The Handmade House

by Geraldine Bedell

  Much later, Joyce and Ferhan were talking about what makes a good client and said it was someone who gave a very clear brief and then left them alone. ‘Some clients go away for the whole design period,’ Ferhan said wistfully.

  ‘Our brief was a bit sketchy, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Nooooo,’ they replied unconvincingly. ‘Anyway,’ added Joyce, ‘we’d already done those drawings for your other house, so we knew quite a bit about you.’

  But they didn’t, not really. They didn’t know why it was important to our family that we’d lived in the same house for eight years, how rooted we felt in it, and why. They didn’t know about Henrietta and Freddie’s father having married an MP, or that they divided their time between a series of houses in London and her constituency in Redcar. The children had loved Redcar when they were young: the house was big, solid, capacious, tatty round the edges, overlooked the iron sea. But it wasn’t where they went to school, or where their friends lived; people spoke differently and treated them as special because of their connection with the MP. There was black coal on the beach, washed down the estuary, the shops on the esplanade were decaying; it was a place that seemed to be struggling to stay attached to England, to be crumbling off its North-Eastern shore, held on only by the bulk of the chemicals factory at the end of the beach.

  They moved around in London, too, depending on the vagaries of their stepmother’s being in power and out, a backbencher and a minister: a flat in gloomy Dolphin Square, lugubrious and peopled by deracinated MPs; a soulless grace-and-favour house in Eaton Square that they all hated, in spite of the grand address; another government place in the attic of Admiralty House, overlooking Horseguards Parade and over the head of John Prescott. And, in between, spells in Southwark and Islington. They whirled around in this vortex of homes, liking the novelty and the drama – besides, how many teenagers get to live just off Trafalgar Square? But there was also something feverish, convulsive about it. And compulsive: being peripatetic came close to an addiction for Henrietta: when she was fifteen, she said she felt uncomfortable spending more than two nights in the same bed.

  When their father and I split up, my cousin, who is a divorce lawyer, cautioned me gently that the current thinking is that children need one home. But it was an impossible choice: he and I both wanted to be parents and we both believed that the only way to do so is to be involved, and involvement seemed to be measured in time. So we split their time. Henrietta and Freddie had three homes for most of their childhood, and Freddie’s PE kit was always in the wrong one.

  We didn’t think we were dividing them in two, like the fake mother in the Solomon story; but now I suspect that perhaps we were. They went to the schools they would have gone to anyway, but some evenings they were collected at 6 o’clock and driven to the other side of London to sleep. One weekend in two they couldn’t do music and pottery classes or see their friends, because they were on their way to the North. They moved around more than a lot of traveller-children, just in nicer clothes.

  I didn’t blame their father for this, really, or not beyond that lazy way that you like to blame people who aren’t there to answer back. I acceded to it, not knowing what else to do, what the preferable alternative might be: to suggest that he shouldn’t see them as much? That I shouldn’t? And it was so painful that I was convinced it must be doing someone good. I remember once dropping them off at King’s Cross and seeing them go off with their other parents, looking like a happy family, and wanting to lie down on the concourse and wail. It took a monumental effort to move one foot in front of the other and get out of the station. And even when I fretted endlessly about the fact that they slept in the back of the estate car on the motorway on Sunday nights – did they have their heads towards the back; what if something went into the car? – I told myself that this anxiety was less to do with their vulnerability than mine. I rationalized my worries – and maybe even genuinely believed this is what they were – as a reflection of my unhappiness about the whole thing, a way of punishing myself for having let it happen at all.

  Through all of this, Charlie and I lived in the same house in Hackney – which, initially, might have been just another one in the roster of homes, although time had made it something else: a fixed point, at the very least; a place you could rely on if only because we’d gritted our teeth and stayed there for ten years, determined to believe it was capable of accommodating everybody.

