Er ... the loveliest house that I’ve ever lived in was one that I lived in with my grandparents when I was a child. And the name of the house was Crosslands. And I have some very happy memories of Crosslands.

It was, it seemed so huge to me as a child. And it had a lovely living room with a piano in it and a lovely sort of hall with lots of carpets and chests and antiques and so on. And there was a mysterious room, it was the drawing room, and we only used it on Sundays, or when the vicar came for tea, or Christmas Day or Easter Day, and I was - used to be amazed about this room because it had the best furniture in it but it was covered up with sheets - it was as if all the furniture was wearing clothes - and it seemed to me ridiculous that we couldn’t en- joy this beautiful furniture all the week through really.

And probably my favorite room was the kitchen. It had a lovely red flagstone floor, which was always highly polished, and an Aga, you know one of those big cookers that heats the whole room so it was always warm there, and there was a kind of clothes-horse above it that we used to hang all our clothes on, and it was just - it was lovely. It was a very warm room with baked bread and - my grandmother used to make ice cream and we’d eat it in there and ... there was a vegetable garden leading from there so I spent a lot of time in the vegetable garden picking peas and eating them - my grandmother used to get really cross with me because I used to pick all the vegetables and the fruit for our meals and then I’d eat half of them, because they tasted so delicious coming fresh from the garden.

Now, I went back to it a few years ago and it was a big mistake. They’ve modernized it inside, they’ve got rid of those lovely old fire- places... have just gone. And they’ve knocked a wall down so the drawing room and the living room have become one big modern plastic kind of room.

But I think what upset me most about it was the feeling that the house had shrunk, it had become smaller and that my memory of this lovely large warm comfortable house had turned into an old house with modernized rooms inside it. And it taught me a lesson really, that you can’t go back on the past and recapture it. But there’s a beautiful memory there.

呃……我住過的最可愛的房子，就是小時侯和爺爺奶奶一起住的房屋了。房子的名字叫“十字地帶”，它留給我一些令人非常愉快的回憶。

房子，在兒時的我眼里，感覺真是好大啊!可愛的起居室里擺放著一架鋼琴，漂亮的大廳里有各種各樣的地毯、柜子、古董等東西。還有一間很神秘的房間，就是會客廳，我們只在周日，以及牧師來喝茶、圣誕節或者復活節的時候才用它。里面有最好家具，卻總是覆蓋著東西―― 就好像所有的家具都穿上了外衣，因此，那時候我一直對這間房子很好奇。不過，令我感到荒謬的是，這么漂亮的家具我們卻一個星期都不能連續享用。