My Life in Houses

by Margaret Forster

  Upstairs was less depressing. The front first-floor sitting room lifted our spirits. Even on that sunless day, it was full of light from the two big windows we’d admired from outside. Here, too, there was a marble fireplace, but this one was clean and, surprisingly, a fire was laid in it, looking so neat, ready to have a match put to it. There was no furniture, but there was a carpet, plain fawn with a darker brown rim, and though it had some stains on it, it gave the room a lived-in feeling the rest of the house lacked. The bedroom, the back room on the first floor, was in reasonable condition too, painted not wallpapered, and the view from the window was an overview of the whole garden, not visible from the room below. We peered out at the trees and bushes shrouded in snow, and tried to guess what they were. Apple trees, plum, cherry? Lilac bushes, camellias, forsythia? Who knew – certainly not the estate agent. Consulting his notes, he pronounced the garden ‘well stocked’.

  This left the bathroom, and the top floor rented by the sitting tenant. The bathroom was, as expected, ‘in need of modernisation’. The bath itself was a rather handsome tub, though badly stained. The lavatory was separate. The lid was down, and nobody, least of all the estate agent, was bold enough to lift it or to pull the metal chain. The top floor was another two sets of stairs up and the smell here was different, certainly not as foul but cloying in a different way. We stood and looked into each of the three rooms, all of them crowded with furniture, and the windows both net-curtained and with heavy brocade curtains, almost closed, over them. The sitting tenant was in America, visiting her daughter. She’d been there six months and, though this was not actually said, the impression was given that she might not return.

  That was it. We went back to the Vale of Health confused and dispirited. The house was in a much worse condition than we’d anticipated and it was obvious a great deal of ‘modernisation’ would have to be done, at a huge cost. We didn’t have the money to finance all the essential work. But more serious than this worry was the question, did we really want this house? Does it speak to us, we asked each other mockingly. No. The answer was a resounding No. On the contrary, it yelled at us to run a mile. Its voice, if it had had one, couldn’t compete with that of Heath Villas. It was like looking at someone clad in filthy, tattered garments, their unwashed grey hair lying lank around their scab-covered face, and trying to see what might lie underneath this woeful appearance after a good scrubbing. Was there a sound, even attractive, body under this outer grime? Maybe there was, but had we the nerve, never mind the money, to bet on it? Would we be able to tolerate a sitting tenant? Would we get on with her as well as we had done with Mr Elton and Mrs Woodcock?

  The agonising went on and on: to make a bid, or not? In the end, we made an offer of £5,000, just below the asking price. I didn’t know if I wanted it to be accepted or not. Yes, I wanted to have a house, I’d always wanted this, but not in any old condition. When our offer was accepted, I didn’t know whether to be thrilled, or to be alarmed. There was no jump-for-joy while we waited to see if we could get the necessary mortgage – which we did. The Scottish Union said they would give us £3,600 on a twenty-year mortgage, if first of all the roof was mended together with some other less vital conditions. Our savings covered the rest of the cost, leaving us with a mere few hundred to pay for the building work (or at least to begin to pay for it while we earned more).

  The agreement was signed on 18th February 1963. It felt terrifying. We picked up the keys and went into the house, our house. It still smelled bad, it was still unwelcoming, sulking, not at all pleased to see us. We wandered about all the rooms, making lists of what needed to be done.

  There was no feeling of elation whatsoever.

  LEAVING OUR FLAT in Heath Villas was hard. It felt so sad, looking round the first floor for the last time, a weak, wintry sun creeping across the carpet, lighting the whole place up as it always did. The house we were going to was dark in comparison, with no views from most of its windows except for rows of other houses. Here, we’d looked out on greenery everywhere, and the still waters of the pond. These two rooms, the sitting room and the kitchen, had lifted the spirits, always. And they had been lucky for us. Everything went right, the three years we lived there, and I thought it was not too fanciful to imagine that the atmosphere here, and of the house itself, had helped. This house had been a turning point. It’s where I wrote and had accepted by Jonathan Cape the book that would become my first novel, and now I could begin to make at least some sort of living as a writer.

  But however much we loved it, we were leaving. Mrs Woodcock gave me a leaving present: a silver Queen Anne mirror, a rather odd gift but very kind of her. She said she would miss us and wished we were ‘not going so far away’ (though of course we were hardly going any distance at all). Mr Elton took us out to a farewell meal and then gave us two large china breakfast cups and saucers decorated in a pattern of pale green leaves. He wasn’t actually in the house when we left – he said he found goodbyes distressing – but Mrs Woodcock stood at her window and as the van we’d hired drove off she waved a white handkerchief. Oh, dear me, it would have taken a heart of stone indeed not to weep, which I proceeded to do, bawling all the short way to Boscastle Road. The only way I could make myself stop snivelling was by telling myself that we were only leaving the Vale of Health for a few years. We would be back, or back in Hampstead anyway, when we’d made some money. Boscastle Road was only to be temporary, our first house, to be followed by what would be our real house. This wreck we were moving to, which would drain our slim purse and our energy, was a mere stepping stone, okay? OK.

