Well once again, John at The Sound of One Hand Typing‘s come up with an interesting topic to write hastily about – a castle you’ve visited in real life.
I don’t really envy Europe on many things, but one thing I do concede is that they do have some really cool old castles. The type of storybook, Prince Charming ones like Neuschwanstein in Germany above (I don’t envy German kids having to learn how to spell things like that however!). The so-called castles over here I find, are rather lacklustre and underwhelming by comparison.
For instance, I live not far from one that locals call “the castle” – in fact, the whole neighborhood is referred to as “Castle Heights”. It was famously renovated not long ago by TV’s favorite get-things-done couple, Joanna and Chip Gaines. It is a fairly impressive stone building complete with a small turret that took over 20 years to complete, though that had more to do with finance troubles for owners than the complexity of it. While it is a noteworthy and impressive structure indeed, it hardly seems like what some little girl would have envisioned say, when hearing fairy tales of kings and queens and long-haired princesses. It doesn’t help that rather on a splendid estate it sits on a rather small lot overlooking a row of used car dealers and appliance repair shops. You can take tours of it, but I’ve yet to do it. But I have been inside one “castle”.
The town I grew up in had a “castle” we could see merely by standing on our driveway and looking to the west. It was built in the 1850s by a low-level nobleman who’d come to Canada. It was the largest individual residence in the country for years, and had it not been for his reputed gambling addiction, it might still be some blue-bloods private estate. However, in the 1870s he was in debt and sold it to the Methodist Church and in time, it was made into a school. It is an impressive looking building, long and stately looking, built of yellowish bricks and featuring a grand-looking entrance way up stairs from the grounds and topped off with little mini turrets. Impressive but no Disney World castle. It’s been used for shooting a few movies and TV shows, and the grand interior through the front door, elegant sweeping wooden stairs leading up to a huge window, is a popular setting for wedding photos. However, its main function is still being used as a private school for high school girls. Which is where I came in… but the story isn’t as fun or risque as that might suggest!
My mom was a teacher, but gave that up for years to raise my brother and I. By the time he’d moved thousands of miles away and I was well into my teens, and she and my Dad had divorced, she decided to go back to it. Initially she was a substitute teacher for the local school board, but after a year or two of not knowing if she’d be working the next day (and often finding out by being woken up around 6 AM and told to report to a school that could be 30 miles away to teach kids she’d never met before) she decided to try for something more stable. She got hired on at the private school. Though she did teach a class at times, her main job was to be a “house mother.” The school is a boarding one, with many kids living there. Many were from wealthy families overseas. So they needed adult women to stay there and stay in built-in mini-apartments overnight to make sure the kids were all accounted for, take care of any medical emergencies that might arise and so on. My mom did that for a few years, and boy, did she have tales to tell! Turns out teenaged daughters of millionaires from Europe and Asia often behaved like … yep, teenaged girls. Many a time my Mom would have to try and track down the source of a whiff of ganja floating down the hallway, and call police when suddenly one or two girls hadn’t shown up by curfew or an hour or two later. Conveniently, there was an inexpensive motel a block away. Police seldom had to look further than it to recover the errant lasses, and disappoint many young lads no doubt in dragging them out of said motel rooms.
It wasn’t a place males were supposed to be inside of, except for one or two male teachers and maintenance guys I guess, but occasionally I went in, helping Mom move some things to her “apartment” or taking something she’d forgotten at home to her. I was probably college-aged at that time, and she told me several of her students wanted to meet me in a bad way. She successfully endeavored to make sure that never happened. Err, thanks Mom?
Anyway, the thing about the building was that once you got off that grandiose staircase, it was a pretty run-of-the-mill old, slightly rundown building. Hopefully they’ve redone it and modernized it by now, but it was rather grubby looking, the rooms were small and a little dark. It was poorly insulated, thus rather cold in winter no matter how hard the noisy radiators tried. Windows had no screens so bugs including bees regularly got in and they weren’t surprised to see bats winging their way down the hallways at night. The electrical grid was not designed for late-20th Century appliances I think, and there seemed to be power outages more than one would expect in a fancy school.
It reminded me of Prince Harry. When I read his book last year, one thing that stood out was how he described many of the old castles the Royal Family resided in – old, dirty, stuffy, small-roomed, narrow-passaged, drafty and lacking many a modern amenity people in new mobile homes would take for granted.
I guess it goes to show. A man’s home might be his castle, but his castle might not be all that it seems. Everyone has their own problems and no matter how the “castle” looks outside, no matter how big or stately, it’s probably not all fun, wine and roses inside.
Everydave Life 