The Handmade House

by Geraldine Bedell

  8

  There was one cogent explanation as to why we still had a patch of nettles rather than a house; unfortunately, nobody bothered to give it to us.

  Brian Eckersley had worked with Joyce and Ferhan on almost all their projects. He was tall, with fashionably very short hair and a hazily Northern accent. A qualified architect as well as a civil engineer, he could more than handle the maths (he’d originally planned to be a physicist), but the sums didn’t interest him as much as the scope and ambition of the buildings. Brian had given up his job with a leading firm of structural engineers to build his own house on top of a dance floor behind a pub off Upper Street because at the time he could make more doing that than he did from his salary (unlike us, he’d bought his site for a few thousand pounds), and this independence gave him a cool, outsiderish demeanour. Architects kept seeking him out to work with them, finding him, as I did, a reassuring presence.

  A few weeks before we went on site, Brian ordered a soil investigation. He asked a specialist firm to sink three boreholes, two to a depth of 6 metres and one to 12. He was concerned about possible desiccation of the ground caused by the roots of the ash tree, and this was probably what mainly determined his thinking about the positioning of the holes.

  The results appeared to show that there was clay from about 5 metres down, which was pretty much what you would have expected in London. One hole suggested that there might be some gravel, a narrow layer perhaps, nothing unusual.

  When the piling company arrived on site in late November, they hit a layer of gravel that went on and on. The site wasn’t big. But it was big enough for the ground conditions to change abruptly halfway across.

  The plan had been to sink something called augered piles, which involves a drill boring into the ground like a corkscrew, bringing out a plug of clay, and leaving behind a neat hole. Then you put in your reinforcement, slop in the concrete, and you’ve got a piling. But you can’t do that with gravel because it keeps falling back in.

  The piling company decided to try another method, known as continuous-flight augered piling, in which the concrete is poured down the middle of the drill simultaneously as it bores into the ground. But this requires a bigger rig. And when the piling contractors tried to get it on to the site, it wouldn’t go down the lane.

  There could have been an ugly dispute about exactly whose fault this was. Fortunately, Brian managed to redesign the foundations so that there were bigger piles and more of them, which meant that they could rest on top of the gravel. This in turn required some redesigning of the ground beams.

  Nobody told us any of this. Presumably at architecture school students are strongly advised to avoid giving clients any information that might encourage them to make more of a nuisance of themselves than they already are. In the RIBA bookshop not long ago, I found a work of fiction from the 1930s called The Honeywood File, an epistolary novel supposedly written by architect, client and contractor. The client, Sir Leslie Brash, is always making unhelpful suggestions (‘an influential acquaintance of mine is financially interested in a new novelty super-paint …’). It’s a very dated and (especially if you are a client) not funny book: I expect it stays in print so that in architecture school they can hand it out to students in the first term.

  Inevitably, things are going to go wrong on a project as complicated as the building of a unique house. I suppose architects and contractors don’t want to be for ever apologizing when they could more usefully be putting them right. All the same, Charlie and I found the sense of being managed unnerving.

  Not long before we started on site, we happened to meet a woman at a party who’d recently been a client of Joyce and Ferhan’s. Did she have any advice, I asked brightly (I was not yet in my depressed phase). ‘Get to know your builders,’ she said, ‘and go to all the site meetings.’

  It was difficult to get to know the builders. Whenever I turned up they seemed to be in their little hut eating curry and khichri, the rice and lentil mixture that is the staple diet back home. Sometimes they’d be drinking from their flasks of Indian tea, which is made from the same ingredients as British tea – leaves, water, milk – but put together in a saucepan cold, brought to the boil and simmered for two to four minutes. It tastes of tannin, makes your head buzz and takes the enamel off your teeth.

  The labourers often didn’t speak English anyway, or they chose not to. Mavji or VM would always answer questions, and Mavji, in particular, would walk me round the site and explain what was happening (though I always felt slightly as though I was under escort). But the idea of getting to know them was futile. I wasn’t there often enough and when I was, they seemed to want me to go away again. Joyce could shout at them, especially when she asked a question and VM passed it on in Gujarati (though she didn’t shout at Ramesh, who didn’t respond to shouting, she said), but I was in a more distant relationship with them, and they carefully deployed their exoticism to keep it that way.

  Still, I could go to site meetings, and the first time we saw Joyce and Ferhan after Christmas, I announced that this was what I wanted to do. I was feeling groggy and bewildered because I’d been up since 5.30, seeing Hen off at the airport for her six-month gap year trip to South America. Before anyone else in the room had been up, I’d been weeping at Heathrow, and I was still struggling to get my head around the idea of her being gone. Joyce, by contrast, was her usual energetic and positive self, at least until I made my site meeting bid.

  ‘But there’s no point,’ she said. ‘Site meetings are boring and long-winded and you wouldn’t understand them.’ She meant we’d get in the way.

  ‘All the same,’ I said, ‘I’d like to come. Otherwise I feel out of the loop.’

