My Life in Houses

by Margaret Forster

  But still, no one wants to define herself as one whose role in life is to look after the running of a house. It’s strange, because it is an exacting job requiring all kinds of skills, the sort most people don’t even notice never mind value. Any woman in charge of the running of a house fights a constant battle against the ever rising tide of disorder and dirt, and even if she can happily, and sensibly, settle for a certain degree of mess, there is still all the provisioning and the laundry and the cooking to be done – I’d say a housewife doing all this on her own and doing it well is something of a heroine. Or a fool. Either way, the pressure is relentless, in spite of all the brilliant labour-saving devices in modern life, with the house demanding constant attention. If it doesn’t get it, it shows its disapproval pretty quickly and becomes a place no longer a pleasure to live in.

  So I let things slide a bit as I grew older, with the influences of housewives in my northern family fading over the years. My standards became those of my neighbourhood, which on the whole, with a few startling exceptions, were fairly lax. Walking round our streets in the evening, and peering through windows into rooms with lights blazing but curtains/blinds/shutters as yet undrawn, a favourite ploy of writers, I saw a good deal of ‘relaxed living’ on display. It looked attractive. Families sitting round big messy tables, children coming and going, taking what they wanted from the dishes of food, the telly on in the corner, a dog wandering around, books and newspapers in heaps, sofas with torn covers – all must be well in such a house regardless of who is looking after it. A fallacy, probably, but not one that’s going to be exposed by looking through a window.

  Often, going out to post a letter at dusk, I’ve left the shutters open in our living room so that on my way back I can walk on the other side of the road and peer in, as though I didn’t live there at all. The room I see bears all the distinguishing marks of those other rooms I’ve looked into except that it is at the moment empty of people, and tidy. There are the usual shelves of books, the paintings on the walls, the general impression of a comfortable space. Our lights don’t fit in, though. Our lamps are old, table lamps, with apricot-coloured shades, which look pretty but are hopeless for reading under, though such a lot of reading goes on. We moan about our lighting every winter, and swear we will have fitted those small, strong bulbs that other people have shining brightly from their ceilings, but we never do, unable to face the upheaval involved. Still, standing and staring into our living room, the glow from these useless lamps is soft and pleasant. They give the room a comfortable look, maybe very retro but worn, relaxed, a mature room. There are so many things that should be done to it, but it pleases me. My house, for all its deficiencies, pleases me.

  This is lucky, because I’ve no energy now to change anything about it. The relief that I used to feel coming back into our house during the time, in the late 1970s, when cancer began is even more intense now that, since 2007, it is metastatic, spreading through my bones and into the lining of the right lung. Inside my house, I can cope. I resist leaving it for anything more than a walk on the Heath, for as far as I can manage. Yet I don’t feel confined the rest of the time, I don’t feel like screaming at the sight of the walls. When everything in my body is changing, as the cancer advances, my house, by staying the same, is a huge comfort, as it always has been.

  For a while, during several months in 2007, it took on a new role, one room within it becoming like a small hospital ward. It wasn’t a room exactly suited to the purpose, but it was on the ground floor at the back, the room made out of the old coalhouse, kitchen and yard. It has a large window and glass doors leading into the garden. The table was removed and the chairs round it, and a single bed placed across it so that lying down I looked out onto the garden. Beside this bed, I had a Zimmer frame, and with its help could just about get myself to the lavatory and washroom off the hall. I never entirely lost the use of my legs but I’d come dangerously close to it, and whether I’d get back to being able to walk properly again wasn’t known. I might, I might not. Meanwhile, I’d better adapt to life in one room.

  I did, remarkably quickly. After all, I was home, in my house, with its famous (for me) healing properties, after weeks in the Royal Free, since the cancer erupted again. The extraordinary thing to me was how slow I’d been to realise what was happening, considering I always knew it might, and never for one moment considered myself ‘cured’, in spite of the passage of almost thirty years. I missed the significance of the first signs, which would’ve been spotted if I’d gone on having annual check-ups at the Royal Marsden, but these had been discontinued by them, after ten years, when Mr McKinna retired. The difficulty, as for all people with a history of cancer, is that not every twinge, or similar, is a warning sign, especially as one ages, and arthritis, and muscular strains, cause pain. So when, swimming in the Caribbean in January 2007, I felt a twinge of pain between my shoulder blades, I put it down to exactly that, a muscular strain. I also saw that I had what looked like an insect bite on one of the old mastectomy scars, but then I had them on my legs too. We came home at the beginning of February and though I wasn’t swimming all day long any more, the twinge of pain between my shoulder blades was still there with every movement and the insect bite on the scar hadn’t gone, though those on my legs had. I didn’t even think about going to my GP, and not out of any fear that these minor things might be significant. I was sixty-nine, it was wear-and-tear, and otherwise I was in splendid health.

