Old Doors
There is a saying that the doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live. Certainly when I first stepped over the wobbly threshold at Rock House it was clear there was no going back. A chronic case of love at first sight. Rather like the time I saw David Cassidy in concert and fainted (I was only 11). Mark, who long ago gave up hope of any new doors opening for him, takes a more pragmatic view and says we only bought it because the bell worked. And it is true, the plain brass push button on the brick façade has such a firm chime that it withstood the Second World War’s bombardments that obliterated half of Swan Terrace at the bottom of the road.
However, the door itself is in tatters and desperately in need of replacing, but I am resistant to change, no matter how sympathetic. Besides the obvious (a new door would cost around £1,000), this plain, six-panelled Regency scrap of rotting hardwood carries with it 150 years of history; of people pushing open and pulling close, the secrets of the inhabitants. From the battered old door at Rock House I can see the spire of St Clement’s, the medieval church that forms the backbone to the old town – although currently shrouded in scaffolding for repairs, the door has kept guard since 1380.
When the Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti decided to marry Lizzie Siddal there on the 23 May 1860, the bride was so frail she had to be carried through the ancient door, even though their home on the High Street was only a few minutes’ walk away.
No family or friends were invited, instead they chose a small group of locals to bear witness. Inside the church there is a sanctuary lamp commemorating their union, alongside a memorial to Rossetti.
The couple had been coming to Hastings since the 1850s, mainly for Lizzie to convalesce. Her health had never recovered after posing for John Everett Millais’s epic portrait of her as the drowning Ophelia – a task that involved the poor girl lying in a tin bath of cold water for weeks on end and led, unsurprisingly, to pneumonia.
When Lizzie died of a laudanum overdose two years after their wedding, Rossetti was sent half mad by his loss and buried her with the only manuscript of all of his poems wrapped into the folds of her waist-length red hair. Seven years later he decided to publish the poems and had them ‘recovered’ from her coffin which, I suppose, does prove that not all decisions are irreversible.
Next week: Preparing for the trenches.
However, the door itself is in tatters and desperately in need of replacing, but I am resistant to change, no matter how sympathetic. Besides the obvious (a new door would cost around £1,000), this plain, six-panelled Regency scrap of rotting hardwood carries with it 150 years of history; of people pushing open and pulling close, the secrets of the inhabitants. From the battered old door at Rock House I can see the spire of St Clement’s, the medieval church that forms the backbone to the old town – although currently shrouded in scaffolding for repairs, the door has kept guard since 1380.
No family or friends were invited, instead they chose a small group of locals to bear witness. Inside the church there is a sanctuary lamp commemorating their union, alongside a memorial to Rossetti.
The couple had been coming to Hastings since the 1850s, mainly for Lizzie to convalesce. Her health had never recovered after posing for John Everett Millais’s epic portrait of her as the drowning Ophelia – a task that involved the poor girl lying in a tin bath of cold water for weeks on end and led, unsurprisingly, to pneumonia.
When Lizzie died of a laudanum overdose two years after their wedding, Rossetti was sent half mad by his loss and buried her with the only manuscript of all of his poems wrapped into the folds of her waist-length red hair. Seven years later he decided to publish the poems and had them ‘recovered’ from her coffin which, I suppose, does prove that not all decisions are irreversible.
Next week: Preparing for the trenches.