My Life in Houses

by Margaret Forster

  I went home the next day, but not straight home. Out of bravado, and because it was a glorious winter’s day, Hunter drove me from the Marsden to Kenwood, on the Heath, and we walked round the west meadow. It was bitterly cold, but the sky was bright, blue and cloudless, and over the grass was a slight mist hovering, about to lift. I felt like an escaped convict, OUT at last, free. Then we went home, and going home felt even better than being out. It was extraordinary that an ordinary Victorian house should have the power to make me feel so relieved and happy, but it did. I loved everything about it from the moment I went back through the front door, saw the pattern of the wallpaper, and the pictures on the walls and the big glass mirror with its gilt frame and the long pine shelf underneath it and then into the living room with its orange-covered sofas and the big pine table and all the jumble of books and belongings, all of it so familiar and yet a shock, the shock of identifying with it all, knowing it all had meaning. In our bedroom, the pleasure of being in my own bed was intense, lying there, looking at the pale yellow-and-white William Morris wallpaper and the Sheila Fell painting of a field at harvest time and the Clarice Cliff bowl on the shelf below it and the framed family photographs on the other wall, and out of the window the bare black branches of the giant plane tree in a nearby garden stretching into the sky. I kept falling asleep then waking again, checking it was all true, that I was home, in my house, thrilled to be there, knowing that now I could begin to recover and heal.

  There was a lot to heal, and the house couldn’t do all of it. The psychological battle to be ‘normal’ exhausted me. I felt physically out of proportion now that I’d had another mastectomy, as though my body was concave, one strange sweep inwards from chin to waist, and only then resuming its usual dimensions. I walked differently, seeming to lean slightly backwards, as though to balance better, which was ridiculous. And I took to shrouding myself in smock-like shirts, still battling with the decision of whether to be fitted with prosthesis. A double mastectomy changed everything, making it no longer possible to convince myself that in order not to look lopsided, and draw attention to myself, I had no choice about wearing a prosthesis. I had a choice now. I wouldn’t be lopsided, just completely flat-chested, no need to wear those stupid things as if I were some kind of drag artist. But vanity – or was it vanity? – pulled me the other way. If I submitted to these substitute breasts (which had begun to improve in shape and texture by then) might it not make me feel as well as look ‘normal’? I wished it was the 1920s, the era when the look was flat-chested for every woman.

  I paid a macabre visit to a little room in Clifford Street, off Bond Street, where two smiling, white-coated, highly made-up women ran a patient care service, funded by God knows who. They were surrounded by boxes of false breasts, piled up beneath certificates on the walls for every variety of surgical appliances, with barely room to move, what with their desk and a trolley and an electric kettle in front of which sat three jars of instant coffee and a box of tea bags. They were so proud of their wares, pulling out breast after breast, demonstrating the different shapes, and then politely asking if I could ‘see’ myself in any of them. Once it stopped being revolting it became, or I became, hysterical. It was like pretending we were having a cosy conversation about woolly gloves, discussing the size, the weight, the fabric. I decided to try the ‘very latest model’, which looked quite alarmingly nasty, but these women waxed lyrical about it, vowing I’d hardly know the difference from real skin. This type, they pointed out, was hollow, therefore virtually weightless, and it stuck to the chest. They couldn’t wait to fit two onto me, and they managed to do this with ease and affection, though I cringed, only managing not to run screaming from the room by repeating to myself my mantra of ‘better than a false leg, better than a false leg’. Straight afterwards, I went to Russell & Bromley’s and bought a pair of beautifully shiny, bright-red Wellingtons. Better than a false leg, better than a false leg . . .

  I still felt, though, that I was wrong, stupid, to have, as it were, given in. Why pretend to have breasts when I no longer had them? Did it make me less of a woman? Does being a woman mean you have to have breasts? I spent idle hours imagining all the women I admired suddenly having no breasts, and then even more bizarrely imagining famous beauties with no breasts – ah, but there a difference had to be admitted. Marilyn Monroe was not Marilyn Monroe without these pieces of flesh, a cleavage was essential. I became temporarily obsessed with looking at every woman I met and removing her breasts, just to see how this changed her. It was fascinating to discover women who could take this removal easily and hardly suffer from it, and those who were diminished, and whose breasts I had quickly to restore. It was a game I played to extinction in those first few weeks, but it was harmless because nobody knew what I was doing.

