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

This summer, we’ve lived at 34 Lillieshall Road for exactly fifteen years. It’s a narrow, three-storey, slightly subsiding, dirty red-brick, mid-Victorian Clapham terrace with a mature, spreading hydrangea in front of the bay window and a glossy scented jasmine that climbs up past the front door to the first-floor window.

The bedroom windowsills each sport a wooden window box, made by Jonathan and painted hyacinth blue by me and filled with whatever flower I can keep alive each season. The paintwork around the windows is white and peeling. The bricks need cleaning but it would cost a fortune so, like everything else, we put it off. There used to be a lawn in front but now there are seaside pebbles, bought by the bagful from a place behind Clapham North tube station. It’s a stylish, romantic look but would be much better if we’d killed the weeds first. As it is, the dock and groundsel and nettles spring hopefully up between the pebbles. Shingle beach meets urban waste ground.

I am perfectly, unquestioningly, at home in this house. After a childhood spent moving house almost every year, I had told myself roots didn’t matter, that being with the people you loved was all there was. I think I even believed it. I used to brag about my lack of domestic continuity, my aloof and nomadic style. Until I met Jonathan. He lived in a terraced cottage with two cats, a full fridge, and honeysuckle round the door. He was only six months older than me yet somehow had managed to achieve this state of grown-upness, of stability and domestic warmth. I fell in love with the life as much as the man.

We decided to have a baby. And a joint mortgage.

Big things and small things have happened to me in this house. I became a mother here – once, twice, three times – and, later, a writer. Standing holding the phone in the far corner of the bedroom, I listened to my mother tell me that my father had sealed himself in his garage and killed himself. I was leaning against a wall that no longer exists because we made a door through into the bathroom. Downstairs in the hall, I had my final terrible argument with my younger sister and watched her walk away down the front garden path. I sat and trembled afterwards on the bottom step of the stairs.

Upstairs, at the top of the house, I wrote a novel in the spare bedroom. I wrote another two in the tiny room on the first-floor landing. I walked fretful babies up and down the bathroom in the dead of night and, pregnant and exhausted, I once lay down on the kitchen floor in front of two baffled toddlers and wept. A squirrel terrified us when it became trapped in the chimney in Jonathan’s study. It scratched and snuffled and panicked all day. A funny and beautiful friend ate pasta at our kitchen table and told me straight out that she was dying. I watched a terrified man jump from the top floor of the refugee centre opposite when it was on fire one scary summer night. Another time, another summer, a burglar came into our bedroom as we slept and rummaged through my handbag.

All of this in our house. Real drama, yes, but no more or less than has happened to most people in most houses.

I loved 34 Lillieshall Road from the start but I was never someone who thought she’d stay anywhere long. And then one day it dawned on me that I had been here ten years and might actually be here another ten. Might even grow old here. I was surprised that the thought didn’t frighten me. In fact far from it – it was oddly comforting. It tempted me. All those years you rush around, waiting for your life to happen. And then you realize it’s just a question of taking a breath and daring to stand still long enough. Let your life come floating down, let it settle around you.

‘I’m going to write a detective story,’ I tell Raphael as he kicks a dog-chewed foam football around our kitchen, closely followed by Betty, the dog who chewed it. ‘About our house.’

He looks worried. Why do my kids always look worried when I try to tell them about what’s in my head?

‘And we’re the detectives, right?’

‘That’s right. We’re going to find out everything we possibly can about every single person who ever lived here!’

Even as I say it, it sounds unlikely and Raph looks suitably incredulous.

‘Even the children? Even the dogs?’

‘If we can – even the dogs. Cats too – if there were any.’

He likes this. But then his face falls. ‘But – what if we can’t find it all out?’

This has occurred to me too. Mostly in the middle of the night when this house seems to be one great big, ferocious, empty space full of secrets. ‘Then I’ll write about that too.’

‘Huh! Great,’ says Jake with his own unique kind of deflating candour, ‘a book about nothing. Fascinating.’

‘It’ll be my job to try and make the gaps and blanks fascinating,’ I tell him – hoping I believe that myself.

Where Do You Get Your Ideas From? It’s one of the great reliable questions that every writer gets asked. A huge, baggy question that we tend, privately, to smile at. Which isn’t fair, because actually it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to ask.

But, deep down, it scares us. It’s impossible to answer because we really don’t know where our ideas come from. And most of us wish we did, because then we could make sure we never ran out. But the truth is they come from anywhere and everywhere and nowhere and sometimes they don’t come at all. We laugh about the question because it reminds us of just how tenuous and slippery a good idea is.

