Ugly, drafty window

By Lily Daniels

My mother fell in love with our house because of a window. It’s made from coloured, engraved and cast glass. The top of the stairs was my mum’s favourite place to sit in the dark corridor with light streaming through the coloured glass and the stained glass in the porch glinting in the sunlight. She felt at home. I never really liked it; the engraved blue stars are vibrant and clear but the cast glass is dark and dirt clings to it. One panel is broken and the rest as draughty as anything. When I started studying glass and ceramics at the University of Sunderland, I found out that stained glass looks best when it’s leaded, when it has small strips of metal for a frame the light can shine through but in a wooden frame it looks clunky and dark. When my grandparents’ health deteriorated my mother moved to Cumbria to care for them and I took over the mortgage. Since then we’ve been renovating but I’m reluctant to scrap the ugly, draughty window. It’s difficult to let go of the past, the things that people put care, time and skill into are precious. Through working at the National Glass Centre I know that if I have a new window installed there are dozens of artists, students and historians who would love a scrap of my glass, so maybe that’s what I’ll do to honour the history of the piece, give it to someone who can make something new.