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    Not Quite Lost: Travels Without A Sense of Direction
    Not Quite Lost: Travels Without A Sense of Direction
    Not Quite Lost: Travels Without A Sense of Direction
    Ebook153 pages2 hours

    Not Quite Lost: Travels Without A Sense of Direction

    By Roz Morris

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    About this ebook

    In life there’s the fast lane, and then there’s the scenic route. Take your time getting there and you might meet people whose stories are as gripping as those of any famous name.

    In Not Quite Lost, Roz Morris celebrates the hidden dramas in the apparently ordinary. Her childhood home, with a giant star-gazing telescope on the horizon and a garden path that disappears under next door's house. A tour guide in Glastonbury who is having a real-life romance with a character from Arthurian legend. A unit on a suburban business park where people are preparing to deep-freeze each other when they die.

    But even low-key travel has its hazards, and Roz nearly runs down several gentlemen from Porlock when her brakes give up on her. She takes her marriage vows in a language she doesn't speak, has a Strictly-style adventure when she stumbles into a job as a flashmob dancer, and hears an unexpected message in an experiment in ESP.

    Wry, romantic, amused and wonder-struck, Not Quite Lost is an ode to the quiet places you never realised might tell you a tale.

    'Move over, Bill Bryson...' Independent bookseller Peter Snell

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRoz Morris
    Release dateOct 2, 2017
    ISBN9781370626823
    Not Quite Lost: Travels Without A Sense of Direction
    Author

    Roz Morris

    STOP PRESS! Roz Morris's novel Lifeform Three was longlisted for the World Fantasy Award.NEW RELEASE! Ever Rest, Roz's long awaited 3rd novel, launched on 3 June 2021. Read it now!Roz Morris writes fiction and essays about unusual ways we can be haunted and how we seek people and places we belong with. Her work has been profiled by The Guardian, Literature Works, the Potomac Review, Rain Taxi and BBC Radio.Her fiction has sold more than 4 million copies worldwide, although you won't have seen her name on the covers - she began her career in secret, ghostwriting fiction for big-name authors.Now she's coming out of the shadows. Her own novels have been described as 'profound tales and compelling page-turners', with fine-honed language, unforgettable characters, and gripping, unusual storylines. Plaudits include a top-ranked title in the American Library Journal programme, a longlisting for an international award alongside Neil Gaiman and a finalist position in the People's Book Prize 2017.She is a writer, journalist, fiction editor and the author of the Nail Your Novel series for writers. She teaches creative writing masterclasses for The Guardian newspaper in London and is also the author of a series for writers - Nail Your Novel.If you want to get to know her a little better, drop in at www.rozmorris.wordpress.com and her blog www.nailyournovel.com - where she keeps a regular diary of challenges she's tackling in her writing. Follow her creative adventures in her newsletter https://tinyurl.com/rozmorriswriter

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      Book preview

      Not Quite Lost - Roz Morris

      Not Quite Lost:

      Travels Without A Sense of Direction

      Roz Morris

      Not Quite Lost

      Travels Without A Sense of Direction

      Copyright Roz Morris 2017

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording in audio or video form, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the express, written permission of the author. This permission must be granted beforehand. This includes any and all reproductions intended for non-commercial or non-profit use.

      If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Author’s note: the events described in this book are real. Certain characters have fictitious names and identifying characteristics.

      Published by Spark Furnace, Cambridge House CB10

      Cover art by Leo Hartas and Roz Morris

      Contents

      Eve of destruction: a childhood home Alderley Edge, Cheshire

      Pardon our French Paris; Mexico City

      Nobody comes here in November Craven Arms, Shropshire; Penzance, Cornwall

      You are not Morgana and I am not Merlin Salisbury, Wiltshire; Glastonbury, Somerset

      I came to find her Westhumble, Surrey

      Staircases to nowhere Torrington, Devon

      Travels without a sense of direction Suffolk

      A time traveller’s road The A303, Wiltshire; Somerset

      How to win an argument about a window Norfolk; Lincolnshire

      Cold sleepers Cryonicists of East Sussex

      You’re not from here Holcombe Rogus, Devon; Porlock, Somerset

      The mother ship Shropshire

      An earthquake Vicenza, Italy

      A bad cold and a village of lost voices Purton Green, Suffolk

      An experiment in ESP Roehampton, London

      Power stations of the mind Gate Burton, Lincolnshire

      Strictly faking it Liverpool Street Station, London

      Heyday Baltonsborough, Bath; Somerset

      West word The places of Not Quite Lost

      About the author

      Other books by Roz

      Where to connect with Roz

      Eve of destruction: a childhood home

      Alderley Edge, Cheshire

      ‘Roz, good to bump into you here on Facebook! Did you know your old house has been knocked down? So sad.’

      Many reunions on social media bring a surprise, but they are rarely so seismic.

      I searched immediately for my old street on Google Earth.

      Outside my window, it was a cold night in February 2017. On Google Earth, it was the previous summer.

      The trees were lush. I hovered in over lawns cropped short, streaked with straw-coloured sunburn. And my old house, a mountain range of red roofs, was still whole.

      I hived off some screenshots and posted a brief note on Facebook, where other friends sympathised. I ran around the web, searching by the house’s name, trying to collect other glimpses before they were overwritten by updates. Or, simply, by time.

      Which is odd because I left the house in 1983, aged 17, and went back as little as possible – a few times a year, and even that was too often.

      My parents sold it in 1996, after the divorce. My mother wanted me to help her clear it up for sale but I wouldn’t be dragged back.

      ‘All your things are still here,’ she said, hoping I would help her do something with the accumulated junk of child years, and the teenage books, clothes and stuff. I preferred to abandon it. Even my teen diaries, which I have to hope no one could be bothered to read.

