as if I stared through a lake that plunged deep into a sylvan world.

I had to wrench my eyes away and force myself to walk on because I wanted to stand and stare and drink in the window and not lose what it stirred within me, a feeling that I had been suddenly flooded with liquid sunshine.

I like a Victorian sash window and a round window, even modern ones made to look like portholes. There’s something playful and cheering as if the house were designed not only for shelter and safety but for fun and laughter.

We have a small round window in our house, high up near the roof that allows light into the attic where no one but the plumber occasionally goes. But from the garden the window sits like a button, or a beneficent sun — the surrounding red bricks its rays — and has the feel you get from a full stop at the end of a sentence, that something good is complete, some little world has been well crafted.

When I went to Paris a few years ago, I stayed in an Airbnb. It was a modest apartment tucked down an alley on the ground floor of a tall building. The windows were long, their lintels painted forest green, and they held so much glass it was like residing behind a shop front, which sounds bizarre but was delightfully uplifting.

And I once visited a house with a curved window seat, made more delightful for having a copy of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca on the seat.

UPVC windows make me wince with their white plastic frames and uniform glazing. Yes, they are durable, secure and insulating, but soulless next to an original leaded light casement with its myriad glass faces winking here and flashing there with an occasional dimple, like a drop in a rippling pond.

I grew up in a house with dreadful windows, quite the worst I have ever seen. The previous occupants had removed the original casements and replaced them with fixed panes and at the top of the panes were slits of louvre with aluminium levers to open the slats of glass. They were the sort of windows to send a Feng Shui running to a damp room with a dark cloth.

It was at that house where everything in our family unravelled. I’m not saying it was the windows’ fault of course, but the constant presence of those windows with their mean openings and their rigid panes must have worked their way into our souls, chipped away at our psyches, ebbed our joy and sucked away any trace of harmony.

It was as if they kept us all tightly bound, imprisoned and constrained. As if the very air we breathed was rationed and dense with the buildup of all my parents’ frustrations and rages. How I longed to throw a window open and let the cherry blossom in, but the tree was denied, severed from my bedroom as if I dwelled behind the glass of a museum.

Perhaps my soul is on an eternal quest for a window that will redress the windows of my childhood. Perhaps my new window in some unconscious way remedies that memory. Truly, we are governed by impulses and desires we know little of; but somewhere deep inside us, our soul knows what it needs, what it desires, what it yearns for. My new window is a balm and I shall revel in its healing.