My Life in Houses

by Margaret Forster

  All my particular friends lived in privately owned houses of varying degrees of affluence. Not one was from Raffles, or any other council estate, not that I knew this before they became my friends. It was just chance. I loved going to their respective houses; I was still fascinated by the whole business of houses. They all had not only beds of their own but whole rooms, which they could retreat to and where they could do whatever they wanted. These rooms were often small but they’d been able to choose what colour the walls were painted and what to put on them. I’d never heard of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, but in these friends’ rooms I understood how enviable it was to have such a room. You could go into it and shut the door and be private. What did privacy for a twelve-year-old bring? Remarkably little, only the pleasure of withdrawing from adult eyes and sibling annoyances. We lolled on the bed or the floor and talked, and that was about it. Eventually, we’d re-emerge, looking as if something important had been achieved. We’d spill into other rooms, carrying on the endless stream of inconsequential chatter. There were things in these rooms which I’d never seen before, cocktail cabinets and gramophones, and in the hall there was always a telephone. In the kitchen, there was always a refrigerator which friends would fling open, offering me cold orange squash. I could never quite get used to all this largesse, never move about these houses comfortably, always feeling I should be on tiptoe, taking care not to spoil anything.

  I never invited any of my High School chums to Orton Road. I didn’t explain why. They didn’t ask, or make hints that a return of hospitality would be welcome. It wasn’t so much that where I lived embarrassed me – though, shockingly, it did – but that I couldn’t think what we would do once we got home. Where could I take them? I didn’t have a room of my own, and in any case most of the year the back bedroom was a sub-zero temperature. All excuses, of course, but they felt real to me. There was no reason whatsoever why I couldn’t have brought friends home and stayed in the living room. My mother would’ve been friendly and polite, she’d have offered her excellent just-baked scones or cake, and my sister, who was quite shy, would have sat quietly, and at that time of day my brother and father would’ve been at work. So, I was being stupid as well as snobbish. I even recognised my attitude as snobbish, and knew it was a disgraceful thing, but I blamed the house for it, not myself.

  I was not, though, only imagining that by 1950 the Raffles estate had begun to have an unfortunate reputation. The ‘garden city’ ideal had been lost. In the twenty years since it had been built, with such high ideals, and with such care, the estate had visibly changed. There were still houses like our own which were immaculately maintained, but there were also far more which looked neglected. There was, as yet, no drug culture, and no gangs, but certain roads had a run-down appearance and the shops had never really flourished. There was a good deal of alcoholism which led to fights in some streets, including ours, and police cars regularly appeared on Friday and Saturday nights. The reputation Raffles was earning was partly unjust but it stuck. All the people who lived there were lumped together: it was the people, it was said, the sort of people who lived there, the problem families, the rough types who didn’t care about anything. We were not a problem family and we were not rough, but we were from Raffles, enough said, so far as some people were concerned.

  There were other council estates in Carlisle, however, which had different reputations. Longsowerby was reckoned the best of them. It had been the first one built, in 1922, and there had been no hesitation in providing the houses with indoor lavatories and (for some of them) even parlours. It was a showcase council estate and it had not slipped, by the 1950s, in the pecking order. There were only six-hundred houses and from the beginning tenants who could well have afforded to rent private accommodation had moved in and set the tone. This was where my mother wanted to move to, but moving at all when you were a Raffles tenant was a fraught business. The need, though, by 1952 was pressing. My brother was due home after completing his National Service, and once he reclaimed the back bedroom my sister and I (by then eleven and fourteen) would have to move back into the bed-in-the-wall in my parents’ bedroom, or else my brother would have to give up his room and sleep in the living room. Neither solution was exactly attractive.

