My Life in Houses

by Margaret Forster

  We shared a bathroom and lavatory with Mrs Hall, just as we had done with Mr Elton. Every morning at 6 a.m. Mrs Hall thundered down her stairs to use the lavatory, and after she’d used it she sprayed an air-freshener vigorously, repeated puffs of some stuff supposed to smell like roses according to the label, and in fact stinking of decaying vegetation. We asked her if she would please just open the window instead because we didn’t like the smell of the spray. She said would we prefer lily of the valley, or Devon violets, the spray came in those scents too. No, we said, sorry, but just open the window, fresh air is best. Not, she said, at her age, opening a window at that time would likely bring on her cough. So we had to put up with it, and open the window ourselves when we got up.

  Even more annoying were the rubber stickers she stuck on the bottom of our new bath. These were blue, shaped like stars, and were to make the bath safe for her. They’d been bought in America and she expected us to be thrilled with them, saying they would prevent us from having accidents ourselves. I tried to get them off, but couldn’t. They remained there, irritating me every single day, for the next fifteen years, until we got a new bath.

  Air fresheners and star stickers caused nothing like the fury the arrival of Mrs Hall’s television caused. Her daughter in America bought it for her, and she was very proud of having it. In 1963, televisions were not at all common – we didn’t have one ourselves – and she invited her friends to come and watch in the evenings. We then had a procession of excited elderly women hauling themselves up the stairs, with Mrs Hall instructing them to ‘hang on to the banisters,’ as though the staircase itself was in danger of moving. They then settled down to watch this modern marvel, with the sound turned up to top volume. Mrs Hall had told us she was ‘hard of hearing’ but she had no faith in hearing aids and wouldn’t succumb to them. She was fond of musical programmes and any sort of quiz or game show, and we’d hear these booming away, the astonishingly loud noise percolating through the entire house. The friends all left by nine o’clock usually, but the television stayed on until midnight when Mrs Hall finally went to bed. It was directly over our bedroom and we’d lie there fuming, thinking this can’t go on, it’s ridiculous, this is our house and she’s dominating it. We wondered if we could get J.P. to put a wall and a door at the bottom of Mrs Hall’s stairs, to cut out the noise, but knew it wouldn’t work, and then we thought of moving our bedroom downstairs but we didn’t want to and why the hell should we. The only other option was to buy her out, but we didn’t have the money. She was rightly protected by the Rent Act of 1957, which gave her the right to stay so long as she paid the rent, and we had always known this. We’d recently been told we were allowed to increase her rent of one pound twelve shillings a week to two guineas and rather hoped she would say this was too much and she was going to find somewhere cheaper. No chance. She paid her rent scrupulously every week, in cash, counting it out coin by coin in front of us, to emphasise her unquestionable honesty. No one enjoyed being a sitting tenant more than Mrs Hall. She was well aware of her power in the house: we needn’t think it was ours. She’d been here first, and her hold on it was firm.

  So for five years, from 1963–68, we learned to tolerate Mrs Hall. This would have been easier if she hadn’t had such a strong personality, and if she hadn’t been such a complainer. She complained about things you would have thought she’d be glad of, such as the central heating. Before we came, her flat was heated by two electric fires which were an expensive form of heating and didn’t, I imagine, warm her whole flat very effectively. It seemed sensible when J.P. Brown was putting central heating in the rest of the house also to have it extended to the top floor which, of course, one day we hoped to have access to. But Mrs Hall was not pleased. She complained that there were not enough radiators provided and the heat was inadequate. There was no possibility of comparing and contrasting the heat now with the heat of the previous electric fires, so we had to take her word for it even though we doubted she was right. She also thought she was entitled to have all three of her rooms redecorated because marks had been made on her paintwork during the installation of the central heating.

  Sometimes, she went away, though not yet for another visit to America (for which we yearned). That wasn’t due for another three years, ‘if I’m spared’. But she occasionally went to stay for a weekend with her other daughter who lived half an hour away and came to collect her by car. Then, the house returned to us, though these brief respites made us even more eager to have it to ourselves all the time. There was one way, though, in which having Mrs Hall there proved an asset.