  Meanwhile, the physical recovery went on, and so did the chemotherapy. I wasn’t sick. The experience wasn’t unpleasant, except for the extreme tiredness, but then most women with three young children are tired anyway. I had regular blood tests, to check that the white blood cell count hadn’t fallen too low because of the chemo. In mid-February, when these tests were satisfactory and I was feeling strong enough, we decided, at long last, to go and inspect the Caldbeck cottage where almost all the renovations had been completed. Hunter was doing a book about the Lake District at the time so he was combining work with this visit, and set off first by car. I followed by train three days later, with my sister-in-law looking after the children. We’d had arguments before he left, about the contents of the car. He’d promised me that this Caldbeck cottage really would be a butt and ben, not in any way a proper home, and would be kept spare and minimal, which it needed to be anyway because it was so tiny. But he’d packed the car with things he thought might ‘come in useful’, as well as things I’d bought for the cottage. These included an old cane bed head, a worn-out looking hosepipe, two stone jars that ‘might’ be made into lamps, six empty coffee jars, a rug his mother had given us which I’d always hated, and a stool which had the strands of its wickerwork top frayed.

  The train journey to Windermere seemed the height of excitement to me – that feeling again of being out, released, escaped. Only six weeks since I’d left the Marsden and here I was, able to board a train and go off for the weekend. We stayed in a hotel that night and then the next morning drove to the cottage. It was like going into a fairy tale. Lifting the latch on the wooden door and walking in I wasn’t sure if I was little Red Riding Hood, expecting to see the wolf posing as her granny, or one of the Three Bears returning home, shocked to see their bowls empty. The minute room was full of little compositions, all asking to be painted, from the one small window, the red curtains I’d made framing it, to the old original fireplace taking up all of one wall and laden with logs. The floor now had stone flags, and the thick walls were plastered and painted white. A table covered in red-and-white gingham stood under the window and a two-seater, narrow sofa was squeezed into the remaining space. There was no real kitchen, just an alcove off this main room, with a stone sink and next to it a cooker. Stone stairs, uncovered and steep, led to a bedroom on one side and a narrow box room on the other. The bathroom was a marvel, somehow fitted under these stairs. There was nothing to do but admire.

  This cottage had been built to withstand the full force of the wild winds coming from the west and so it was dug low into the ground. There were only two small windows – one in the living room one in the bedroom. Not much could be seen from them but views were not the point: keeping the wind and cold out was more important. That first night, there was a tremendous wind, howling and roaring all around, but the cottage stood firm, not a rattle to be heard. It hunkered down, just as it had done for two hundred years, and being inside it felt secure and safe. Not so outside. It was a shock, next morning, to step outside and feel the wind, though by then it had quietened down a good deal. We set off to walk on the top fell road above Caldbeck, where the rough land sweeps down to the fells beyond, and some of the trees are so pu
shed by the wind that they appear almost horizontal, level with the ground. There was a rainbow above us, held up, it seemed, by thick buffeting clouds on either side, acting as buttresses. The sense of space was vast, miles and miles of green, with sheep everywhere and in the distance a group of fell ponies wandered backwards and forwards across the unfenced road.

  It wasn’t difficult, once back in the cottage, to imagine what life had been like for those living there before us. Everything about living there had been hard, involving exhausting physical labour of one sort or another. Simply keeping the fire going – for warmth, for cooking – meant an endless gathering of wood. It ate wood. All the logs we’d had delivered seemed to be burned in no time. The fireplace itself was so huge it needed half a forest to keep it going, and if the fire in it went out the cold was intense. Getting up in the morning, starting the fire was a priority, but it was unlikely those living here, who worked as farmers, would have bothered. It would be straight out in the morning, with no hot drink or food, unless the fire still had an ember or two which could be quickly coaxed into burning. The privy was round the back, and any washing would have to be done with a bucket of water taken from the rain barrel. By comparison, we were living here in the height of luxury and comfort, and we were well aware of it.