      The divorce wasn’t a surprise. Harmony was a fragile commodity in that house, because of the way my parents’ personalities mixed. By my teen years, a raised voice would put me on edge in case it turned into rage. I learned not to create problems for them.

      At the age of 14, I realised I was becoming short-sighted because I couldn’t see the blackboard at school, but I feared they would argue about who would take me to the optician so I tried to manage by my own resources. I arrived at every lesson in a state of panic in case I couldn’t grab a desk at the front, which caused bitter confrontations with my classmates, but I couldn’t explain the real reason in case it reached adult ears and my parents were told. I concealed my secret for a year until my vision was so blurred that I had to confess.

      Then I went away to university in London, and every time I came back for the holidays the brittle atmosphere was worse.

      But we grow up or move on; all personnel have been much happier since we went our separate ways.

      There were good stories to tell about living there, of course. One particular incident became a fond part of family legend. I was barely a year old, so I have only my parents’ accounts, which are unreservedly amused and – what’s more – in agreement.

      A builder’s lorry backed into a gatepost and knocked it over. On top was a stone ball, which rolled off and began to travel. Mother, father and the red-faced lorry driver gave chase. Did I mention the house was on a hill? It was. A long, twisty hill of about a mile, with steep areas where your bicycle brakes had to work hard.

      The ball made a strong start and gathered speed. Nobody could catch it, and anyway it would have flattened them because it was as big as a Fitball and made of solid stone. There was nothing to do but wave to motorists and warn them to get out of the way. Despite the many curves and corners, the ball somehow stayed travelling down the road, bouncing off potholes and glancing off kerbs.

      After a good 10-minute run, it reached the point where the road began its final descent to the village. At the bottom, the National Westminster Bank stood with an arched open door, exactly like a football goal. A score looked certain.

      And then the ball disappeared. It had dropped into a manhole. Luckily, the man who should have been in the hole was sitting on a wall eating sandwiches. A crane was summoned and the ball was hoisted out and carried back home.

      So: that house. It was called Edge Croft and was built in 1909, high up on the hills in Alderley Edge in Cheshire, a place now beloved of Premier League footballers. In the late 60s, about the time I was born, my parents ran a building company. They bought Edge Croft in a run-down state and did a major refit.

      It had tantalising relics of former glory: a stable block with a cast-iron cupola like an ornate salt cellar; greenhouses with Edwardian heating pipes and vines that produced tiny grapes that we made into wine. The house originally had a grass tennis court, but that was sold off separately as building land. The garden path, though, still knew the old layout. It ran under the fence in the back garden and reappeared in the shrubbery on the front drive.

      Inside, the house once had a system of bells for summoning servants. They were ripped out by the builders, but the bell-pushes still remained in the master rooms. With those scant details I became a house whisperer, on a mission to find all clues of things that had been removed.

      My father happened to remark that there had been fireplaces in the upstairs rooms. I went around my bedroom, tapping the walls, until I found a spot that sounded hollow. With the end of a screwdriver I carved fireplace firmly and visibly into the wallpaper, so it would never again be lost, which I’m sure my parents were very grateful to me for.

      Fortunes changed. The building company went bust.

      The house’s upkeep became monstrously expensive. We turned off the heating in some of the rooms and they became bleak and chilly, as though they were being reclaimed by the outdoors. The cupola on top of the stable block rusted and fell off. The greenhouses lost their glass, pane by pane. I now own a house of much more modest size with my husband, Dave, and it creates some age-related headaches that are tricky to manage on the precarious earnings of an author. It makes me appreciate that Edge Croft must have been a crippling burden. Sometimes my parents talked about splitting it in two and selling one half, and I know I reacted with outrage, not knowing the first thing about the realities. It would possibly have eased their worries to move somewhere more manageable, but they never did.

      In one of the grown-up rooms, I found pictures of the house in its original state. I was astonished to see it once had curved bays and glittering leaded lights. My parents had stripped them all off, even the gables, and replaced them with sliding windows and grim grey pebbledash. Edge Croft used to be a period house. Now it looked like a bus garage. I informed them, with the haughtiness that only an eight-year-old can muster, of my great disappointment.

      ‘Those gables and windows had all rotted,’ they said. ‘And you couldn’t see the view.’

      The view was one of the house’s defining features. An uninterrupted, south-facing vista over the Cheshire plain. Fields that sloped away and then became bands of hedges, hills, and blue distance. Right on the horizon was the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, six miles away. Whatever my parents disagreed about, they agreed that the view was special.

      Being a child, I had no idea why all that light and space would be good for the soul. But I found the telescope spellbinding. Whenever you looked at it, it presented a different shape. It might be sideways on, its struts and girders looking like a bicycle wheel, faded by the distance to navy blue. Sometimes it was a white eye, as the reflective dish pointed straight at you. I used to watch it through binoculars, trying to catch it move, knowing that it was tracking something at a vast distance in the heavens.

      As home became increasingly strained, the telescope embodied qualities I hoped I would have in my life – curiosity and wonder. It looked at the sky. It believed in the future.

      I went to college. I returned for holidays, reluctantly, and every time the battles had become more profound. The divorce was a relief, a split for us all. We could go our separate ways.

      So I refused to help prepare the house for the sale. I didn’t want to sift through the artefacts of daily family functioning. The mugs and dishes and dinner plates, for instance. Our family culture of what was used when and what always stayed in the cupboard. These were rules we all knew and lived by, every single day. A set of traditions built over the years. A narrative understood only by us. To look at it again would be to rejoin the family. And perhaps I also didn’t want to see it dismantled.

      Still, I often puzzled about the house. Those walls and rooms, the fields under that bright spread of sky, contained me in my earliest years. A family house is one of your guardians. As a quiet, imaginative child, I had spent as much time alone with it, on my inward paths, as

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