  In March 1964, I had my first baby, Caitlin, and instantly Mrs Hall changed character. The television was no longer blaring away until midnight for fear it might waken the baby, and she began tiptoeing up and down the stairs, shushing her friends too. By the time Caitlin was fifteen months and able to crawl up stairs, Mrs Hall tempted her up to her flat every day. This was excellent news for me. I didn’t actively encourage Caitlin to climb Mrs Hall’s stairs but I didn’t stop her, especially once I was pregnant again and welcomed the rest I could have while she was with Mrs Hall.

  I was going to give birth this time at home, and we were having the coalhouse converted into a small bedroom. We once more had J.P. Brown back. It wasn’t a big job, only a matter of clearing this back addition of remnants of coal and other rubbish, putting a window in, and then knocking a door through into the main house. By then, the house had changed its nature convincingly and this was just another improvement. I’d first realised this transformation when I came home from hospital with Caitlin and saw the house in a completely different light. I came back to it, my mind still half expecting it to seem not really ours. I was like a stranger, seeing it all anew, and I could hardly believe how light and bright and attractive it was. It was a snowy day, just as it had been when we first saw the house, but this time the yellow painted door with its shining brass knocker opened smoothly, and inside the walls were papered in a blue and white pattern of birds, and the sitting room had a log fire burning and it was all clean and lovely.

  Jake was born in May 1966, in the new, little room, probably the first baby ever to be born in the house. I loved this fact. People had died in the house but nobody had been born there so far as we could find out, and this made it belong even more to us. Unable to resist a sentimental gesture to mark the occasion, we planted a cherry tree in the garden. There were plenty of fruit trees in it already, but none planted by us, so this one was special (and it went on to flourish, cascading the lawn with pink blossom every spring). It made me begin to decide that we could never leave this house, our house. How could we, when we’d planted a tree and needed to watch it mature? Would returning to Hampstead be worth such desertion? No, it would not. Already, in a mere three years the ‘significant moments’ had piled up and were exerting a powerful tug on my loyalty to the house. But it wasn’t a decision that needed to be made yet, because we were nowhere near being able to move back to the Vale of Health, or anywhere similar. The thought was there, though, at the back of my mind: I am not going to want to leave this house, ever.

  But if Heath Villas had brought us luck there were signs, by 1966, that Boscastle Road was going to be even luckier for us. The next two years were hectic, with film projects on the go which made it look as if we were at last going to refill our bank account, emptied by paying for all the work done by J.P. Brown. My second novel, Georgy Girl, was in production, and Hunter’s Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush was on the edge of the same. Our house, during this period, became a place of meetings – directors, producers and actors – which I didn’t like at all. I felt uncomfortable having these people in my house, though they were being very accommodating and kind, agreeing to come to me, first because I was about to have Jake and then after I’d had him. It wasn’t, for them, a very workman-like atmosphere, sitting in a room full of toys and baby clothes, with one child tottering around and the other roaring in his cradle only just next door and not at
all out of hearing. They were tolerant, these men, sitting with scripts on their knees, pointing out what would work and what would not, and I was the impatient one, knowing I wasn’t suited for this or for any kind of team work.

  Mrs Hall, on the other hand, loved all this activity. The film people came in large cars, which often waited in the street for them. Though she said she was ‘hard of hearing’, she somehow seemed to hear our doorbell ring before I did and would rush down, arthritic limbs suddenly nimble, and answer the door, claiming she’d thought it was her bell being rung. We also, around this time, had some television crews arriving to do interviews which changed Mrs Hall’s attitude to us entirely. She was disappointed when told that the programmes we’d appear on were obscure arts slots which she’d be unlikely to catch. But still, we had had television made in our house – the glory of it. I was relieved that by the time Hunter was doing the Beatles’ biography, and they themselves were coming to the house, Mrs Hall was in America again for another six months. Answering the door to the Fab Four would have had her swooning.

