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

It was a hot afternoon in May. The young man from the estate agents – sweating in his shirt and suit – unlocked the door and said he’d leave me to wander round on my own. A fatal thing to let me do. Like leaving a pair of Victorian lovers unchaperoned. Maybe he knew it. Maybe he knew how hard my heart was pumping. Don’t ever go house-hunting when you’re pregnant. As bad as doing the weekly food shop just before lunch. Too hungry, you’ll buy too much.

I was hungry.

I fell in love immediately, as expectant, first-time mothers do with houses that are beautiful, empty (unloved!) and streaming with sudden late afternoon sunshine after rain. I paced those rooms, the dusty air lit with magic, and knew that it was mine already. It was waiting for me to fill it with children. I could have had my babies right there and then, on the wide, dusty floor of the bedroom.

In fact, I could already hear the furious laughter of toddlers echoing round the terracotta-tiled kitchen. I could see the small Wellington boots lined up in the hall, the school blazers hanging – torn and stained – from the pegs by the stairs. I could even, if I strained hard enough, hear the dull thud of teenage music from an upper room, the slam of an adolescent bedroom door. The house wasn’t empty at all. It was full of my life, my future.

‘Like it?’ asked the young man who stubbed out a cigarette as I reemerged into the sitting room.

‘It’s just perfect!’ I said. Then I worried. Was I supposed to sound cooler?

But how could I? It was quite simply the most perfect house I’d ever walked into.

The rooms were large, light, the walls rag-rolled. Apricot and gold in the sitting room, lavender and hyacinth in the first-floor bedroom. In fact it was a house full of decorative surprises. The loo on the first-floor landing was papered in black and white striped felt, exactly like a zebra, with a silken tassel (a tail!) to flush the loo itself. The top (second-floor) bedroom was described in the details as having ‘wallpaper with matching hand-painted blinds’. What it neglected to add was that the wallpaper was Tottenham Hotspur wallpaper – blue and white shields repeated so many times that it sent you dizzy – and the blinds had ‘The Spurs! The Spurs!’ hand-stencilled on them.

‘I know,’ said the estate agent with an apologetic laugh. ‘We weren’t sure whether or not to come clean about that. I mean, it could be offputting – unless you’re a fan?’

‘My husband’s a cricket man,’ I told him, ‘but we’ve got a baby on the way.’

‘Oh, well then. You never know.’

He left me alone again and I went and stood in the garden, which was eighty feet long and clearly cherished. The magnolia had just finished flowering – huge waxy teardrop petals flushed with pink and still damp from the recent shower. Grass springy and damp underfoot – scent of lilac, honeysuckle, and the strange deliciousness of parched soil after rain. A blackbird called down the lawn.

I had to live here. The baby in me wouldn’t be born till the following January, but I’d recently felt it move for the first time – a fluttery zigzag I could just feel if I lay on my stomach and shut my eyes. Now I knew for certain that this child would live here in this house. It would be his or her house – the place where he or she cried and laughed and took his or her first steps. I went back and told Jonathan.

He put his head in his hands and then he said what he always says in these situations: ‘We’ll just have to find the money somehow then.’

We only met John Pidgeon once, at the house, to talk through fixtures and fittings. He was living out in Kent and should, we reckoned, have been relieved – grateful even – finally to be done with his bridging loan. But if he was, he didn’t show us. He played it so very cool. Years later, all I remembered about him was that he had brown hair and a beard, was a little older than us, and was in rock music journalism. Also – as he told us then – that his wife was an interior designer. This explained the rag-rolling.

We stood with him on the lawn and talked about the big white marble fireplaces in the sitting room. They’d been stolen while the house was standing empty but Val across the road had seen the burglars in action and they’d been caught red-handed. So the fireplaces had been returned and reinstalled, but badly. You could see all the joins between the marble slabs and the mantel of the one at the front wasn’t quite straight.

John Pidgeon agreed to sell us the huge mirror that was screwed to the bathroom wall (I really wanted the house exactly as I’d seen it that first afternoon) and then he announced that he wanted to dig up some plants. The yellow rose, for instance – it had been planted for a child who died. And the magnolia, too, was of sentimental value.

‘He can’t take the magnolia!’ I told Jonathan, horrified.

I’d dreamed about that magnolia several times by now – vague, happily disorganized dreams in which our nameless, faceless baby also featured. The magnolia, with its generous green arms lifted to the sky, was already a part of my life. Trees are owned by places, not by people. They belong to the ground. That magnolia wasn’t going anywhere.

I did feel for him about the dead child, but a meaner part of me wondered whether he was actually telling the truth. But then could a person make that kind of thing up? The fact that this thought crossed my mind shows that I might have been going to be a mother, but I really knew nothing yet of the ferocity of birth and death, of everything that parenthood makes you stand to lose. If I had, would I have begged him to take the rose away? ‘Have it – please, I understand.’ I’d like to think so.

All of this is on my mind as I write to John Pidgeon at the forwarding address he left with us in 1988. The letter comes back a week later, scuffed and creased and marked ‘Not known at this address’.

Meanwhile, I go to the Minet Archives Library in Knatchbull Road – the same library where I first glimpsed Henry and Charlotte on the juddering microfiche – and ask the librarian whether there’s any way of finding out the names of people who lived in our house. She has thick black hair and a frowny face and is drinking coffee from a mug with a picture of the Teletubbies on it.

‘I suppose you could look in Kelly’s,’ she says.

Kelly’s?

She leads me over to a shelf of volumes and tells me I can just look up our address, year by year, and the names should all be there. It’s a kind of phone book from before there were phones; the first half is more like the Yellow Pages, listing shops and tradesmen, and then there’s a long list of ‘householders’, street by street, house by house. It’s that easy.

