The Victorian House of Lead Pipes, a Garden Mouse, and Absinthe Stains

My recurring dreams lead me back to Westoun. I ‘inherited’ this mid-19th-century house built out of windstone on Wardlaw Gardens from my academic mother, Louisa. 

In my first and second year here, I went to raves in the garage, watched friends sloppily kiss their long-time crushes in the corner of the living room, drank from my first beer keg while doing a handstand in the front garden, and saw drugs for the first time being snorted off the kitchen floor. In a sense, I spent my St Andrews ‘youth’ at Westoun. 

From across the ocean in Texas, I was frequently pulled back to Westoun in my dreams. There, my academic mother sat at the piano with her hands tied to the ceiling by string, striking the keys like a marionette, while I ran through the unknown parts of the house, chased by the frantic tempo of her music. 

These dreams made me horrified to move in. It did not help that Louisa, decked in scarves and holding a large glass of wine, had once drunkenly mentioned that a man died on her bed. The same bed that was to be mine. My biggest concern was how I would walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night without being visited by the home’s prior residents. 

As soon as I received the bit and barrel keys to the heavy wooden front door, I ceased to be afraid. I was no longer a guest passing the white-ringed entry vanity where shots of absinthe once sat; I was Westoun’s caretaker, trying to iron the stains out of the wood. I felt like I now had a responsibility to look after this home with its herringbone floors, tall spider-webbed ceilings, and grand staircase carpeted in red that wraps around the main wall only to lead to nothing. I have since come to adore the house’s hauntings, treating the slamming doors and midnight knocks as something that just nonchalantly happens. 

I take naps in the garden’s only puddle of sunlight and steal hydrangeas from the vacant neighbour. In the blue kitchen with its matching blue tiles, my pink dress hangs from the ceiling drying rack. The dress hung there for the entirety of two semesters, never warm enough to wear in Scotland, and now permanently smells of cooked meat. I sprawl out on the oriental rug in my bedroom and admire the patches where the fibres have frayed and baby-blue ribbons, gifts from a friend of my mother, hang from the chandeliers. I have spent countless hours in the bathtub, finishing all seven of Jane Austen’s novels while eating peanut butter and bananas. The house takes on a voice of its own. It is always Westoun and I. 

In April, when it felt like my life was falling apart, so was the house. A seagull was living in my chimney, and not wanting to evict a single mother, I endured her 5am wake-up calls. The cabinets of my blue kitchen were coming off their hinges, and the entry wall was (and still is) covered in rain-soaked stains, causing plaster to crumble onto the cracked black-and-white tiles, a soft shedding that can be heard at night. A garden mouse named Jonathan took up residence in my bedroom, making frequent visits, jauntily running back and forth from its hole in the wall to hide behind my Le Chameau rainboots.

Finding lead in our water pipes was the height of it all. Deprived of water, I turned to wine for a week. This endeavour quickly came to an end when I walked into St Andrews Wine Company and was greeted by a worker’s pointed finger: “Look, it’s the girl who has bought the same bottle for five days in a row.” I pivoted to pomegranate juice immediately. I sipped it from a wine glass as I watched the front lawn be torn to shreds to replace all of the pipes. 

Now the camellias outside my bedroom window are appearing to bloom again, a signal that my time here is ending as graduation nears. It feels melodramatic to say, but leaving Westoun feels like a part of me is dying. I am losing a space that has become more of a home than the one I grew up in in Texas. 

My dream is to one day buy the house in full, restore it to its proper state, and provide every past resident with a key to return home to. That way, I can watch the flowers bloom over and over again and never worry that my time with Westoun is coming to an end.

Photos by Mari Claudia Reimer