  Leaving the cottage, which was so snug and enclosed, it was always surprising to be reminded that there was an outside world in which we were a mere blip. The few farm buildings we could see looked insignificant against the landscape. What dominated were the fells, with High Pike the highest. I wanted to climb it, in spite of the wind. Climbing High Pike is not like climbing mountains such as Skiddaw, where there are well-marked paths. The ground here is rough and full of peat hags, and there are no paths. The climber makes her own way, the best way she can. It was gruelling that day, with my energy low and the weather against me, but I was determined to do it to show myself I could. Reaching the top of High Pike isn’t particularly rewarding either, there isn’t the thrill of standing on the summit of Helvellyn or Scafell, though the view across the Eden Valley to the Pennines can be exhilarating. Not that day, though. Cloud came down, the rain began, and we could see very little. When we got back to the haven that was the cottage, I was shattered. I’d hated the climb, hated the slogging on, the struggle not to be blown sideways by the vicious wind, hated having fallen into the must-get-to-the-top trap when it wasn’t in the least important to do so.

  That night, there was a violent storm, making the wind of the day before seem nothing. The rain was not like normal rain, like city rain, but more like an avalanche of water, thundering against the windows, making a noise as though rocks were being hurled against them. This was another version of a house as a place of refuge, this time from the elements – its original purpose. Surely the glass in the windows would crack, surely the tiles on the roof would blow off. Yet in the morning, when we nervously went to inspect the damage outside, there was no evidence of a terrible revenge wreaked by the storm. Some branches of trees were broken off, and the potholes in the track leading to the road were full of water, but otherwise there was no sign that there’d been a storm at all. The cottage sat smugly, knowing it had survived worse many times.

  Our last night there, all was quiet, intensely quiet, after the storm. The black all round the cottage was dense, unrelieved by any light from a moon or stars. When we put the lamp off inside, just to experiment, to see how dark it really was, and slowly walked a few yards away from the door, it felt perilous. There was nothing for us to bump into, so we counted twenty paces, without being able to see where we were going, and then turned round to count those twenty steps back to the door. We got nowhere near it. Putting our hands out to feel the door, or the wall, there was nothing there. Opening and shutting our eyes made no difference. The black was the same. We shuffled around cautiously till we found we had reached the gate, which meant we’d gone in entirely the wrong direction and were about ten yards from the cottage. Getting back to it was a matter of blindly inching slowly forwards.

  Before we left the next day, we made lists of what we needed to bring when we came for the Easter holidays with the children. A torch was number one.

  IT TOOK NINE months, not the planned six, for me to be finished with the chemotherapy, because of my white blood cell count once falling low enough to mean there had to be a halt till it climbed back up again. Once this treatment was over, and I’d been checked out at the Marsden, we began thinking of one final alteration to our house.

  At this point we could have moved back to Hampstead, with the value of our Boscastle Road house now sufficient to finance it. Hunter was keen, though partly his enthusiasm was to do with his love not just of looking at houses but bidding for them. He had his eye on Downshire Hill and dragged me off to inspect houses there on four different occasions – dragged, because I didn’t want to move. I loved my existing house more and more, and I valued the neighbourhood, where we were deeply embedded. My ordinary house in an ordinary road on the wrong side of the Heath had become special to me. So, as an alternative to the excitement of moving, we decided to incorporate the yard, between the little room that had been the coalhouse and the kitchen, into the fabric of the house, making a new room out of this space which would have glass doors opening onto the garden. At the same time, another room would be added on top of the bathroom, which would be Hunter’s office now that he worked mainly at home.