  So, my mother started writing letters to the housing department of the council and at the same time looking for swaps in the local newspaper. She wrote a good letter, listing the reasons why she felt we had a case to be rehoused, preferably on the Longsowerby estate. I thought one of her reasons was a mistake. She said her father-in-law, recently widowed, who lived in a terrace house at the foot of the Longsowerby estate, was becoming frail and needed looking after. This would be easier if we were near at hand, on the Longsowerby estate. I thought the council might say, well, if you want to look after him and he lives in his own private house, why don’t you move in with him? Problem solved. The council didn’t bother suggesting this, which was just as well. My mother would’ve been appalled at the thought, hating as she did my grandfather’s dark, narrow house which had no garden, only a small yard opening onto a back lane. I never really understood her objections. I looked at my grandfather’s house and saw only the number of rooms – three bedrooms, a parlour – and the address: not on a council estate. I didn’t want to live with him – he was a surly, grumpy man – but my idea was to put him in our Orton Road house. I was told not to be ridiculous. My mother was told by the council that all it could suggest was that she should put a request for a swap in the Cumberland News.

  This she did. Every Friday, she also scrutinised the ‘exchanges wanted’ column. There were lots of these but while three-bedroom houses on all the estates in Carlisle were heavily in demand nobody seemed to want two-bedroom houses with no indoor lavatory. Especially not in Raffles. Then, suddenly, the possibility of an exchange came up. The tension in our house was terrific. ‘Count on nothing,’ my mother instructed us, but she was obviously hopeful herself. It seemed a man who had only one leg wanted to move to be near his daughter who lived in Raffles. He lived in Richardson Street, Longsowerby, exactly where my mother wanted to be. It appeared to be crucial that we had a bath in our bathroom though not a sink or lavatory. All the time the proposed exchange was being discussed and fretted over, the man’s one leg seemed somehow of huge significance, though what on earth it had to do with it I cannot now imagine. He’d apparently been in his Longsowerby house, originally with two legs, since 1928, and had lost a leg in the Second World War. His house had not only three bedrooms but a parlour, and a parlour with a bay window.

  The rent, if the exchange went through, would be more, which was a cause of great concern. Could the extra rent be managed? Just about, if my father did even more overtime. There was a brief moment when my mother, who had worked in Carlisle’s Health Department as an assistant to the medical officer, and had once gone back for three months to fill in for someone who was ill, suggested that she could go back to work, but my father vetoed this immediately. He wasn’t having that. I think my mother would have liked to return to her job, or one like it, but she didn’t put up a fight.

  Finally the exchange was agreed, and a date fixed, and my mother set to making sure that we would be leaving Orton Road in sparkling condition. The cleaning that went on those last two weeks was ferocious even though the house, it seemed to me, was already spotless. She made my father distemper the living room again, worried that when the battered old settee was removed there would be a mark on the wall. I even helped by scrubbing, on hands and knees, the linoleum in our bedroom.

  There wasn’t much to pack up, but enough to fill the van which my brother borrowed. My mother didn’t really want to take our existing furniture (‘poor stuff’ she called it) but as there was no chance of buying new furniture she had to accept everything we had would be going with us. I don’t know how she really felt about leaving a house she’d lived in for twenty-one years, ever since she’d been married. I was jubilant, but then I saw only the huge advantages
and wasn’t the slightest affected by nostalgia for the place. But my mother, inevitably, had memories that made this humble house mean something to her that transcended its bricks and mortar. Her own mother had died here; I’d been born here. And she had good friends, as I had, across the road in Inglewood Crescent. She would still see them, but it would mean at arranged times, no more slipping in and out of each other’s houses.

  As for my father, he was worried about the extra rent, and the expense of moving (though I couldn’t see what that would be) and furthermore there was one thing about the one-legged man’s house to which we were moving that he did not like at all: it was opposite the cemetery.

  I came across a remark in Howards End, many years after I left the house where I was born, which struck me as mad. A character in this novel says: ‘Can what they call civilisation be right, if people mayn’t die in the room where they were born?’ The idea of dying in that house in Orton Road, of wanting to die in the room where I was born, filled me with dismay.

