Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House

The hall down below me has black and white lino tiles, which Mummy polishes with a strange whirring machine called a Goblin that has an actual goblin on the front. I like to sit and run my fingers over the little red creature, enjoying its raised-up feel, the hard plastic still buzzy and warm from being used.

I follow Mummy around as she does the housework. She says I am like a little dog. When my baby sister Mandy’s awake, she’s screaming or feeding and Mummy’s busy, but when she goes down for a rest Mummy and I are pals in those afternoons of furniture polish and doll’s clothes and prickly roses and the wet exciting smell of the paddling pool on the concrete patio, filled by a dark green hose on a hot day.

I have ideas. Sometimes these ideas make me tremble with excitement. I am four now and I sit in my place on the landing and make a Big Girl Box for Mandy who’s getting bigger, even though she can’t talk or do anything yet. In the shoebox, there will be: a crayon (not a wax one, which is only for babies), a rubber to rub things out, some paper, and one of Mummy’s old pinkish lipsticks with its sugary, big-lady smell.

I rub a bit of it on Mandy and she laughs and I see that her nappy has got so fat that wet is coming down her leg. I show her how to scribble all over the paper like a grown-up. She won’t so I try to make her but in the end she gets tired and crawls away and I shout at her to come back right now! – but she won’t. It’s tempting to hit her but I know that if I do she’ll scream and then I’ll have a smack bottom.

‘she can’t talk or do anything yet’

The dress I am wearing has no front or back fastenings and every time Mummy pulls it on or off me, I almost suffocate. If you can’t breathe, then you die. Every morning our goldfish, Tish and Tosh, throw themselves out of the bowl and Daddy nearly steps on them when he goes down to make the tea. But he always puts them back in and they gasp back to life and swim off. Until one day he puts them back in and they just float. ‘Too late,’ he says. ‘Sorry Tish, sorry Tosh, you’ve had it this time.’ He sounds sad but you can tell from his face that he thinks it’s funny.

Another day – by now I have two sisters – we are sitting in our wicker chairs in the playroom watching Robin Hood on TV and smoke snakes silently in through the door behind us. I begin to scream.

‘The house is burning down!’

Mandy stamps and wails. Only Debbie dares run and find Mummy, who is chatting on the phone. She puts the fire out quickly – a whoosh under the cold tap. It’s not much of a fire – just a thing she was melting down in a pan for Daddy, something to do with his work.

Mummy takes us upstairs where you can’t smell the smoke and we have warm Ribena on the edge of our beds. I don’t dare watch Robin Hood on television again for about ten years, in case it gives me the house-burning-down feeling.

Our bedroom is a safe place. On summer nights when I am in bed and it’s still light, I like the sound of Daddy wheeling our tricycles in from the lawn, the slump of water as the paddling pool empties. Sometimes I kneel up at the window and watch. Something about the way he holds the cigarette between his lips, as he bends and uses both hands to tip the water onto the grass, makes me feel loved.

Next door are the Smiths. Luke is two and Jack is the same age as me, five. He’s my best friend. We have our polio boosters together, a sugar lump on our tongues – same taste, same moment.

Luke is always lying on the bed having his nappy changed and he is ill. So in fact is Jack, even though they don’t look poorly. We are not to mention it, Mummy says, and I don’t, though Jack has already told me and we’ve laughed about it secretly.

Then one morning Luke is in his Mummy’s arms waving to us from the bathroom window and the next day he’s died. I decide I’ll never wave to anyone again, in case I stop breathing.

Mummy is crying. I don’t cry but I walk very slowly and quietly on tiptoes to show that I know something bad has happened. We hold hands and go round in a circle and sing ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. Each little flower that opens, each little bird that sings. I ask Mummy where Luke is right now this minute and she says it’s all right, he’s in Heaven.

Jack and I are in the sandpit. He says it’s for the best that Luke is gone.

‘Is he in Heaven?’ I ask, testing him.

He shrugs, lets the sand run through his fingers into a blue cup. ‘At peace,’ he says.

I laugh and so does he and then we wriggle around together in the sand and then he takes me inside and shows me a glass door in their house and says, ‘Lean against it,’ and I do but the glass isn’t there and I fall through and bang my head and cry.

Dear Resident of 2 Middlebeck Drive

Please forgive this letter coming totally out of the blue but I’m a writer writing a biography of our Victorian house in Clapham, South London. I’m trying to find out as much as I can about every single person who has lived in this house from the day it was built in 1872, through to the present.

Because the book is about the idea of home and how we feel about the people who have inhabited our spaces before us, I’m really keen to go back and revisit my own childhood homes. I lived in your house in Nottingham as a baby, until I was five years old. I wondered whether you’d mind if I called in for a quick look around?

