My Life in Houses

by Margaret Forster

  But I knew that any kind of house was preferable to the alternative, a flat or a bed-sitting room. My aunt Jean, my mother’s sister, lived in what was really a flat, though it had the appearance of a house. Number 366 Bellshill Road in Motherwell had a proper front door so that it looked as if it led to a house, but once inside it was revealed as a flat. There were just two rooms and a tiny kitchen area on a landing at the top of a flight of steps which led down to lower ground level, passing a flat below on the way. She and her husband and two sons lived here in this big block, known as The Buildings. Out at the back was a line of washhouses, and further along an old slag heap called ‘the bing’ where children played. There was a strong communal atmosphere among the women using the washhouses – they all knew each other, and were in and out of each other’s ‘houses’ all the time. Coming home to Orton Road after staying with Aunt Jean I suddenly appreciated what we had there. Slowly, it was beginning to dawn on me that it was all a matter of comparisons. I might yearn for the space and privacy a big house gave you but compared to living in ‘The Buildings’ I already had it.

  Just to confuse things, there was another sort of flat within my experience. My mother’s other sister, Nan, lived with her husband and son in a flat above an opticians’ in Nottingham. If we weren’t spending our holidays in Motherwell, we spent them in Nottingham in an entirely different flat. This one was large, with three bedrooms, and a spacious living room, kitchen and bathroom. It was comfortably furnished, with pale-coloured fitted carpets throughout, and silk curtains at the windows. There was no garden or outside space but otherwise it seemed to me an attractive place to live. I could live in such a place, I thought, having previously decided I would never want to live in a flat. But of course in Aunt Nan’s flat there was no one living above and no one living below (because below was the shop). So it felt quite separate, suffering none of the common disadvantages of flat-dwelling. Still, no garden was a minus, and I went home from this flat grudgingly grateful to live in a house that had one.

  I was still, at eleven years old, playing at my version of houses the way other girls played at skipping. It obsessed me. The game consisted of fixing upon an existing house in Carlisle’s Norfolk Road, down which we walked to visit our grandparents. In this road, which had no access to traffic at one end, making it very quiet, there were double-fronted Victorian or Edwardian villas, some approached by circular drives, and with imposing iron gates at the entrance, often with stone pillars either side. One or two, at the end of the 1940s, had already been converted into old people’s homes but most were still privately owned and lived in by solicitors and managing directors of local firms. This was not in Carlisle’s posh area (that was Stanwix) but this one road, despite being a little too near the Raffles estate, was a desirable road to live in. In my imagination, in this game I played, I already lived in it, though I changed ‘my’ house regularly. I selected a house and moved out the people living in it. Where to? I had no idea – they were just evicted, it was their problem where they were to go. I took over the minute they had gone, just me, not with my family. I chose a bedroom at the back of whichever house it was, hoping that it looked out onto a garden full of apple trees. (I couldn’t see how big the gardens of these houses were, but I was sure they must have lawns and trees.) I wouldn’t have curtains at the window, just a blind, the sort I’d seen pictures of in magazines. The walls would be plain white, and the carpet pale green. There would be no dark furniture in this room, everything would be light wood. I hesitated over my bed: brass headboard, or wickerwork? Then I moved into the rest of the house, cautiously investigating room after room, and changing the decor in seconds. There would definitely be a library, though I wasn’t sure how to fit in shelves, whether they should go right round the walls or, as in the Tullie House public library, be free-standing. Oh, problems, problems, all of them delightful.