  As the elder child, Hen had borne the brunt of the shuttling childhood. When the official driver turned up to take them across London, she was not supposed to lapse into helplessness. Since Freddie had quite clearly abdicated all responsibility for his PE kit, people expected her to keep an eye on it. Not altogether surprisingly, as soon as she had much choice in the matter, she started opting out. Giddied by the St Vitus’s dance of homes, she began to withdraw from the rackety arrangements, to find she’d ‘got stuck’ at her friend Tess’s or later, at Matthew’s. At times she actually seemed to prefer their families to her own, and, perhaps, to prefer being a guest, an observer, to a wholehearted participant. In our house, she claimed, she couldn’t hear herself think for all the children – which I suspect meant she felt the house wasn’t really about her.

  She had taken the supposition that she might have more than one home to its logical conclusion. Now she could only assemble her sense of homeness, derive her sense of security, from a network of houses and families.

  Then she started sixth form and something (possibly not unrelated to the end of my nauseous, bad mood-inducing pregnancy) changed. Hen took a decision that, to work, she would need a base, and unilaterally overruled her parents’ questionable, if benignly meant, arrangements. She saw her father, to whom she has always been close, as often as ever, but she located herself primarily with us.

  For months and months I had wanted Hen to come home, and now she had done so. In spite of her father’s and my best efforts to deprive the children of home, home was what our house had become.

  Leaving Hackney would be a huge dislocation. It had to be worth it, not just for Charlie and me, but for all of us. Joyce and Ferhan could have no conception of how onerous a responsibility they’d taken on, of how much baggage I was dragging with us; nor that when I said, ‘Kitchen to be the largest room of the house,’ I meant all that.

  We returned from our week away to a bundle of correspondence: letters from our solicitor to the estate agents and the vendors’ solicitors, plus replies. The only one that really mattered was the faxed note from the vendors, which pointed out that the deeds clearly stated that the plot was 75 feet by 55 feet (which they did) and revealed that the wooden posts marked the place where the 55 feet ended. The letter concluded: ‘We are sorry if the purchasers imagined the concrete posts defined the plot, but they are not 55 feet from the southern boundary wall’ – i.e. the purchasers were prats for not measuring.

  Why, I stomped around asking myself as I lobbed dirty clothes at the linen basket, would our land start a yard into the scrub, and not line up with the boundary next door? Who had decided anyway that the boundary was 55 feet from the southern wall, and when? We now knew the two plots had been bundled together before the current owners had bought them, and perhaps for a long time before that. Had the deeds always stipulated that, if separated, the southern end of the site should be 55 feet deep? Or had somebody just made that up?

  I wrote to the Land Registry, inquiring about the history of the site(s), but, although staffed by very friendly people who give every impression of wanting to help if only they could, the Land Registry is more secretive than Porton Down, the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment and GCHQ rolled into one. I don’t know why this should be, unless it’s something to do with a particularly English attitude to class, whereby owning land makes you more important and gives you more rights than anyone else, including the right not to reveal what land you own. The nice members of staff at the Land Registry were not at liberty to open the file. Anyway, as people who cared about me started gen
tly pointing out, it was irrelevant now, because 55 feet was what we’d bought.

  ‘The good news,’ the solicitor said brightly, ‘is that, technically speaking, the wall should start at fifty-five feet and come on to your land, so you’ve got the whole of it on your side, but we’ve got everyone to agree that fifty-five feet should be the mid-point.’ It was a measure of how neurotic I’d become over the whole thing that I was prepared to regard this as a triumph.

  Still, we had something to look forward to: our concept meeting with Joyce and Ferhan. One sunny Tuesday morning, we rang the bell of the scruffy door in an alleyway behind Upper Street and were buzzed inside, where we were faced with an improbably steep staircase. Their office was under the eaves, half a dozen desks pushed together at the front of the room by the windows and, at the back behind a long white cupboard, a meeting space around a wide white table. Everything, in fact, seemed to be white.