  Snow was still lingering on the ground. The cold was bitter that March day. We had the same trouble opening the front door as the estate agent had had, even though we’d been in and out several times since. It seemed a bad omen to have to struggle to get into what was now our house, and I began to imagine it had some dreadful history we didn’t yet know about. But, so far as available records could reveal, it didn’t. Its history was quite ordinary. The land the house was built on had been leased first to one William Apedaile of New Hampton, Middlesex, and then to John Edgar, a builder living in Kentish Town. Previously, the land belonged to the Earl of Dartmouth, which is why several roads in the area were given his name. John Edgar built his first eight houses in 1869, and then sold one to Margaret Jane Hollick, who in turn sold it in 1929 to Victor Prior, a musician. The next owners were the Ligate family. James Ligate was an engine driver, and he lived in our house with his two sisters Ellen and May. Ellen was the last to die. She took in lodgers, and the last of them was Mrs Hall who moved in just before the Rent Act of 1957. She occupied the top floor, but after Ellen Ligate’s death the rest of the house remained empty, while its ownership was disputed, though there were some short-term lettings.

  Nothing there to account for the sullen feel to this house. For such a long time, it seemed to resist all efforts to make it a pleasant place to come home to. It sulked and scowled and seemed determined to stick to its unlovely state however hard we tried to clean and modernise it. We camped in one room, the bedroom, where at least the view of the garden cheered us up – ah, the garden, upon which the Ligates had lavished all the attention lacking in the house. It was one of the unexpected consolations of those first weeks in the house, watching the shape of the garden emerge as spring arrived. Every day we saw some new treasure, one day a tree revealed, in its froth of white blossom, as an apple tree, another a shrub as a japonica or forsythia or lilac . . . colour, colour everywhere and faint scents wafting through the windows, now wide open to try to lift the still lingering mouldy smell. Later on, there were roses emerging, with an arch entwined with them halfway down the path, and either side of this path there were flowers we were too ignorant to give a name to. The whole of this pampered garden was walled, an old brick wall, and at the end there was an Anderson air-raid shelter. There was space to build a garage, opening onto the mews lane between us and Grove Terrace, if we so wished. We did wish, but a garage was wel
l down the list of essential jobs.

  The surveyor’s instructions had been clear: the roof was the main priority. The valley gutters needed renewing and the tiles of the whole roof would have to be overhauled. Obviously, we needed a builder. Mr Elton recommended the Hampstead firm of Cramb and Dean. Someone came to give an estimate, but it was three times that of the local Kentish Town builder we found. We knew this might mean the local man, one J.P. Brown, was rubbish but we took the chance, and he and his merry men got cracking. J.P. Brown was an Irishman, thickset and strong looking though not young. There was nothing about his appearance which inspired confidence except for his brawny arms, the sleeves of his shirt always rolled up, ready for work and looking used to it. He was cheerful and full of confidence – the roof would be no bother, no bother at all. He had a gang of six Irish workmen who all lived in his house in Fortess Road, ten minutes away. They seemed to sleep in a kind of dormitory, so far as our questioning could make out, with Mrs Brown cooking their dinner every evening, the money to pay for it taken out of their wages before they got them. They arrived promptly at 7.30 each morning, though not always all six, and took possession of the house before we left for work (I was still teaching). They could tell how worried we were, especially me, about all the work that needed to be done but it only seemed to amuse them. ‘Will ye look at that?’ they’d say, pointing out some dodgy brickwork, ‘falling down, ’tis!’ and then merely laugh, and tell me they were only joking – ‘It’ll be a grand house when we’ve done, so it will,’ they’d console me. I found it hard to believe. For weeks and weeks, all was destruction, the tearing out of things leaving gaping holes which terrified me. The noise was coming from so many different places, the hammering and drilling and sawing, and the bad smell was replaced by other hardly less unpleasant odours of cement and plaster and thick dust. If there was a plan, any order in this chaos, then it was all in J.P. Brown’s head.

  He himself often wasn’t there, and sometimes none of his men were either. They just disappeared, with no warning. There was never any explanation afterwards either, though clearly they were moving between jobs. We’d phone J.P. Brown, and get Mrs Brown, who always sounded breathless, as though she’d climbed a great number of stairs to answer the phone, which had rung long enough to force her to answer. She never had the least idea where either her husband or his crew were. ‘Out, working,’ she would say. Sometimes she was too exhausted, or too fed-up to speak, and would simply lift the receiver and wait. When we asked for J.P. she’d say, ‘’tis Mrs Brown’ and hang up. Eventually, we discovered that if she was pestered enough she’d nag her husband to come to us, because we’d become, with our anxious pleading, ‘that poor young couple’. This, so the workmen told us, hugely enjoying the drama, infuriated their boss, who would shout at her in the name of Jesus to shut up. But it usually resulted in him sending at least a couple of the workmen round the next day.