  I played this game but I hardly played at all with the doll’s house I had. It was no good to me, with my grandiose ideas. My father’s brother, Bob, had made it for me when I was seven. It turned out to be deeply disappointing, consisting as it did of a roof over four square rooms, two above, an identical two below, and all of them open at the front. There was no hinged door to close the house so that it would look like a real house. That, I suppose, was beyond Bob’s capabilities. After a few half-hearted attempts to paint the rooms and stick bits of plastic on the floors, and scraps of wool to act as carpets, I lost interest. The few bits of doll’s furniture I was given looked ridiculous in this open house, and moving them about was no fun at all. I expect I was thought unappreciative, but luckily for me it soon didn’t matter because my father had a row with Bob and they didn’t speak to each other for the next forty years. Even then, it wasn’t a proper conversation. Bob came to my mother’s funeral and seeing him standing respectfully outside the church, my father bellowed through the opened car window: ‘Bob, you can come to the tea if you want.’ Bob shook his head. That was that. The non-speaking continued to the death. After their row, though, the doll’s house became tainted, and I was allowed to give it away. Far better to play houses in my head.

  But there was another house, apart from those in Norfolk Road, which fascinated me, and which I thought I could see myself one day living in, if some magic occurred. Morton Manor was just across the Wigton Road, which marked the far edge of the Raffles estate. It couldn’t actually be seen because it had a long, high wall separating the grounds it stood in from the road, but once a year Sir Robert and Lady Chance held a garden fete there and we were allowed in, making our way through the big gates and along the driveway which on either side was dense with shrubs and trees. There had been a house on that site since the seventeenth century but the manor as it was that day (or parts of it) had been there since 1807, when the Forster family bought and added to it. The Forster family? How lucky that I didn’t know this in the 1940s, when I would immediately have spun a fantasy about myself really belonging to this branch of the Border family famously mentioned in Walter Scott’s ‘Young Lochinvar’ and not my own – I’d have cast myself as the long-lost great-granddaughter, the rightful heir. As it was, John Forster sold the manor in 1837, and eventually it came to belong to Robert Chance.

  Coming upon the house was a surprise – it was hidden for so long from visitors winding their way along the drive. The gardens were natural-looking but in fact cleverly designed by a celebrated nineteenth-century gardener, William Sawrey Gilpin. I didn’t know anything about garden design and had never heard of Gilpin, but I could see that the Morton Manor gardens were artistic. So was the manor itself. It was a long, low building, just two storeys high, with floor-to-ceiling windows on the ground floor and quite a modest entrance to the house through a curved porch. The whole of this front wall was covered with ivy (though maybe it was Virginia creeper – I never saw it in the autumn). I thought this made it romantic, but my father looked at it and condemned it at once on two grounds: ivy weakened the wall, and it encouraged insects which would get into the rooms. I wondered if I should pass this worrying information on to Sir Robert and Lady Chance, who that day sometimes came among us, but decided not to. We were not, of course, allowed into the house, but I lurked near the generous windows and tried to peer in, ever so casually. I couldn’t see much, just what looked like heavy dark furniture and some large, dark pictures on the walls.

  Coming home from Morton Manor, I instantly pictured our council house covered with ivy. It looked much better. But nothing could be done about how the house looked, ivy or no ivy. It looked like a child’s drawing, and a child who had no talent for drawing. It was crude in shape, even I could see that without knowing anything about architecture. There were no distinguishing features – well, of course there weren’t, the council’s money wouldn’t run to anything fancy. The front door, like all the other houses on the estate, was painted a dismal shade of green, not fern green, not forest green, but a withered-cabbage green. I looked at it more and more critically once I’d grown acc
ustomed to other styles of houses. I noticed how the top half of the walls, which were rendered, had turned a dirty grey, and I wished they could be whitewashed. That would help. So would reorganising the shape of the garden. Most of it was to the side, which made it very public. If it had been at the back, there would have been some privacy . . . on and on I went, fixing my general discontent on the poor house.