Until now. Because I know where my idea for this book came from. It came from all the things you’ve just read. It came from a fusty South London archive and a helpful librarian who showed me how to use the microfiche. It came from a happy coincidence, a man called Henry, whose wife may or may not have been self-effacing, who may or may not have given a fireguard away to a totter, but who once must absolutely certainly have walked up and down our front path and stood where our dustbin is now.

It came from my kids and their scary sharpness, their sometimes shattering curiosity, their likeable ability to cut through the fancy adult rubbish to the gleaming urgent flesh of fact beneath.

‘my kids and their scary sharpness’

And it came from a bit of over-hasty DIY on a dark Boxing Day afternoon and a house where we’ve spent such a significant part of our lives, but which is never quite the right colour. And the fact that, in the end, we all of us have one compelling thing in common. We inhabit spaces and we know we aren’t the first to do so and we know we won’t be the last either.

I began to wonder how it would feel to find out about the ones who came before – to turn them from the vaguest idea back into substance. I wondered whether it might be possible to persuade our house to give up its secrets, to allow me to know the people, to hear the stories, to resurrect these ordinary lives – some of them long forgotten.

‘It’s not really our house at all, is it, Mummy?’ asked Chloë soon after I’d started on my project. ‘It’s like we’re just the top layer. And one day there’ll be another layer right on top of us, squashing us down.’

I smiled. ‘Do you mind that?’

She gave me a sharp look and went back to cutting pictures of shoes out of magazines.

‘I’ll have to think about it,’ she said.

Chapter Two THE BOY IN THE TOTTENHAM HOTSPUR ROOM (#ulink_83531f86-299a-562d-b0e2-5420e44858ee)

The Pidgeons 1981–1987

We bought this house from a man called John Pidgeon.

Just walk through the hall and into the kitchen and immediately you’ll spot a couple of crucial things about John Pidgeon. The first is that he likes to do his own carpentry – all the kitchen cupboards are hand-made by him, with fat, optimistic little bluebirds carved in each corner. And the second is that he had a habit of not quite finishing the task in hand – none of the cupboards have handles.

Right from the start, we viewed this trait of his with a kind of frustrated affection. ‘Pidgeonesque’ became the word we used for anything where the idea was good but the execution lacking. Or maybe it was just that we identified with it so closely ourselves. After a year we decided to paint the white cupboards bright blue. It took us about six months to get around to the second coat. Maybe this syndrome was infectious.

When I first saw the house, in May 1988, Jonathan and I had just found out we were having a baby. We weren’t married but the baby was planned – though it wasn’t expected so quickly. Where was all the ‘trying’ you were supposed to do? At twenty-seven, we were young and romantic enough to feel we might have quite enjoyed the suspense.

Still, now that it had happened, we decided we had to move. It wasn’t just a question of space but also of a new start, a home that belonged to both of us. I didn’t mind about the lack of a wedding – or at least back then I didn’t think I did – but I wanted pots and pans, paint swatches, the paraphernalia of a life chosen together.

We looked at houses around Clapham but none of them were quite right. The only one I’d been drawn to wasn’t all that suitable – it was just, as Jonathan astutely pointed out, that the exhausted woman who showed us round had a dribbling newborn baby on her shoulder. Tiny towelling babygros dripped on a rail over the bath, the whole place smelled of Wet Wipes. I wanted it. Meanwhile details of a house in Lillieshall Road arrived in the post one Saturday morning. It was firmly out of our price range.

‘It looks absolutely gorgeous,’ I told Jonathan, ‘and look at that garden.’ The photo showed a smooth green lawn going on forever, punctuated with the pink, red, and yellow blobs of roses.

He agreed. ‘It’s a lovely road too. Beautiful houses. But look at the price. There’s no point even thinking about it.’

I agreed with him. He threw the details in the bin.

An hour later, I retrieved them.

We rang the estate agent. He said the house had been on the market for a year. The owner had moved to the country. It had been standing empty all that time.

‘If no one wants it,’ I pointed out to Jonathan, ‘maybe we can get the price down?’

He laughed.

‘I’m just going to look,’ I told him, ‘just on my own. Just in case.’

‘In case of what?’

‘Just to put my mind at rest, OK?’

Number 34 Lillieshall Road. Even the street name sounded like flowers. Lilies and shawls. Armfuls of scented lilies and, yes, baby shawls. We’d been to Mothercare and bought several satisfying cellophaned packs of white cellular baby blankets. Just to have in the cupboard. They looked impossibly small. They looked like they were made for a doll’s cot. I couldn’t believe we’d ever use them.

Lilies and shawls. Flowers and babies.