  Sometimes, he’d send one of his sons to oversee. The workmen liked this. It meant Brown junior arriving at 7.30 a.m. and leaving at 8 a.m. to have breakfast. He was a carpenter, but they had absolute contempt for him, a contempt shared by his father. The son put cupboards in with such carelessness that none of the joins fitted. ‘Call himself a chippy,’ his father would mutter, and kick the cupboard door to demonstrate how badly it was hung. When J.P. himself was there, twice as much work was done, as he rushed backwards and forwards through the house inspecting and examining everything and blaspheming loudly if it was not to his satisfaction. He went on the roof himself, doing most of the retiling, completely oblivious to any wind blowing, holding on his battered old cap, however unsteady it made him. Standing in the garden watching him was a terrifying experience (and many years later, we heard that was how J.P. Brown died, swept off a roof in a strong wind he’d chosen to ignore).

  We were still, after three months, living in one room, our bedroom (though we had a cooker functioning in the still hellhole of a kitchen). We’d allowed ourselves the luxury of a fitted carpet there, a cheap hair cord, pale green and very Heath Villas. We were only in this room to sleep because as soon as we came home from work we would start trying to tackle all the jobs that needed to be done. J.P. Brown was being paid to do the building work, but we couldn’t afford to pay him to do the decorating. This, we assured each other, we could do ourselves. It was just a case, wasn’t it, of stripping off old wallpaper and paint, and putting new stuff on? Any fool could do that. It turned out, of course, that it was harder than it looked and that we were hopeless at this DIY. We couldn’t make the dark brown embossed paper on the hall walls budge. First we attacked it with metal scrapers, then with some sort of liquid which had acid in it – ‘will remove even the most stubborn wallpaper’ – and still it clung on. It was the same with the thick brown paint on the doors which we daringly tried to remove with a blowlamp. Hours and hours we spent on these sorts of jobs, getting more and more bad-tempered and tired.

  The house itself seemed to be resisting all our valiant efforts to make it look good. It was as though it had no intention of yielding to the 1960s, with its liking for white paint and plain surfaces, and wanted instead to cling on to dreary colours and florid wallpapers, stuck in the Victorian era. This resistance was particularly evident when it came to the floors. Bare, sealed floorboards were the thing in 1963. We’d seen them in other houses and we wanted them in ours. Knowing it would be a task probably beyond us, we asked J.P. Brown to do it when he’d finished the building work. He said no, it would be robbing us. The floorboards were in poor condition, and were only cheap wood anyway, and they would split if they were sanded. He demonstrated by helpfully putting the heel of his boot through one floorboard which already had a crack in it. Couldn’t he replace just the boards which had splits in them? No, he couldn’t, there were too many of them. Best to put a nice bit of lino down. We sulked, then we turned stubborn and hired a sanding machine. We were terrified of it, but off we went, sanding the boards of the ground floor, holding our breath in case every single one splintered. Not quite half of them did, but we splashed on the seal and pretended it had worked. We could almost hear the house sniggering at the result, and we certainly heard J.P. laughing when he next turned up. He was kind, though, directing one of his men to put nails here and there in the places where boards were coming adrift.

  Meanwhile, the main work had all been done. The back addition was now a proper kitchen with a new window overlooking the garden. The bathroom had a new bath, sink and lavatory. We had had central heating installed, though we hadn’t yet used it. The horrible smell had gone. Now, coming into the house, the smell was of paint. One job we found we could manage satisfactorily was painting the walls – any fool really could do that. We bought two sheepskin rollers (‘don’t be bothering with the foam ones,’ J.P. said), price: £1.8s.6d, and set to. Every wall was now white, pristine and perfect. We even accomplished the harder task of laying a tiled floor in the kitchen, black and white tiles, to achieve what we hoped would be a Dutch interior effect. The house, at last, was agreeing to scrub up well.

  It was at this point, just as we felt we were truly taking possession of our house, that our sitting tenant arrived back from America. We soon discovered we had been deluded.

  The moment Mrs Hall arrived back we felt we were living once more in a flat, a large and roomy flat, but a flat all the same. Up to then, it had been easy to forget that the top floor of our house was lived in by someone else, who would have habits, routines, tastes which did not fit with ours. Sharing a house with Mrs Hall turned out to be not at all like sharing with Mrs Woodcock and Mr Elton. Mrs Hall did not flit silently up and down the shared staircase as Mr Elton had done. For a woman in her mid-sixties – a small, slight woman – she was surprisingly heavy on her feet, thumping up and down the stairs as though she were wearing hobnailed boots instead of perfectly ordinary shoes. She clearly liked her passage through the house to be noted, pausing often to sigh or groan in a highly theatrical way. It brought me out of whatever room
I was in to enquire if she was all right, and gave her the opportunity to describe her various ailments, and me to show some sympathy. She liked to talk, and had absolutely no intention of communicating by note. I tried that once only, leaving a polite note at the bottom of her stairs, the extra two flights that went up to her floor, telling her that one of the workmen would be coming up to mend the leaking tap she’d reported. She came down to the kitchen holding it at arm’s length, rather the way Mrs Woodcock held the Sunday Times colour magazine when she was disposing of it, and said, ‘What’s this? Am I not worth talking to now?’ I apologised, said I just thought it easier to leave a note, it meant there was no need to bother her. ‘Bother?’ she said, ‘Talking to me is a bother?’ I gave up, and never left a note again.