  But at least I recognised that, badly arranged though it was, our garden was a showpiece, though not of the Morton Manor variety. Gilpin, I imagine, wouldn’t have approved of cabbages and rhubarb growing together with roses, but he would surely have admired my father’s hedges. These were superbly maintained, though they needed constant trimming. Privet grows rapidly and densely, but my father, who liked it four-feet high and two-feet wide, tamed it, and all with hand-shears. However, every Friday night this front hedge took a cruel bashing, to my father’s fury. A few hundred yards to the left of our house, where Orton Road met Wigton Road, there had once been a tollgate, when Raffles consisted of open fields. An inn had stood there since the early nineteenth century, named The Horse & Farrier (probably because the publican was also the blacksmith). A new pub, still called The Horse & Farrier, was built in the same place in the late 1920s, all ready to serve the thirsty inhabitants of the about-to-be-built council estate. There was no other pub on the estate so the popularity of The Horse & Farrier was assured. Our house was on the main route to it. When the publican turned the inebriated out at closing time, a great mass of roaring, fighting men (and a few women) would surge along Orton Road, making the first stop at our hedge, some men clinging on to it for support, some being sick into its glossy leaves, and some propelled into it by a fist. I’d lie with my younger sister Pauline in the bed-in-the-wall, my heart thudding, though I knew I was in no danger whatsoever, and listen to my father yelling out of the window that he was going to call the police (this would’ve been difficult as we had no telephone). Sometimes, his fury would grow so great he’d go and fill a bucket with water and throw it over the drunks. Not a wise move, though temporarily effective.

  The Horse & Farrier was an imposing building, unlike any of the other pubs I’d passed in nearby Caldewgate. It would’ve been easy to mistake it for a rather grand house, situated as it was on a corner, all by itself, and with a bowling green behind it which could’ve been taken for a beautifully maintained lawn of best Solway Firth turf. The rendered walls were whitewashed annually and, like St Barnabas Church, deep in the heart of our estate, there was a certain glitter about the place. But I was afraid of it. My father patronised it himself, once a week, though he never came home drunk. I hated our house being near it. I never, when describing where I lived, said ‘near The Horse & Farrier’. Instead, I’d say ‘near Morton Park’, or ‘near Inglewood Crescent’, snobbery already in place.

  It also featured large in the nightmares I regularly had. I’d never, of course, been inside this pub but in these nightmares I’d be in it with hordes of people all around me shouting and singing and cursing, all of them holding glasses of foaming beer in their hands, some of which slopped over and dripped on my head and ran down into my mouth. I was always on my knees, trying to crawl between the booted feet, and getting kicked as I struggled towards a door I could see ahead. This door was always open, with the light streaming into the dark room, and eventually I’d reach it and crawl through and stand up to walk away – at which point, I’d wake up, having fallen down the stairs. Fortunately, there were only twelve quite shallow stairs in our house, with a bend at the top which I’d obviously negotiated successfully in my sleep before falling. I was never really hurt. I’d be picked up, and taken to sit on my mother’s knee and attempts would be made to try to find out what all this falling down the stairs had been about. I don’t think I was ever able to describe the nightmare except to say I was in The Horse & Farrier, which completely mystified my mother.

  Once the nightmare faded, and I was put back to bed, our house seemed an attractively safe place, even cosy, and I’d be relieved and glad to be tucked up in the bed-in-the-wall. But what I really liked, the time when the house took on another character entirely and I was quite happy living in it, was when it was empty except for me. This was rare. Usually, every evening, we were all in the living room with the wireless on, but sometimes on Friday evenings everyone would be out. Gordon, who was a keen Boy Scout, would be out at a Scouts meeting, or often away a whole weekend at a Scout camp; my mother sometimes would take Pauline to visit a relative. My father would come home from work, strip off his blue overalls, get washed and spruced up, then go for his end-of-the-week treat to The Horse & Farrier. They didn’t all leave, or return, at the same time but there was usually at least an hour when the house was empty except for me. By the time I was twelve, it was considered allowable for me to be on my own, with strict instructions, in the winter, to keep an eye on the fire. It had to be regularly stoked up, and I hadn’t to get so lost in a book that I failed to add coal at the appropriate time. When the house was empty, reading took on a different quality. It was not a battle against noise and interruptions, and general resentment at what was considered an anti-social activity, but instead an easy pleasure, with no effort needed to block out everything happening in the room. I fantasised that the house approved of my reading, that it enjoyed the little library it had become. What I was actually reading was mostly still children’s stuff, Arthur Ransome and such like, though I’d read Jane Eyre and had attempted Virginia Woolf (Orlando, of which I made nothing whatsoever). It was always annoying when the rest of the family began arriving home and the house once more became more like a busy meeting place than a library.

