#LifeInLockdown

Stories From The Shed by Eleanor Porter

I used to think I had a big house. At least, I thought so before the lockdown. In the morning my husband would leave for work and then my daughters would leave for school. The place was my own to work in, as long as I ignored the voice in my head, it sounds something like my grandmother, to get on and do the washing and the cleaning and the cooking. I’ve spent years ignoring that voice and I’ve got pretty good at it.

My son came home from university. His girlfriend joined us for a few days. Then the lockdown was announced, and she couldn’t go home. For a few days the house still emptied out – the girls went to school and my husband, a teacher, went too. Then the schools were shut. My husband was in the loft, zooming colleagues, organising online lessons. Downstairs my son rediscovered his violin. My daughters began a Spotify battle that leapt from room to room around the house.

But we’re lucky, we have a garden. The chicken house, empty since the fox visited one too many times, was just too small, but the shed behind the old chicken run, crammed to the roof with junk, the shed beckoned. It took all of us all day to clear it, making a pile on the lawn – old tents, bits of wood, hen bedding, buckets and spades, abandoned crockery, broken chairs, a wendy house in bits – the flotsam of family life. But once it was empty, with even the bit of abandoned rats’ nest hosed away, it revealed itself as sound and roomy enough, even pretty light, once the cobwebs were wiped from the window.

I’d thought I’d just put a table in and make the best of it, but my husband had other ideas. I’d like to say that I measured out the insulation, cut and fit the planking, wired in electrics, but I’m afraid I just watched in awe. One morning I woke at 5.30 not to the birds, but to the sound of sawing. Soon I began to get a sense of the transformation – and what a transformation! Little by little the lapboard crept up.

Before the end of a week it looked less like a junk shed and more like a sauna. Every morning now I get up and walk to the end of the garden. I’m wearing a path through the grass. There’s a blackbird feeding his mate just the other side of the fence, he cocks his head and stares but can’t quite see me. I can’t hear deliveries, I can’t hear the phone, I can’t hear the washing machine beeping, only the neighbours’ children and the birds. I’m not going back inside.

Eleanor Porter’s book The Wheelwright’s Daughter is out now – available in ebook, audiobook and paperback. Get your copy today by clicking on the cover below.