  Then something odd started happening to my walk. I was a fast walker, tending to stride, and suddenly this rapid striding felt lopsided. Instead of following the path up Parliament Hill, I was veering onto the grass and having constantly to correct my direction. So, at last, I went to my GP. I saw a young doctor I’d never seen before, but then I hadn’t been to the practice for years. This doctor listened to my rather apologetic account of why I’d come and examined me carefully. I pointed out the insect bite, though it hardly needed to be pointed out, suggesting that really it was nothing. It was concluded that what I was suffering from was indeed muscular strain, and the insect bite was just a spot in a delicate place. I was told to come back in ten days’ time if the walking hadn’t righted itself. I left the surgery cheerful, and went off to review a book for the BBC Radio 4 Front Row programme. Unfortunately, getting off the bus, my cheerfulness evaporated. I could hardly walk the few yards into Broadcasting House.

  But to cut this sad tale short, before those ten days were up I was in the Royal Free, an emergency admission, with what turned out to be multiple metastatic lesions and a vertebral collapse, causing spinal cord compression. The insect bite/spot was another lesion. By the time I was admitted, I was numb from the chest downwards, but I still had bladder and bowel control, and minimal use of my legs. There was a long wait until the Royal Marsden, to which a biopsy of the tumour had been sent, confirmed that these lesions were a spread from the one I’d been treated for in 1978. I was told that I now had secondary breast cancer, for which there is no cure, though it could be controlled.

  Controlled: I rolled the word round and round in my head. What does, in this context, ‘controlled’ mean? What is the difference between ‘control’ and ‘cure’? A substantial one, I thought. If something is cured, it has gone. It is finished, over. But if it is controlled, it is always present, if held back. Who, or what, does this controlling? Drugs helped by radiotherapy and, sometimes, surgery. Drugs, in my case hormonal therapies, a whole range of them, were to do this controlling, acting as a brake. Immediately, I imagined that I was on a bicycle, going very fast down one of the Lake District mountain passes, and I was braking hard to negotiate tricky bends. It was quite a comforting image. But then I remembered that brakes often fail when under such pressure and that brake linings wear out. How would I know when they reached this stage? Could new brake linings be put in? Not without the bike stopping, idiot.

  So that was how I came to be confined to bed in my house. It seemed such a triumph to be there at all, the relief and p
leasure making me light-headed (though maybe the drugs, and the radiotherapy, and the lack of sleep in the oncology ward, had done that anyway). For ages, days and days, I was content to lie there, repeating in my head, over and over again: ‘home, home, home’. I was safe again in my house. It was like being in a nest, and at first this didn’t seem at all limiting. I had no energy, so I didn’t want to leave this safe and secure place where everything was arranged according to my needs. I could, and did, lie for hours looking out onto the garden, at its springtime best, the cherry and apple and pear trees all in bud and about to blossom. I’d fix my attention on one particular cluster of buds on one particular branch and convince myself I could witness them opening second by second. The weather, towards the end of March, was warm and sunny, and usually I would have been out on the Heath all afternoon, but I seemed not to mind being in the house. I didn’t read and I didn’t write. I just looked. At the garden, at paintings, at photographs.

  But, of course, this could not go on. Every day I lolled in bed, what remained of my muscles was being eroded. If I didn’t want to stay for ever as an invalid I had to exercise, so I began following the instructions the physiotherapist in the Royal Free had given me. Then, as I became a little stronger, an occupational therapist came to show me how to use crutches so that I could progress from the Zimmer frame. Patiently, she demonstrated, one foot forward, one crutch forward – simple. But no, it wasn’t. I put the wrong leg with the wrong crutch, and stood immobile in the middle of the room. It was pathetic, and being pathetic was something I could not bear. So, fury with myself made me try harder and eventually (useful word, when I can’t actually remember how long it took) I mastered crutches. The next stage was to leave the house to go for regular physiotherapy sessions at the Marie Curie Hospice in Hampstead.

  This was a big step. I didn’t want to leave the house, not for anything. If I was going to force myself to do it, I wanted all the curtains and blinds of the houses in our road to be drawn, the way they used to be for a funeral when I was growing up in Carlisle. I didn’t want anyone to see me staggering to the car on my crutches. I wanted to close my own eyes – dangerous – so that if anyone was walking past I wouldn’t see them and wouldn’t have to talk to them. I made such a meal of it, getting from the house to the car, that I was exhausted with the tension. Looking out of the car window, it seemed incredible that people were walking without thinking about it, walking at a great pace along the pavements, oblivious to what a miracle this is once you can’t do it.

  Going into the hospice was difficult. I’d been there before, to visit my sister-in-law who had respite care there before she died, so the building itself was familiar and not at all alarming, just a large, Edwardian mansion converted for this other purpose. But being a visitor and being a patient are different experiences. I tried to get to the gym without looking into any other room and without talking to anyone. I would have liked blinkers on, really. In the background, I could hear pleasant, reassuring noises, people laughing and chatting, but I didn’t want to respond to any of it. I wanted to do what I’d come to do then get back to my house as soon as possible. A lamentable attitude, but it was mine.