  ‘It will make everything take so much longer,’ said Ferhan, meaning we’d get in the way.

  Charlie tried a different tack, explaining that those of his projects where the clients were most engaged tended to be the ones that finished on time. He was reasonable, Joyce and Ferhan found more excuses, I was tired and incoherent. ‘OK, we promise not to ask any questions!’ I said brightly at one point, which slightly undermined the point of going.

  Eventually, we compromised an attendance at site meetings once a month, starting with the next one. I turned up at the site at 9.30 on a murky Thursday morning a few days later to find Mavji mooching about behind his fag and Joyce doing her best to ginger everyone up by complaining that the fax machine was too old and she wasn’t having any useless old equipment on this site. The builders had put hoarding around the tree to protect its roots, set up a portable toilet and erected a little hut for their drawings and khichri eating; they were awaiting delivery of a container in which they would keep the fax, the phone, the plans and, in wet weather, themselves, though, to me, the site didn’t look big enough to take one.

  There was quite a lot of discussion about drains: we’d had to bring Dyno Rod in to flush out the mains, which were full of builders’ rubble. As far as I could understand, we had to dig a run to the mains, and there was some dispute about where it should go. Joyce was right that there was an enormous amount of technical stuff that I didn’t understand, but curiously, I found those parts the most comforting. I could let the impenetrable conversation about sealants and insulating materials drift around me and feel that something was happening.

  On subsequent weeks, we had to rely on the minutes, even though they glossed the discussion so thickly that you could scarcely tell who’d been there. ‘Service runs to be dug after completion of ground beams to house to prevent collapsing of trenches’ sounded like a sensible decision. But what were these collapsing trenches? Did trenches usually collapse, and if not, why were ours doing it?

  ‘Reinforcing cages are still in process of being put in position for casting of remaining ground beams,’ Joyce wrote in March, where the ‘still’ probably covered some vitriolic argument about why everything was taking so long. ‘The block has arrived for garage wall adjacent to neighbours’ wall,’ reported the same set of mi
nutes. ‘The pile cap of the original was in fact different from the drawings SE [structural engineer] had referred to and so the setting out was approximately 300mm off those shown in the drawings. It was agreed that the wall should be located as shown on the drawings and that the garage would become 300mm wider internally. The blocks will be laid tomorrow.’ This came closer than usual to admitting error, but you still couldn’t work out what had actually happened. And by the time we received the minutes, often a couple of weeks later, things had moved on, the problem had been solved or skirted around, and everyone was exercised by something else.

  The tussle over site meetings was still rankling at the end of April when Hugo and Sue came over from Ireland. They’d bought a large, dilapidated Georgian house, south of Dublin, close to where Hugo had grown up, for which they were concocting plans for pared-down interiors. We were due, on one of their first trips back to London, to meet in Soho for dinner; Hugo was late because he’d been to see the site with Joyce.

  ‘I’ve been trying to think all the way here in the taxi what I was going to say to you,’ he told me, as he sat down.

  ‘Oh, blimey.’

  ‘You’re a long way behind. I think you should be thinking in terms of September rather than the summer.’

  ‘Mmm, I know that.’

  ‘But it’s going to be fabulous.’

  How could he tell? All you could see were some reinforcing rods sticking out of the ground.

  ‘I’m worried it’s going to be too small,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t look big enough to be a whole house. I think it’s smaller than the house we’re living in now.’

  ‘That’s why you employ architects: to make all the space work for you. You won’t be falling over pushchairs in this house.’

  ‘That, Hugo, is because we won’t be able to take them with us. There won’t be room.’

  ‘I feel emotionally implicated in it,’ he said, by which I think he meant guilty.

  And, sure enough, much later he told me he had been horrified by how small the building (or lack of) seemed to be.

  ‘Whenever I tell people I’m building a house,’ I said morosely, ‘they say “Oh, how fantastic!” I’ve hardly met anyone who isn’t envious. They assume it must make you feel powerful and in control. And in fact, it’s the opposite.’ I told him about the tussle over the site meetings.

  ‘You should insist,’ he said, as if it were that easy. ‘You should say to Joyce, “OK, we’ve done it your way. Now we’re months behind schedule and we want to attend.” And at the beginning of each week you should ask for a list of things that are supposed to happen in the next seven days, and if they don’t, you need to know why not.’

  The following afternoon, I telephoned Joyce and tried this. She remained extremely resistant. We’d slow things down, our presence wouldn’t be helpful. Altogether it was a really bad idea.

  ‘Either we come,’ I said, ‘or we hire a project manager.’

  I’d just spent two hours on the internet trying to find out about project managers – how you acquired one, whether there was some kind of professional project managers’ organization – and drawn a blank. If Joyce had retorted, ‘OK, do as you like,’ I’d probably have to ask her how to go about it. But she didn’t. She backed down.

  I couldn’t go to the next site meeting anyway, because I had to take Harry to look round a new school. And the one after that, I forgot.