  While an assistant prepared coffee, they gave us albums of photographs of their previous projects; I looked through them stupidly, not really knowing what I was looking for, or how to judge them, a little fearful of not liking them. I felt nervous, excitable, wanting to get on and see what sort of a house a person like me ought to be living in.

  The first and biggest question, they explained once the coffee had arrived, was where to put the house on the site, and which direction it should face. From this everything else would follow, because it would dictate where the light came in, for how much of the day. Joyce, who was managing our project (they designed as a team, but one or other of them took responsibility for dealing with client, contractor and any other management issues), had already been in touch with Islington Planning Department to see whether there might be any constraints on positioning. There were; and the restriction was massive and intractable. The Department expected the new building to follow the footprint of the two developer’s houses for which planning permission had already been granted.

  ‘They said something about the Residents’ Association,’ Joyce said vaguely.

  The developer’s houses (as we referred to them, to show that they weren’t in our league) were modern two-up, two-downs with a third bedroom in the roofspace. They had frontages on to the lane and small, north-facing gardens at the back. No doubt if they’d been built they would have been perfectly all right, but on the plans they looked mean. I thought of them as cringing, their purpose mainly mercenary. Many months later, I tracked down the architect who’d designed them. It was clear from our conversation that his client had always seen the real money as coming from the development at the other end of the site, where he had permission to knock down the 1950s villa and put up a block of flats. The houses in the lane weren’t exactly an afterthought, but they were a bit of a bonus; they certainly weren’t a labour of love. And even I, knowing nothing about how you should begin designing a house, recognized that given a virgin site you wouldn’t put the garden to the north.

  So Joyce – who’d been in dispute with this particular planner on a previous project – asked whether there were any circumstances in which his stipulation about the footprint might be relaxed. ‘Only,’ he said, raising his eyebrows, as if this were highly improbable, ‘if the house were of outstanding architectural merit.’

  This, quite clearly, was a mad thing to say. They were architects. What on earth did he think they were about?

  The upshot, Joyce said, was that she and Ferhan were going to show us the concept for the house they wanted to build, and we’d have to make a decision about whether we wanted to take the risk to go ahead and design it, because it was conceivable that we could get all the way to planning and have it thrown out.

  Positioning the house was difficult for other reasons, besides the Planning Department’s intransigence. First of all, there was the huge ash tree dominating the north-western corner, with a preservation order on it. This was more than just a tree-in-the-way technical problem. The tree had been there for a long time: it was easily more than 100 years old and had flourished because it had been planted, or had seeded itself, in that precise place. In some sense, the site belonged to the tree. Weird and mystical feelings about trees aren’t (it seems to me) just a product of contemporary worries about global warming and acid rain and deforestation and logging. To Hindus, neem trees have always been objects of worship. Christians bring fir trees into the house in winter (really a pagan thing, but anyway). In Shakespeare you only need a few trees for everyone to start changing sex and falling in love with the wrong person.

  And the siting of houses in relation to trees has always been important. Any self-respecting English parkland, good enough to feature in a television adaptation of Jane Austen, for example, requires a few handsome and well-positioned oaks. Chinese villages often have a grove of trees or bamboo behind and a pond in front to ward off evil influences. The ash tree gave our site an identity, contours that we couldn’t rub out.

  There were other constraints, too: although the 1950s villa was some way off, the Planning Officer at Islington Council warned that anything that overlooked it might have difficulty getting through. And we didn’t particularly want to look out in the other direction, over the scruffy lane. Lastly, as the Planning Committee had made clear when they’d approved the developer’s houses, and as the Department reiterated now, any further development should respect the roofline of the mews (which had subsequently become a factory making glass and was now derelict) at the dead-end bottom of the lane.

  Joyce and Ferhan turned over some pieces of paper to reveal a series of prettily coloured sketches. The house they envisaged was a long glass box, with more or less blank walls at either end. When you entered from the lane, the hall would rear up to the roof along its whole length. The right-hand side would be glass, overlooking greenery, and the roof would also be glass, on to the sky.