  Why exactly the Beatles wanted to come to our house never seemed clear to me. What was the attraction? I thought maybe it was a kind of joke even if I didn’t understand it. But Hunter insisted it was part of wanting, at the height of their fame and already tired of it, to do ‘normal’ things. Going to friends’ houses for dinner was what ‘normal’ people did in the new middle-class life they, like us, had fallen into. Anyway, three of them came, separately, though I’d rather have got the whole thing over in one go.

  Paul came first, with Jane Asher, but for tea, not dinner. Tea was easy. Paul played energetically with Jake, and Jane charmed Caitlin. Next came George and Pattie, but for an evening meal. George was intent on a philosophical discussion, and not much interested in the food. I’d been told all the Beatles were vegetarians (not at all common in the sixties) and I’d gone to some trouble to prepare an aubergine dish from a recipe I’d learned. I made the same dish for Ringo and Maureen but it turned out they were the sort of vegetarians who didn’t like vegetables other than potatoes. Luckily, I’d made two puddings, so that was fine. John, in the end, didn’t come, having got over any desire to do the middle-class thing (and anyway, unlike the other three, all brought up, like us, in council houses, John was nearer to being middle class himself).

  It was as a direct result of earnings from films and the Beatles’ biography, on which we had already paid tax, that we, too, were about to leave our house and go abroad for fourteen months. I was appalled at the idea. We’d just got the house into shape and had actually been able to furnish it – why would I want to leave my brand-new Habitat day-bed and the big pine table and the squishy, low armchairs? I was still at the point of admiring them all (Mrs Woodcock’s influence long since rejected). I was settled and didn’t want to be uprooted, and most of all I did not want other people renting our house, which is what would have to happen if we went off for this allegedly idyllic year or so in the Mediterranean. But it was explained to me that, with tax under Harold Wilson’s Labour government now at around ninety-five per cent, if we didn’t go abroad we would lose the rest of this sudden influx of money. We might never earn such sums again, and by keeping a proportion of it, if we went abroad, we would give ourselves security for the future. The other factors that came into the decision were that Hunter had been given a sabbatical year by the Sunday Times, and both children were not yet school age. It was the perfect opportunity to spend it in a Swiss Family Robinson kind of way.

  I still wasn’t jumping for joy.

  A New Zealand family rented our house for a year. They were enthusiastic about the house, thrilled with the garden, and delighted to be so near Hampstead Heath. Their two children were the same age as Caitlin and Jake, and slotted perfectly into the playroom (the name given by then to any room where children slept and had their toys, the word ‘nursery’, now outdated). I wanted to ask them to cherish all our belongings but couldn’t, knowing it would be a cheek when they were paying to use them – ‘cherish’ indeed! They asked if they could move in some of their own bits and pieces, which they’d bought while in an unfurnished flat for the last three months, and we said of course. There turned out to be quite a lot of these ‘bits and pieces’ and once they’d arrived they fitted in oddly with our own furniture. Rooms which had had plenty of space in them suddenly looked crowded. They also asked if they could move some furniture of ours to other rooms, in an arrangement that would suit them better, and again we said yes, of course they could do whatever they wanted once we had left, but could they put everything back as it had been before they, in turn, departed.

  Fuss, fuss . . . it was only furniture, and I could put everything back as it had been in half an hour, so it was ridiculous to mind so much about the position of objects. But already, with the New Zealanders’ stuff in place before we left, the house felt as if it had passed out of my hands. The red, wooden rocking chair, my latest purchase, looked all wrong now that it had been moved from the corner near the window to accommodate the new family’s giant trunk, and our big pine table was wasted, shoved up against a wall so that their two-seater sofa could fit in. Our Welsh dresser – another, now fashionable item – was festooned with the New Zealanders’ new crockery instead of my arty display of old china plates, and the kitchen had gained a pressure cooker, an ugly, shiny chrome thing. Definitely time to go.

