Up in the Attic

I've been to an excellent concert at the Quaker Meeting House in Rawdon, Leeds, tonight. It's always very peaceful there and it made me think of a hotel we used to stay at that had the same atmosphere.

It's not a hotel any longer: a publishing company is based there now. But there's still a photograph of the house if you click on Eccle Riggs.

Eccle Riggs is a large old stone hall near Broughton-in-Furness, which is a delightful village in the Lake District. Apparently it was once the home of Viscount Cross.

We stayed there often when I was a child. It was owned by the Misses Preston, three religious spinster sisters who were out to do good, in the best possible way. When we used to go there it looked like this old postcard: - oh, how many times have I swung on that swing! It had only been minimally modernised and was still essentially as the Victorians had left it.

I'll tell you more about the rest of it another time. Tonight I want to tell you about the attic.

We often went there in the Spring, at Easter or Whitsuntide. One time the house was very full of guests and the Misses Prestons asked if I would mind sleeping in the attic room.

Up right to the top of the house, up an extra flight of stairs, through its own little door, in amongst the eaves and the water tank.

I loved it on sight. I liked its sense of being apart from the rest of the house, that feeling of being in a secret room on some kind of adventure. I liked the swishings and gurglings of the water tank. I loved the stack of old Victorian paintings next to it, and spent a lot of time looking at them. I liked my little single bed in the corner, with all its old eiderdowns. And I loved the atmosphere of it.

I was a child who was scared of all ghosts, strange atmospheres and things that go bump in the night. I always slept with a light on. I still leave the landing light on at night, so that if I wake in the night I can see the light under the door.

But that room was all calm and comfort and safety, and I've never known why, really. The whole house was all peace and calm as a matter of fact, under the benign stewardship of the Misses Preston: but my room was the epicentre of it.

So in that room, for once in my life, I wasn't bothered about the light.

Which was strange, because I was pretty sure that there were Victorian children in the room. I never saw them. I never heard them. But I just thought that they were there.

I stayed there every visit from then on - it was "my" room. Eccle Riggs became a much posher hotel after the Misses Prestons sold it, with a swimming pool: and now it isn't a hotel at all. But I want to know if the attic room's still there. I expect the old paintings are long gone - but perhaps the atmosphere's the same. I'd love to go back and find out.