This was published 7 years ago
First Love: Victorian lace and a steep staircase - an inner-city romance
By Julie Lewis
When I first saw her, her beauty had faded. My family said her best days were long gone. But I didn't think so. I was entranced. I dreamed. I hung a future on her Victorian lace and saw nothing but happy days. Did she sag? Did she slump? I did not notice – she was all elegance and mystery in my eyes. As for the whiff of rising damp? Who could smell it from the back seat of a yellow Holden Kingswood travelling down South Dowling Street on the way to the Royal Easter Show?
I fell in love with the Sydney terrace on those annual Easter pilgrimages. I was smitten by the terrace's verticality, its urban sophistication, its promise of lives long past, so different to my home.
Julie Lewis was entranced by the Victorian lace of Sydney's terrace houses. Credit: Wolter Peeters
My parents built our house on a block my father bought when he was a bachelor. It was suburban and single storey. The only tales its walls could tell were our family's. It sat on a large yard dotted with the artefacts of my father's hobbies; the pigeon house, the orchid house, the ferret cages.
What would it be like to live in a house where the backyard was the city? In a house that climbed upwards to a second or third storey as well as back in time? I imagined debutantes and gangster moles. Miss Havisham and Julia Flight. Staircases intrigued me. I wanted one. Badly.
Illustration: Simon Letch
I moved to Sydney for university and into my first share household terrace. It was a dump, but I had the starriest of stars in my eyes. A bedroom ceiling blackened with mould? Nothing some discount curtaining couldn't hide (while adding a certain Bedouin chic, I believed). Deep cracks in a supporting wall? Who cared when you had a staircase to thump down like a person really going places. I felt like a better me – a grown-up. In those days before designer renovations, I lived in a succession of terraces in various states of disregarded disrepair. But the romance didn't last.
Coming home slightly tipsy one night I tripped near the top of one of those long-desired staircases. The ceiling slipped away from me in slow motion as my body traced an arc backwards. In that instant, love died. That I didn't was thanks to a well positioned flatmate with good upper-body strength. Now, decades later, I value solid ground and single storeys. But I don't keep pigeons. Or ferrets. Yet.