  I hated closing the front door behind us as we left, early one raw March morning, a taxi taking us to Heathrow. I was pushing emotion onto what was just a pile of bricks and mortar, a place I’d only lived in for five years, imagining that the house was giving a forlorn cry of abandonment as the key was turned in the lock. All the other houses I’d lived in, except for our rented flat in Heath Villas, I’d left without a backward look, and now here I was, ‘carrying on’ as my father would have said, and yet I was only leaving this particular house for fourteen months. What had happened? I really didn’t know, but there was already an attachment there that took me by surprise.

  THE HOUSE WE arrived at, in the Maltese island of Gozo, was not the house we’d thought we would be living in. That one, which we’d been shown slides of, was above Ramla beach, the only good sandy beach on the island. It had looked idyllic, situated on a hill just above the beach, with a narrow path running down to it. But at the last minute, literally the day before we left England, we were told that this house was no longer available but there was another, even better, in the north of the island. We had no alternative but to accept it.

  It was not ‘better’ than the Ramla beach one. For a start, it was nowhere near a beach, any beach. The address, Birbuda Street, Ghaab, suggested some kind of organised community but the reality was a dispersed collection of houses stuck at the far north of the island, not exactly a wilderness but tending that way. The last bit of the road to it was stony and dusty and we were relieved to get to the end. The house itself, when we found it, at least looked attractively Moorish in design. It had recently been converted from an abandoned farmhouse and nobody had yet lived in it in its new form. I’d worried about fitting in to somebody else’s house, but there was no difficulty there. The house had no atmosphere about it at all. It felt blank, without any imprint of any kind. Entering it was like stepping into a vault, with the ceiling so high and the walls whitewashed and bare. It felt cool, which was a blessing after the blazing heat outdoors, and there was a faint echo when we talked. It was quite dark, the main light coming from the door, which opened onto a long veranda.

  We unpacked our luggage, our clothes, toys and books, and they immediately looked lost. The furniture was basic and cheap, not at all suited to its setting. A Formica table with spindly legs looked like an insult to the living room as did two armchairs covered in grey moquette. At least, we thought, the children can’t damage anything, and there was the advantage of having lots of space for them to run around in. But from the beginning, there was no sense either that this house had ever been someone’s home or that it
could be made into one, and certainly not during the short time we were going to be there. It was a house made to be rented, to provide an income for its new, absent, owners, and that was how it would remain.

  It proved a strange experience living there. Two maids went with the house, twins called Josephine and Lily, who spoke little English. We weren’t given any choice about having them – they were part of the deal, and turned up every morning for two hours, though there was little to do. A great deal of sweeping went on, and a lot of clothes washing (there was, of course, no washing machine). They were always snatching up clothes that didn’t need to be washed, and then scrubbing them ferociously, over and over again, in a big tub. We usually left for the beach soon after they arrived, and returned as they were leaving, so we didn’t get in each other’s way. We had a long siesta in the afternoon and then, when it was cooler, though not much cooler, we would go and explore the rest of the island. At night, the house was hot, though it felt cool during the day, and we slept badly. It was a relief when dawn came, the coolest part of the day.

  We knew, quite early on, that we’d made a mistake and part of this mistake was the house itself, not just its situation, though this was a disaster. It seemed a long car ride from Ramla beach, where we’d wanted to be and where we spent the mornings. We never wanted to leave the sea, and getting the children into the boiling hot car for the ride home seemed such an effort. The writing was not going particularly well either, though we both tried to put in a couple of hours a day. It was easy to blame the house, but a cheat. Anyone who really wants to write can write anywhere, but it was convenient to make excuses about the house being too hot, the house being too uncomfortable, and so on. We even went so far as to tell ourselves that if we’d been in the house next door, also recently converted but lived in by the owner before being rented, then we would have been more productive. In essence, this other house was the same as ours but the difference was in how it had been furnished and decorated – a matter of taste, in short. Our owner had treated this Moorish shell as though it were a bungalow in a British suburb, whereas the owner of the next door one had chosen things that complemented the Moorish design. There were lovely textiles everywhere, and instead of sofas and chairs in the living room there was a low wooden shelf running round the room with cushions upon it as well as along the wall. The tiles on the floor were like a mosaic, and there were wall hangings embroidered with pictures of the island.