  All the rooms would be to the left, looking out and opening on to the garden. There was a sketch of a little orange smiley-faced sun moving round the building, showing that the rooms would always be light and there would be plenty of sunshine in the garden, which would face west. From here, the building would resemble a doll’s house – a long box with a glass frontage, capable of opening up along its entire length, with rooms on view. There was a sketch showing Harry in one of these and Henrietta and her friends in another, with a speech bubble asking, ‘Why have these architects installed smoke alarms in my room?’ while they presumably smoked a joint or cigarettes. At the edge of the kitchen/dining room/den which dominated the ground floor, there would be what Joyce described as an indoor/outdoor eating space, behind a metal grille. I didn’t altogether grasp how it would work, but I loved the idea of eating outside even when the weather was a bit rough. By means of architecture, you could, apparently, eat outside in the winter without feeling the cold.

  And then finally there was a prettily coloured impression of our bedroom, with a kind of courtyard in the middle of it with a retractable roof, so that Charlie could indulge his enthusiasm – the perversity of which everyone politely ignored – for outdoor washing.

  It was dazzling. Or rather, bits of it were dazzling: the dramatic glass hallway, the indoor/outdoor eating space, the courtyard bathroom. It was difficult to take everything in, and these were the things I absorbed, because they were the most exciting. In the process I cheerfully overlooked the fact that Henrietta’s bedroom was on the ground floor, next to the garden, and that the studies had been stuck on the roof in a funny kind of box, like a little hat. I was so taken up with the thrilling parts that I didn’t bother to find out what Joyce and Ferhan thought the house would be made of. I did, however, in a masterly stroke of architectural priorities, ask what sort of plants they were thinking of for beyond the glass hall wall.

  The question was, were we prepared to go ahead and work this up? It was a risk: if we got to planning only to have it rejected, we’d be back to square one. We would have wasted months. Ferhan explained that she and Joyce weren’t saying that they couldn’t do a house turned
round in the other direction, to face the lane, but it would have to be quite different – perhaps involving light coming down into the middle, through a courtyard or something. If we were reduced to going for that option, it would have to be a whole different house (meaning that we’d have to pay for the design process all over again). They just thought this would be better. So they felt duty-bound to show it to us. And they made a proposal: if we wanted to work up this idea, they’d charge us an hourly rate to design it up to the planning stage. If it got through, we’d incorporate the fees into their overall percentage. If not, they’d charge us half the money.

  It wasn’t a difficult decision. On the basis of four drawings in coloured pencil and a sketchy floor plan, we were already in love with their glass doll’s house. We didn’t know what the alternative might be, only that it wouldn’t be as good and, if we were supposed to be designing the ideal house, the beginning was hardly the moment to compromise. True, we had the phenomenally expensive bridging loan, clocking up the hundreds with every passing couple of days until we got to planning permission, but how long could it take? Three months, we thought, at most.

  4

  ‘Beginnings are delicate moments,’ the architecture critic Witold Rybczynski has written, ‘the beginning of a building no less than the beginning of a friendship or a marriage.’

  He’s right, I think, about friendship and marriages. If I hadn’t turned away from Charlie’s searching stare at that party in 1990, who knows how different things might have been? I could have spilt wine out of my glass and over my fingers, which is what usually happens when I’m nervous, said something crass, started eating crisps in an effort to sober up and defused the whole thing. Instead of which, I decided I couldn’t cope right then and skipped off, and the look stayed there, emotionally undermining me. It was still burning through my posh frock, unfinished business, when we next met a year later. When Charlie and I finally did hold a conversation, it was underscored by the need to get over that awkwardness, by an awareness that our relationship was already on a whole other footing of emotional ambiguity and uncertain potential. (This is a not uncommon tactic of shy people, to spin fervid webs of feeling in the air around them, in an effort to transmit a sense of being fascinating without actually having to speak. If the relationship develops, it does so freighted with that moment of initial drama; if it doesn’t, at least we haven’t had to speak.)