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

Last autumn I came home from the local archives library where I’d been trying to research a novel set in the nineteenth century.

‘You’ll never believe what I found out today,’ I told my daughter Chloë, ‘about this house and the people who lived here before us. I found out that in 1881 there was a writer and journalist living here called Henry Hayward –’

Chloë stopped on her way up the stairs and paused, hand on banister – a banister sticky with the marks of three children who don’t often wash their hands.

‘A writer? Just like you, you mean? Was he famous?’

‘I don’t know but listen, this is the good bit – he had a wife called Charlotte and three kids who were just exactly the same ages as you three are now.’

Chloë’s eyes widened. ‘Hey, cool! What were the kids’ names?’

I told her: Frank, Arthur, and Florence.

‘And Florence was my age?’

‘I think so, yes.’

‘Hmm … good names.’

Chloë swung round and sat on the stairs.

‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘how long since anyone shouted those names out in this house.’

‘You mean the way we shout for you to come downstairs?’

She nodded. ‘Yes, except we never do.’

I laughed.

‘A long time,’ I said. ‘Years and years. A hundred years at least, I suppose. It’s a funny idea, isn’t it?’

I watched her think about this. It was dusk on a chilly October evening. We carried on upstairs and stopped together on the landing. I had a pile of ironing in my arms. Chloë had blue ink scrawls all over hers.

‘I wish you wouldn’t write on your arms in biro,’ I said.

She ignored me and stepped over her cat Zach who was sleeping in his regular, hazardous position, draped right across the middle stair of the next flight up.

‘Shall we say them now?’ she whispered.

‘Say what?’

‘Their names. Shall we say them out loud because of how it’s been a hundred years and all that?’ She put her fingers on the fat white softness of Zach’s stomach. He opened one eye and closed it again. ‘Florence!’ she called shyly. ‘Arthur! Frank!’

‘Henry Hayward!’ I said more forcefully, and Zach jumped up and spilled himself off downstairs.

Chloë laughed. ‘You don’t need to say Hayward, Mummy. He knows what his own surname is.’

‘Charlotte!’ I called.

Our voices sounded strange, mostly because we didn’t know what we were doing or why we were doing it. Chloë looked at me and almost giggled but then checked herself. Her face went solemn and she listened. I listened as well. The house listened. Someone else seemed to listen too, but I still don’t know who it was. Maybe it wasn’t anyone. Maybe it was just the sense of the strong, clean lines of the present bending for a moment, going shaky and blurred. Whatever it was, for a few uneasy seconds I felt surrounded – not by people perhaps, so much as by moments, lost moments. Forgotten days and nights, lost hours, old minutes that had ticked away and would not come again.

Chloë shuddered, but it was a shudder of excitement.

‘Hmm. I liked that,’ she told me in her precise, Chloëish way. ‘Do you think they heard?’

‘Do you know what a census is?’

Later, putting the clothes away in his drawers, I found her older brother Jake, playing Super Mario Tennis.

‘I found out something good about our house today,’ I told him.

He rolled his eyes to show he’d heard, but kept them on the screen. Two grubby thumbs continued to work the control.

I touched his head then bent to kiss his hair. It smelled of boy – a heady combination of old jumpers and school dinners.

‘Do you want to know what it is?’ I said.

Still holding the control, he turned round. On the screen two blue men froze their less-than-friendly poses.

‘Do you know what a census is?’ I asked him.

He sighed and his eyes flicked back to the screen. ‘We did them at school. I know everything there is to know about them.’

‘Well, today I looked up our house on the 1881 census and guess who lived here?’

He put down the control and waited. ‘Who?’

‘A writer called Henry Hayward and his wife and three children – who in 1881 were exactly the same ages as you three are now!’

He shrugged. ‘Great.’

‘A family just like us,’ I told him. ‘Don’t you think that’s extraordinary?’

He seemed to think about this. ‘No.’

‘Come on, you’ve got to admit it’s a bit funny –’

‘How do you know they were like us?’

‘I don’t. But they sound like us.’

He sighed. ‘What were the kids called?’

‘Arthur and Florence and Frank.’

‘It’s sad,’ he said then. I asked him why. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Would any of them have slept in my room?’ He looked worried. He didn’t want anyone in his space – he hadn’t been keen when we did a house swap with New Yorkers two summers ago. A Victorian child pushing its spectral way in would be the last straw.

‘I don’t know. Yes, I expect so – they must have done.’