A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment...

As I recover it in recalling my child-wrought memories, it is no complete building; it is all broken up inside me; here a room, there a room, and here a piece of hallway that does not connect these two rooms but is preserved, as a fragment, by itself. In this way it is all dispersed within me – the rooms, the stairways that descend with such ceremonious deliberation, and other narrow, spiral stairs in the obscurity of which one moved as blood does in the veins; the tower rooms, the high-hung balconies, the unexpected galleries onto which one was thrust out through a little door – all that is still in me and will never cease to be in me. It is as though the picture of this house had fallen into me from an infinite height and had shattered against my very ground.

~Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

And that house was a magnet, an absolute magnet, and it grew because it had my mother’s love in it. It’s odd, because the daughter who takes most after my mother, Maisie, her house is the same, it draws people. Some houses do.

~ Terence Davies in an interview with Paul Farley and images all from Distant Voices, Still Lives, BFI, 2006