  I’d disappear then upstairs, to the freezing-cold bedroom, but at least by then, in 1950 and aged twelve and nine respectively, my sister and I had graduated from the bed-in-the-wall to the back bedroom because our brother had gone off to do his National Service. We still had to share a bed, but it was a proper and much more comfortable bed, and it was a whole room to ourselves. There was no space to fit in a desk or table but I sat at the washstand to do my homework. This was a pretty piece of furniture which had come from my maternal grandmother’s house. It was made of pine, and on it stood a china jug and bowl. The jug was meant to be filled with hot water from the sink in the kitchen then carried up and poured into the bowl, to be used to wash. In fact, we all washed at the kitchen sink and only visitors (always family) got the washstand treatment. But with this jug and bowl moved to one side, a chair could be put in front of the washstand and I could just about sit at it to do my homework, though it meant jamming my knees under it or twisting them to one side.

  Soon after we took occupation of this room, the art teacher at my school set as our homework ‘The view from my bedroom window’. If I’d still been in my parents’ bedroom in the bed-in-the-wall, whatever could I have painted? As it was, I had a proper window to look out of. I looked. It was a dreary view: the coal bunker, the rope washing line held up by two massive wooden props, and the backs of the nearest other council houses. All the flowers my father grew were at the side and the front of the house, the wonderfully varied lupins, and dahlias, and snapdragons which would have given me a whole paintbox of colours to play with. If I painted the real view, all I’d need was grey, black and brown. There was one tiny yellowish flower that grew in a damp little dip in the tarmac near the coal bunker, but I could hardly make anything of that. Slowly, I began to paint what I would have liked to have been seeing. A smooth, oval lawn came first, with an apple tree at the far end. I was about to cover it with blossom when I remembered it was November. In the centre of the brilliantly green lawn I put a fountain, but then couldn’t paint the water so quickly altered it to a bird bath. No need to paint more than a black smudge to indicate a possible bird. I added a swing to a branch of the apple tree but knew I wasn’t accomplished enough to attempt a figure sitting on it. Masses of gaudy flowers went in, all around the lawn, and in a moment of inspiration I managed quite a successful cat stal
king across it (we had no pets). It was a startlingly colourful picture and I was pleased with it. No one at the High School had been to my house, least of all the teacher, and no one could possibly know this view was entirely untruthful, so I couldn’t be found out. I handed in my homework with some pride, only to learn a shaming lesson. The best picture was painted by another girl whose view from her window was far more depressing and dreary than mine. She obviously lived in a house with no garden, only a yard, a yard full of dust and bins, one of them overflowing. There was a rusty old bicycle lying on the ground, one wheel missing, and the colours she’d used were grey, a deeper grey, a pale grey, dark brown and black. She had rendered the scene truthfully and made a picture that was full of atmosphere and interest, however dismal. My own fantasy view had been ridiculous.

  But then fantasising, or daydreaming, was how I lived my life. All the time. The house I lived in kept trying to pin me down to reality and I kept resisting and floating away. I would not be living here. I wouldn’t let Orton Road be all there was in life. I would not have people looking at me and thinking ‘ah, yes, Orton Road’ reflected there. The idea of my place of dwelling somehow leaving an imprint on my character would have been anathema to me. I knew, already, that it was not possible to tell what kind of house someone lived in just from looking at them. There were girls at my school from all kinds of houses and until I’d visited their homes I hadn’t been able to tell. Posh accents were rare in Carlisle in the 1950s, so voices didn’t indicate where a girl probably lived. The state of a uniform wasn’t an indication either – there was no such thing as a smart gymslip, and though some might be scruffier than others that could often be deliberate. No, it was no good guessing. Only the address gave anything away.