You can reach me by writing to this address – or else phone me on the above number and I will of course phone you straight back …

After more than two hours at the Family Records Centre, I can find nothing – no birth or marriage date or anything – for Charles Edwin Hinkley. Kelly’s Directory tells me that there was Isabella Hinkley, Walter Hinkley, and Charles Hinkley. I’ve decided to look for a son but I remind myself that was always just a hunch. Maybe Charles is a father and I should have started with the older books. It’s just so hard to know how far back to go. Hinkley is a fairly unusual name (Thank You, God) but the truth is I’m getting nowhere.

I give up, bored with Charles Edwin, and decide to try Isabella Bloomfield Hinkley. It’s an imposing, rather glamorously Victorian name – a name that would fit inside a cameo brooch. She leaves the Kelly’s Directory list in 1948, so, assuming she died in that year, I check deaths for 1948. And find her almost immediately, in the July to September volume: HINKLEY Isabella B 90 Hackney.

I flush with excitement and satisfaction. I’ve got her! But can it really be this simple – can this be her? Well, surely it’s got to be – even if for some strange reason she did die in Hackney.

The truly unsettling thing is, if she lived to be ninety, then I must revise my whole picture of her. It means she was much older than I imagined – quite a late-middle-aged lady when she came to our house in 1918, just as the First World War ended.

I cross over to the other side of the room and check the births for 1859 – birth records for the 1850s are on satisfyingly thick, yellowed paper, curly handwritten. And there, in January to March 1859, I find her: Isabella Bloomfield, born and registered in the district of Billericay. This time, I feel a surge of real delight. That is definitely my Isabella.

Stunned and suddenly exhausted, I go to the room downstairs and sit and eat an apple, though an espresso is what I really crave. A white-haired woman, her hair zig-zagged with kirby grips, fidgets at a locker. She can’t get the key in – ‘I can’t get the key in, Brian’ – and various elderly men walk slowly up and down the room with loose change, ordered by their wives to fetch a bag of Quavers.

Isabella. Oh, Isabella. When I started my research this morning I had a firm picture of you lodged in my head. You were a slightly haughty, youthful, black-haired woman, a woman in your prime. Now in the space of an hour or so, I’ve uncovered an entirely different Isabella. A very old lady, living in Clapham, dying in Hackney. And an Essex baby.

An Essex baby with whom I have nothing at all in common – except that she grew up to inhabit the very same rooms, gaze out of the very same windows, in the very same house, year in year out.

From: John Pidgeon

To: Julie Myerson

Sent: Wednesday, April 7, 2003 9:17AM

Subject: 34 Lillieshall Road

Dear Julie

Leon is a lovely person. Ask him if he remembers playing snooker after school listening to Prince’s ‘Raspberry Beret’. I do. And the ceiling falling down.

Best

John P

I go up to Leon’s old room. Jake’s bed is unmade and there are used cereal bowls and half-full glasses of water all around it. On the floor are old discarded boxer shorts, school books with their covers half torn off, the silver discs of CDs, Warhammer magazines, cat fluff. School clothes are falling out of the open drawers. Kitty, Jake’s cat, black and somehow angry, lies in one of the other open drawers among the socks, one open eye gazing at me. And the green eye of the Playstation glares at me from the opposite corner.

I pick as much as I can up off the floor and ask Aga, our Polish cleaner, to hoover the room thoroughly.

I’m in Nottingham, driving towards The Chalet, where I lived from the age of one to five. Whoever lives here now hasn’t replied to my letter but we decide to call in anyway, hoping they’ll be sympathetic.

We turn off Mapperley Plains – all of it unfamiliar – and drive slowly down the steep slope of Middlebeck Drive. This junction is where I first learned to tell left from right, in the back of Mum’s pale blue Mini. Whenever I think of left or right now, this road is what I see in my head.

Middlebeck Avenue is exactly as I remember it – though it can’t be quite because one or two of the houses look brand new. Dark purplish brick, clipped hedges, dwarf conifers, hanging baskets spilling with pink and scarlet Bizzie Lizzies. The kind of cul-de-sac where men wash their cars on Sundays, local radio on, soapy water spilling in the gutter. I recognize the house immediately, only it doesn’t seem to be called The Chalet any more. Just plain 2 Middlebeck Avenue.

‘You think anyone in this day and age would actually want to live in a place called The Chalet?’ Jonathan says.

‘No, but what I mean is, I think I wrote to the wrong person. I’ve got this awful feeling I wrote to 2 Middlebeck Drive, not Avenue.’

We ring the chiming bell and a tall, quite elderly and rather gentle-looking man opens the door and gazes at us, baffled.

Before I can begin apologizing for disturbing him and telling him who I am, I realize what I’m looking at. Just over his shoulder is the small first landing where I made my Big Girl Box. The same white banisters with their curly metalwork. I smile politely and explain that I am a writer (but inside I feel four – the itch of the tights on my legs, the sweet smell of Mum’s old lipstick).

No, he says, he hasn’t had any letter. I pretend to be mildly surprised.

He looks at me carefully, his lip trembles. He says he would love to show me round but his wife is very ill at the moment. He grips the doorframe and shakes his head. ‘I’m grappling with so many problems right now, you see.’