  On Boxing Day 2000, I’d dragged the family to look at our site; on Boxing Day 2001, we went to look at Elaine’s. Clearly, her house was going to be very large, on account of its really being two houses. She was going to have rooms she didn’t know what to do with. ‘And this will be the World Cup Viewing Room,’ she’d say as she walked you through the rubble.

  More space was what we’d wanted; we were the ones with all the children. But now that we’d cleared the weeds, the apple tree, the garden roller and the abandoned chair, the patch of ground seemed smaller. Now that you could see clearly from one end to the other, it was obvious it wasn’t far.

  Varbud pegged out the footprint of the house in the earth. It appeared to be about as big as their container. Elaine took to calling it Tiny Towers, which was doubly aggravating as there weren’t going to be any towers. It didn’t cover much ground, and it wasn’t going up very far.

  ‘We should have built a four-storey gothic house,’ Freddie said.

  ‘It’ll look bigger when it’s finished,’ I replied unconvincingly.

  ‘Oh yeah? Will my bedroom be bigger?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  ‘No, it won’t. You know it won’t. Honestly, what’s the point of building a house if I end up with a bedroom the same size as the one I’ve got now?’

  The point, Harry could have told him, was to have a tree-house. He was standing frowning up at the hoarding round the trunk now, evidently trying to envisage it. (No one had told him it wasn’t in the budget. I suppose we were still hoping vaguely that the money for it would be found, although I don’t know from where, since we were having difficulty finding the money to stay out of prison.) ‘I think,’ he said pensively, ‘that perhaps I’m also going to need a telephone.’

  Hen had also come with us that Boxing Day, although her interest in the house-building project was intermittent – partly, and inevitably, as a consequence of her not being there a lot of the time, partly as a side-effect of her shuttling childhood, which had left her with a self-contained sense of herself, not linked to any particular location. She’d sought security instead in a network of relationships – friends as well as family – that she’d laced together underneath herself like a safety net. Even so – more than ever, in fact, now that she’d gone away – I was aware of how much I wanted this house to be somewhere about which she didn’t feel ambivalent, in which her feelings weren’t fragile, and to which she wanted, uncomplicatedly, to return.

  Freddie, on the other hand, had always been instinctively domestic. His childhood had left him strongly attached to home; he liked being in, surrounded by his family. But while he was more interested in the project, he was also more disparaging. He didn’t seem to trust us to provide for him in what he regarded as our folly.

  One Sunday morning (this was not long after I decided to stop arguing with him and resorted instead to sighing through my teeth, implying he was being exasperating and unhelpful) we stopped at the site on the way to somewhere else. The younger boys gambolled about on the edge of slippery trenches with spikes at the bottom and skipped dangerously over protruding reinforcements while I teetered after them in my high-heeled ankle boots and tried not to think about them falling forwards and impaling themselves. Freddie got out of the car, took one disgusted look at the plot, and got back in again.

  He might, I thought, be right about its being too small. But he was wrong that we had been negligent of him. The house was in part an attempt to draw breath, to establish ourselves properly at last, to give everyone their equal weight and place, to be legitimate. And that was about him as much as anyone. It was an attempt to make up for the times that his PE kit was in the wrong house and that, what with all the shuttling, he’d forgotten to do his homework and now it was too late; to recompense with a proper family home and, at the same time, to put it all behind us.

  I knew he couldn’t put it all behind him, really, any more than Hen could, that the effects of their peripatetic childhoods were deep inside them, but it was galling that he didn’t trust that I was trying. I could still taste the memories of children skipping off down the front steps, knowing that I had to turn and go back inside and wouldn’t know what to do with myself, that the point had drained out of the day. I could remember waking up on a Saturday morning, listening for them and realizing they weren’t there. I could still feel the frustration of buying new socks only for one immediately to be left somewhere else, of trying to locate a missing jumper that might have been under a bed on the other side of London, or possibly in Redcar, where they probably wouldn’t be going for a
nother month, and how could anyone be expected to remember to look for it then?

  Hen’s bewilderment was a deep current that didn’t surface properly until adolescence, when it swept her away on a tide of exasperation at what she scathingly referred to as her New Labour New Parents childhood. But Freddie’s was ever present. For much of his childhood, it was as if the things that might have given him ballast – the book he was reading, his homework folder, his pencil case, his jumpers (they needed twice as many clothes as other children, what with the ones you wanted always being somewhere else) – were whirling centrifugally around him, just out of his reach. I looked on, feeling helpless, thinking that good parenting was largely a matter of being in control or, at least, of giving your children the illusion that you were in control, and infuriated that I wasn’t able to make the simple things work for him. Since I couldn’t go and look under the bed in Redcar myself, I nagged at the other household, earning myself a reputation as a fusspot, my focus on the trivial a mean-spirited war of attrition against their larger, more oxygenated ways of sitting round tables discussing the future of this or that cabinet minister. I hated feeling unable to help my small, vulnerable boy, hated how vindictive it made me feel (there was something in the war of attrition theory, no doubt), hated the knowledge that I had brought this situation about.