Have I been pretending that it never happened? I think maybe I have. If you have read “Hate it here” you will know that I hate the house in Cokeworth. I recently described the house in Grimmauld Place and will do more no doubt in more detail about various places. The area is famed you see for making pottery and it was one of the workers cottages that went along with it. There was a road in front of the house which was unusual. There were eight houses in our terrace of houses. Four, then a small path just wide enough for two people to pass down and then another four houses. At the end of the road was the pottery. My grandfather used to work there, and his father before him. Each house had a tall chimney that reached as far as you thought it could go and beyond.

Each of the houses were opposites of each other, and had a front door on either side. There were no gardens for any of the houses. They also backed on to each other. I design that seems to go back to medieval times. People used to look at my uncle and I and think that we were very strange. We were the “odd ones” in town. The only ones that didn’t work at the factory even though my grandfather had done. People had the assumption that because my mother had died, that we were now to spend life in eternal mourning. Simply because my uncle wore black robes and other “robed” people came to the house.

Our house was at the end of the row near the path, or snicket as it is called. At the end of the road was the factory where pretty much everyone worked on a daily basis. Along the other way was the river. It was dark and horrible.
It is the smallest of all the houses that I have lived in. On the ground floor you enter a study area. It was filled with books, and an armchair. There was a large fireplace but everyone had one of those. If I close my eyes, I can still see the wooden seat under the window that we kept things in. There was a rug on the floor which was tiled and I remember thinking it was very luxurious because it was long and green. I used to play with Nagini on that rug and we would crawl around for ages with it. It also had a kitchen out the back, accessible through an arc, which was modern for the time. My grandfather did not like magic in the house and would punish anyone for the use of it. The downstairs was mainly green and brown.

Upstairs were two bedrooms and a bathroom. When I lived there, I had the back bedroom, presumably because it was the smallest and my mother had the front bedroom. My mother did the best she could to decorate it and but wallpaper of dancing clowns around it. This backfired dramatically when I realised that my boggart was actually a clown and this was why. It wasn’t as if they would attack you or hurt you even. I just didn’t like them. When I was older, I managed to transfigure the room into something a little more comforting. I made plants grow up the side and made it look as though I were in a tree.

Today a new house stands in its stead. They demolished the old terraces and factory and instead built a bigger more, modern house. Did I mind? No not really. All I would say it that if you are passing, or for those of you that may even live there and don’t know who I am… visit the museum. You won’t find a pictured of my grandfather but stand by the river, take in the golf course and try and imagine what it used to be like.