Sunday's children

I remember that Grandmother and Uncle Carl were both critical of our summer house, though for different reasons. Uncle Carl was regarded as somewhat unhinged, but he knew best about all sorts of things and declared it wasn't a house, definitely wasn't a villa and wasn't in any respect whatsoever a dwelling. The phenomenon might possibly be described as a number of wooden boxes painted red and placed side by side and on top of each other....

This, the specifics: some red wooden boxes with white corners and with arbitrarily placed and similarly white-painted mouldings here and there... This entire collection of boxes rested on twelve high stones, so between the lower floor and the uneven ground below was a space about two feet high. In there were pieces of greying wood, broken wicker chairs, three rusty odd-shaped pans, some sacks of cement, worn tyres, a tin bathtub full of defective household utensils and several piles of newspapers bound with wire. You could always find something useful there. True, it was forbidden to crawl under the house.