‘It’ll only be the adults,’ she says, ‘but it should give you a list of names, if that’s what you’re looking for.’

I go through the volumes – experiencing a small jolt each time I see 34 Lillieshall Road printed on the page. I’m surprised at how just an address can feel like a part of you. In a way, it’s hard to believe that those words existed before we lived here. More than a hundred years of letters plopping through the letter box with that precise number and those words on. Crowds of different people who’d write ‘34 Lillieshall Road’ each time they had to fill in a form or begin a letter.

How many people?

An hour later, I have a crowd of names in my notebook.

After Henry and Charlotte Hayward, there’s Elizabeth and then Lucy Spawton, Isabella Bloomfield Hinkley and Walter Hinkley. Then Charles Edwin Hinkley, Walter Stephen Hinkley. Beatrice Haig, Phyllis Askew, Vera Palmer, Annie and Theodore Blaine, Amy and John Costello, Joan Russell, Olive Russell, Rita Wraight, Mavis Jones-Wohl, Dorothy and Wilfred Bartolo. By 1960, Gloria Duncan, Aston and Melda McNish, Louisa and Stanley Heron, Clarence Hibbert, Salome Bennet, Vincent Dias, Gerald Sherrif, Thomas H. Kyle, Veronica and Doreen Ricketts, then the Pidgeons, then –

I gaze at my notebook, almost dizzy with the sheer number of names, the sound and shape and idea of them. What is it? Didn’t I expect to find so many? Had I even thought about it? I suppose, when your house is a hundred and thirty years old, it’s not so unlikely that all these people will have lived there. But so many different names, sometimes all at once – presumably the house was sometimes rented out as rooms. It’s a shock. Or maybe it’s the names themselves, each one bulging with a mass of possibility, each one suggesting a life, an attitude, a type, a race, a class.

Most of us live in our homes knowing we’re not the only ones to have done so. But we rarely confront those shadows in any significant way. Why should we? This is us and that was them. Their clutter, their smells, their noises, and their way of doing things is long gone. We’ve painted, plastered, demolished and constructed or converted – a loft, a bigger kitchen, a new power shower in the bathroom.

Our moments have blotted out theirs. Maybe this is a necessary element of domestic living – maybe it’s the only way we can co-exist comfortably with each other’s past lives, each other’s ghosts. If Lucy Spawton or Melda McNish – a wonderfully sharp-tongued tartan name! – or Salome Bennet ever stood in our kitchen and sobbed or kissed or opened a fatal telegram, then it’s all gone now. If it wasn’t, the sense of claustrophobia would overwhelm us. We’d be stifled by years of emotional history every time we passed through a doorway or climbed the stairs.

When Jacob was about four years old, he asked me why people had to die. ‘Why, Mummy? Why does it have to happen?’

I thought quickly and came up with what I decided was a brilliant (and true) answer – for a four-year-old anyway.

‘Because, darling, if people didn’t die, then the world would fill right up and there’d be no room to move or have fun or anything.’

He frowned. ‘We’d have to stand on top of each other?’

‘Exactly. It would be very uncomfortable and everyone would get very grumpy and it would be awful.’

It’s 4.30 – closing time at the Minet Library. As the librarian slides the bolts on the big wooden door and turns the sign to ‘Closed’, I go and sit in my car outside and leaf through my notebook again and look at all those pencilled names (no biros allowed near the archives). Louisa Heron, Salome Bennet, Thomas Kyle, Gloria Duncan, Isabella Bloomfield Hinkley …

It’s beginning to rain. I don’t know why I feel oddly deflated when actually I’ve just found out so much. This, then, is it – the beginning of the trail. I should feel inspired and excited, but in fact I just feel sad.

I flick on the radio and it’s a repeat of a programme I heard earlier in the week, about a Hungarian who fell in love before the war and lost her sweetheart; then, through a series of coincidences, she met up with him again more than fifty years later and married him. A year later he was dead of cancer.

We moved into 34 Lillieshall Road on 4 July 1988. It was a hot day and still early enough in my pregnancy for me to be feeling constantly sick.

The only other thing I remember is that some good friends of ours happened to have moved into a house on a parallel road on the exact same day. In the evening Jim and Ruth came round and we shared an Indian takeaway among the cardboard boxes and packing cases. The turmeric in the sauce stained our best grey melamine coffee table bright yellow.

We tried everything, but nothing would remove the bright yellow cloud. And then one day, almost a year later, it just disappeared all by itself.

‘That’s all you remember?’ Jonathan says. ‘About moving in here?’

‘It was a big thing,’ I tell him, ‘one of those things you can just never explain.’

Dinner at Nick and Beth’s in Wandsworth. They are a bit older than us and, I half-suddenly remember, old friends of ‘Bubbles’ (real name Susan) who happens to be John Pidgeon’s ex-wife.

In the seventies, Beth lived in Macaulay Court, the 1930s art deco block at the far end of Lillieshall Road, where it turns sharply left and becomes Macaulay Road. And Bubbles lived at 61 Lillieshall Road with John and wore gold platform boots – or at least that’s what Beth once told me. And eventually John left her to live in our house, on the other side of the road and just a few doors down.

Now as Beth and I walk up their garden steps to inspect her echinacea and phlox before dinner, I decide I ought to question her about John Pidgeon. Bubbles must know where he is. So could Beth give me Bubbles’ phone number so I can ask – as delicately as possible of course?

‘Oh, Bubbles and him, they really really don’t get on,’ Beth says. ‘But he works at BBC Radio now, I think – he’s big, head of something – just send an e-mail to the BBC, you’ll get him.’