  All around us during this period, people were moving into the area and doing the same kind of thing. Every road seemed to have at least two skips in it as the houses were disembowelled, and bricks and plaster and bits of wood and old pipes were heaped into them. Walls were knocked down, back additions rebuilt, lofts made into rooms. Half the houses in our road had had bed-sitting rooms in them when we arrived in 1963, but by now – in 1980 – they had almost entirely disappeared. The demolition of the interiors was followed by an army of decorators, set to make the houses modern and attractive. The road became crowded with vans, painters, plumbers and electricians, vying for space. Every day except Sunday (and sometimes on Sunday too) the noise of hammering and drilling and sawing could be heard, one strong hum of energy vibrating along the road. NW5 was clearly no longer on the wrong side of Hampstead Heath, no longer Hampstead’s poor relation.

  Then one day, the house next door to us, our semi-detached neighbour, was sold. Previously, an elderly couple had lived there, a quiet self-contained pair who, though they kept their garden immaculate, had done nothing to their house in all the many years they’d lived there. They went off to a bungalow in Bournemouth and their house was sold immediately to a man who was rumoured to own several other houses. He apparently bought in order to modernise, and then sell at a huge profit. It didn’t sound like good news for us. We’d grown used to our pleasant neighbours and would’ve liked them to stay. But we’d altered our own house so we could hardly complain about the noise that now went on as the next door house was ripped apart and put together differently.

  The owner who eventually moved in next door seemed to live there with a constantly changing group of other people. He wasn’t interested in any kind of neighbourliness and could barely bring himself to say hello as he came and went. Fine, that was the way he wanted it. But this lack of any recognition made it hard to deal with what began to happen in this house, often when he himself was not there. His friends, if ‘friends’ was an apt description, were fond of flinging open the windows so that the excruciating loud beat of their music could blast over the garden in the early hours of the morning. More alarming, sometimes one of them would crouch smoking on the windowsill, above the glass roof of the new extension, and once we were horrified to see a man hanging by his fingertips from this windowsill, dangling over the glass before hands appeared to grab his arms and haul him back in. To add to the fun, there was an Alsatian dog that raced up and down the garden barking furiously, and once a woman in a white dress ran screaming from the house, throwing her arms up in what looked like appeal. Just
as we grabbed the phone to call the police, she stopped screaming and began laughing hysterically, and when a man came out she flung herself at him and he wrapped her in an embrace and she kissed him and then they went back inside, apparently devoted to each other.

  There were several years of this kind of thing, with the loud music played all night being the hardest to endure. We tried making polite objections, saying we didn’t want to be unreasonable but could the music be lowered after midnight, especially in the room next to our bedroom? This was always agreed to, with a ‘yeah, sure’, but the tremendous noise went on. Just as we reached the point of thinking we’d have to see if there was any law against this kind of torment, there would be a sudden cessation of all sound. We’d see an exodus from the house, of about a dozen people, all carrying bags and piles of belongings, and getting into battered vans. For as long as a whole month there would be blessed silence, and then a new lot would arrive, in twos and threes, until the house was once more full again and the same sort of noise would begin.

  All those years of living next to a quiet, considerate elderly couple we had smugly imagined that our Victorian house, unlike modern houses, had thick walls, which insulated it from noise. Wrong. Well built or not, the dividing walls between our house and next door hardly dulled the music. The walls in certain rooms seemed to vibrate, or so we imagined, and we’d stare at paintings hanging on these walls, expecting them to crash to the floor at any moment. Sometimes, in desperation, we’d thump on the walls to register our objection. This proved ridiculous. If our thumps were heard at all, they were ignored, or more likely treated as a joke. Once at two in the morning, when the whole of our house seemed invaded by the relentless beat coming from next door, Hunter went and hammered on the front door, determined to at least try a face-to-face appeal. It was eventually opened by a young man he’d never seen before who beamed and stood aside to let him in, welcome to the party, make yourself at home. He found the ground floor room full of people lying there stoned, completely immobile, raising only a hand in greeting but making no objection when, locating the stereo, he turned the volume right down. No one was aggressive, no one asked what the hell he thought he was doing. Pleased with his apparently easy victory, he came back to bed. Five minutes later, the music was back, louder than ever.