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

She laughs quickly. ‘Ha! The sponging, yes!’

And we always thought it was rag-rolling.

She calls to John, who’s doing something in the hedge. He steps down the bank, some kind of pruner in his hand and holds out the other one. He is just exactly as I remember him – solid, gruff, bearded, and slightly on edge. But then so am I.

We go in the kitchen – a little farmhousey kitchen whose long low window is filled up with a view of smooth country lawn. Julia makes coffee and John clears stuff off the table, spreads a load of photos out, and straightaway starts to tell me how he was in the process of buying the house – in 1980 – when he met Julia.

‘My wife and I lived at No. 61, but we’d decided the marriage wasn’t going anywhere. And she went to stay in her parents’ place in Kensington – a mews, I think they still have it. Anyway I think the sign went up at No. 34 on the Saturday morning – and I went straight round to the estate agent and the house was hideous, dreadful decor and all that, but I remember still thinking it was under-priced. I bought it immediately. For – guess how much?’

I shake my head and bite my lip. I can’t guess.

‘£32,000.’

He smiles and straightaway so does Julia. They both know we paid £217,500 for it just eight years later.

Julia pours coffee, pushes the sugar and milk across the table.

I ask him if he can remember who the seller was, but he can’t. He vaguely thinks that when he was first shown round the house there was a large black woman living there.

‘Was she called Kyle maybe? Or Ricketts?’

‘I don’t know. The name Ricketts rings a bell, like I said in the e-mail.’

Suddenly Julia takes a bottle from the fridge, pours herself a glass of water, and stands and tips her head back and drinks it all in one. We both watch her.

‘It was hideous,’ John says again as if he realizes this spectacle has been distracting. ‘The house.’

‘But you could see its potential?’ Julia prompts.

John tells me exactly what it was like. ‘The front door was orange and hardboarded over with a rectangular panel of fluted glass –’

‘I thought it was bobbly?’ Julia says, pouring more water.

‘Or bobbly. Bobbly or fluted anyway – down the middle. All the internal doors were hardboarded over too and the banisters. I pulled the hardboard off and there were no – what do you call them? – actual banisters, the verticals.’

I’m surprised. ‘None?’

‘I had to put them in – the ones you have there aren’t the originals, far from it. I got them from a squat on Clapham Park Road. They were pulling this squat down – I knew some people there – and so I whipped out the banisters.’

I laugh. Because it’s surprising and funny, the idea that the banisters in our house – which we’ve painted and repainted reverently and have always assumed were original – actually came from a Brixton squat.

‘They were pulling it down anyway. So you didn’t actually do anything wrong,’ Julia interjects quickly.

John ignores this. ‘They don’t match at all,’ he points out. ‘Some of them are completely different. Haven’t you noticed?’

I tell him I haven’t but then I am famous in our family for not noticing that sort of thing (and besides I always make an excuse when it comes to tedious banister painting), but I know that Jonathan, who misses nothing, will have noticed.

John tells me that there was an outdoor loo which they later turned into a pantry.

‘But it never felt right,’ Julia adds quickly. ‘We never quite liked the idea of it, did we? You know, a loo being a pantry.’ She wrinkles her nose.

‘There was also a bath right under the kitchen window,’ John says. ‘That was the only bathroom, you know.’

‘What?’ I ask. ‘You mean a horrid sixties one?’

‘No, no, not at all. A really nice cast-iron one. I had it outside the back door for ages and then eventually a rag-and-bone man came by and I said he could take it away. But I got something in return. Come and see.’

He takes me through into the low-beamed sitting room. Julia follows close behind. There on the wall are two brass candelabra-style light fittings, with flowers and bows. ‘I asked for those – they were on his cart – so he gave them to me in exchange.’

Julia says it was funny but in those days you still had this man with a cart and a bell – ‘a real rag-and-bone man’ – and as she says it, a dim memory slides back into view.

‘I remember him too!’ I say. ‘He still used to come when we first moved in.’ I realize he was one of those things you took for granted and then didn’t notice when he’d gone. The area comes up in price, times change, people too … the man with the cart goes.

I ask John how the house was arranged. Was it split up like flats for instance?

‘Oh no, not at all. No actual partitioning. But there were certainly different people living separately in different rooms.’ The little room at the back on the first landing (this is now my study but it’s also been a baby’s nursery and Raph’s room) was the kitchen. He says that in the (real downstairs) kitchen, the brick fireplace was plastered over with a nasty gas fire in it.

‘We pulled it all off and discovered this glorious original brick chimney breast behind.’

I apologize and tell them that in fact we finally got rid of it – ‘There was no light, we couldn’t see each other when we were cooking.’

John doesn’t react to this but says there used to be a door to the left of the fireplace – so those were originally two separate rooms. And the slab of York stone in the hearth came from Lassco Reclamation Yard. And we thought this was original as well. When we extended the kitchen out over the yard, we put the slab of stone in the garden, beneath the swing seat to stop feet scuffing the grass.

Julia asks if we kept the floor in the kitchen.

I hesitate. ‘The terracotta tiles? No, I’m afraid not. It wasn’t that we didn’t like them – in fact, we did, we loved them – but when we extended the kitchen they had to go.’

Julia gives John a private look and sighs.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, putting down my pen.

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘but they were so special.’

He smiles uneasily. ‘They took a while to find.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say again and I mean it. I realize I don’t especially want to mess with their memories. If the house was such a special and happy place for them, if they invested so much care in its decoration, do they really want to hear how we trashed so much of it?

But Julia’s face brightens. ‘Don’t be silly! We have practically the same here,’ she says, and I look at the floor and it’s true, they do. The earthy warmth of terracotta with little blue and white china patterned tiles at the corners, just like the ones that used to be in our kitchen. John asks me if I remember the zebra print wallpaper in the upstairs loo?

‘With the tassel tail you pulled to flush it?’

We all laugh. I tell them that for years we used to send guests upstairs to check out two things: the zebra loo and the Tottenham Hotspur Room.

‘Ah,’ says John and his face relaxes into a smile, ‘that was Leon.’ He shows me a photo of Leon in bed in the corner of Jake’s room. There’s the famous wallpaper with its blue and white Tottenham Hotspur logo repeated over and over. Leon is about Raph’s age – maybe nine or ten – and he has a Tottenham Hotspur duvet and a television and most of the rest of the room is taken up with a snooker table. Jake would be so jealous.

We kept the wallpaper for the first few months and then, that first Christmas in the house, with the baby due in late January, I began my maternity leave. The first thing I did was paint that room. It took me a week: Radio 4, the cool white light of mid-winter, and the sudden luxury of waking in the morning with no office to go to.

The Sanderson colour I chose was called Bisque – a pale, almost beigey, antique doll pink. It took a maddening number of coats to cover the Tottenham Hotspur shields. I wore a brown striped woollen dress and an old green apron and I stood awkwardly halfway up the ladder, holding on tight, an unborn pair of feet sporadically pounding me in the ribs. My body felt full and absurd, as if this baby should already be out.