  I spent an hour there, three times a week, for two months, working on the machines, watched over by a charming young French physiotherapist. Naturally, I couldn’t keep up my attitude of not wanting to have anything to do with anyone else. So many people were in a much worse state than I was and had been brought in wheelchairs to do simple arm exercises. Most were returning home after their sessions, but there was one woman who doubted she would be able to go home because she lived in a flat on the second floor and needed a stairlift which was proving awkward to fit, so she was going to have to stay in the hospice while it was ‘sorted’. I imagined not being able to go back to my house . . . too awful to go on contemplating. I only ever managed to enter the hospice because I knew that within an hour I’d be leaving it to go home and yet I knew that one day it was very likely I would be staying there. Gloom.

  It took six weeks for me to graduate to being a one-crutch user, and then, after another four, I took two unaided steps – the excitement definitely worth an exclamation mark! ‘Don’t try this at home yet,’ the physiotherapist warned me, pointing out that I’d had a rail either side of me, to grab onto if needed when I ‘walked’, and that she herself had been standing close by. But as soon as I got home, I went into the garden and, with Hunter on one side and the children on the other and behind me, ready to catch me, I walked. Six steps. No collapse. After that, the crutches were replaced with a walking stick, though not the one provided by the Royal Free. I used a stick that had been my father’s, and before that his father’s, an old-fashioned gnarled stick made of ash. My legs felt as if they were encased in plaster, they were so awkward and heavy, but I could totter short distances even if I was not yet up to the Heath.

  This stubborn reluctance to leave the house still went on though I was now able to do it. Within it, I was regaining mobility all the time, finding myself delighted to be in rooms I hadn’t managed to enter for months. I conquered the stairs and was back in our bedroom, so the ‘ward’ downstairs was dismantled and everything put back to normal. Lastly, by July, I made it up another flight of stairs to the room where I write, up at the top of the house. There I sat, once more at my desk, pen in hand, ready to write again. Only I didn’t. I sat and sat, and stared out over the trees. For years I’d been trained the way mothers of small children are, not to waste a moment of child-free time, and so I’d always got straight down to it, and the habit had carried on even after there was no real need to be so concentrated. But now, I was tired. I couldn’t do it, couldn’t produce the ten A4 pages in a morning which I’d been used to. I tried to persuade myself that, through being so slow now, every word would mean more, be more tellingly crafted. Not true. My old, rapid, if careless, style of writing was better by far than the halting, lame stuff I was turning out, crawling hesitantly over one mere page in three hours. Why bother doing it? Why expend precious energy, of which there was so little, on writing, when it would be better conserved for other things? Yet each morning the lure of the desk and the pen drew me up to that room, and I gave into it. Sometimes, sitting was painful, which made sticking to the writing ridiculous. It wasn’t even as though I thought I was turning out anything special enough to justify this regime – it was simply that for some strange reason I wanted to be there, doing it.

  At the time, I was working on a novel, The Unknown Bridesmaid, and was 140 pages into it. When I went back to it, after the gap of three months while I was recovering, I couldn’t remember a thing about it, and had to read the whole thing to find out who this bridesmaid was and why she was unknown. It was written in two ‘voices’ and I couldn’t understand either of them, or where this tale was trying to go, so I had no option but to tear it up and start again. There was only a tiny seed of the original idea left and this time I had to nurture it delicately, knowing I could only write in short stretches and mustn’t let the narrative get too complicated or it would swamp my feeble energy. But at least I could write, if differently and with a new caution. It pleased me to be doing it, it meant something, whatever the end result, and that was all that mattered. I didn’t even care if it turned out hopeless and didn’t get published – it was all about the process of the doing of it.

  That year, 2007, we managed only seven weeks in Loweswater, with the need to come back for scans to determine how the drugs were controlling the cancer. It was lovely to be there at all, but the meaning of being in Grasmoor House had changed. The point of having the house had been to be able to go for long walks and climbs among the fells and without being able to do this there was a new sense of frustration. The house didn’t reassure me the way Boscastle Road did – it was a house, this one, to be out of, however attractive inside. Then in 2008 and 2009, though stronger and now able to walk, with a stick, of course, surprisingly far, I had to keep coming back for a couple of nights to have regular scans wh
ile I was on a Cancer Research trial and this coming and going made me unsettled, never quite belonging to the country or the city. I came back by train, and I’d sit there as it approached London, all those dreary rows and rows of the backs of houses flashing past, thinking it wasn’t possible that somewhere out there, in all this mess, there was one house which had a personal identity for me. It seemed absurd, unbelievable, to invest such affection in one pile of bricks and mortar to the extent that I did. It seemed a miracle that the key I had in my bag would turn the lock of the front door of one particular house. But travelling the other way, to Loweswater via Penrith, was different. The last stretch of the journey in the train saw no houses to look out on, only hills and trees, with an occasional farmhouse in the distance. The landscape dominated, imposing a great peace on everything. The small town of Penrith hardly interrupts this impression, and then I was in the car and after the drive over the Whinlatter Pass dropped down into Lorton Valley where for a long time there are no houses at all and even when they begin to appear they are all highly individual. Instead of feeling depressed, as I did at the sight of my house in London, lost among thousands of others, I’d feel cheered that in Loweswater my house could never be buried among others. It stands out, by itself, not part of any street or road or square.