  But I once, in the 1980s, went back there to do a feature for a colour magazine, one in a series called ‘The House Where I Grew Up’. It wasn’t as though I hadn’t been past the house many times since I left it – it was part of going back to Carlisle, which we did regularly, to do the nostalgia tour, driving round places that had some familial significance – so there was no real surprise to find the appearance of Orton Road quite different from how it had looked in 1952 when we left it. My father’s beautifully tended garden had vanished. No neat and tidy lawns, no flower beds full of lupins and dahlias (or even cabbages), no immaculately trimmed privet hedge. Indeed, a van had been driven through the hallowed hedge and stood on what had once been assiduously mowed grass but was now a thicket of huge weeds. Bulging black plastic sacks littered the broken path round the side of the house, and the trellis that had been covered in climbing roses lay smashed on the ground. It looked as though it had been there many years, with half the wood buried in mud. All the curtains of the house were drawn though it was two in the afternoon. There was graffiti scrawled on the side wall in blue paint but most of it was obliterated by slashes of black.

  The magazine had sent a photographer with me – there was always, in this series, a picture of the writer standing in front of the house. He said we should knock on the door – there was no bell – and just explain what we were doing. I was nervous about this. It wasn’t part of the deal, as I had understood it. All I’d been asked to do, all I’d agreed to do, was write about my old life in the house. I’d heard stories of how the Raffles estate had now become a dangerous place, full of drug dealers, and from the look of Orton Road some of them might well be living here. A newspaper article had claimed, after all, that Raffles in Carlisle was on a par with Toxteth in Liverpool and the Broadwater estate in Tottenham. I really didn’t want to disturb the inhabitants. But the photographer insisted we had to do it, and so I invited him to do it himself. I didn’t see why he couldn’t just take a quick snap, and then we could leave, sharpish.

  He knocked. No response. He knocked harder, and for longer. Just as he was about to give up, and take the photograph anyway, a window on the upstairs floor was banged open and a furious woman’s voice yelled, ‘Who is it? What the fuck do you want? Fuck off!’ The photographer bleated that he just wanted to take a photograph of Margaret Forster, who once lived here, for a feature about—. He was cut short. ‘Do what you fucking like but shut the fuck up,’ shouted the same furious voice, and the window was slammed shut again. Was it any wonder that in the resulting picture I looked tense and uneasy? I could hardly stand still, never mind smile. All I wanted to do was leave quickly, but, as is the way with colour magazine photographers, one shot was not enough. On and on he went, having me pose first in front of the door, then the downstairs window, and just as he was moving me to the gate a car screeched to a halt and a man got out of the front passenger seat. He wasn’t a big man, but he was burly and he moved aggressively, pushing the gate open with a force it didn’t need, considering it was almost off its hinges anyway. Before anything could be said by this man, the photographer got in quickly, coming out with the same patter he’d given the woman. The man frowned, as though the photographer was speaking in a foreign language and he had to translate it first before he could decide what to do. I wondered if he would ask for money, if he was someone who lived in the house, for permission to take a photograph. Did he have the right? Would the photographer give him a tenner? But it wasn’t necessary. Just as abruptly as he’d arrived, the man left and, after he’d said something to the driver, the car swung round the corner into Dalton Avenue.

  I’ve driven past the house since, but always rather quickly, and sadly. I thought I had no feeling for it whatsoever, that it didn’t affect me in any way, but I found the dilapidation and neglect troubled me. It seemed to symbolise something distressing but I wasn’t sure what – maybe just the shame that such a once aspirational building effort seemed to have ended like this. When, and why, had this utter change in Raffles come about?

  At the time of that photograph, the house where I was born, and lived for fourteen years, looked condemned.

  THE COUNCIL HOUSE we moved to in October 1952 faced Carlisle cemetery. It was at the top of a hill, near to the rather impressive entrance. At the bottom of this hill, there was a path which led through some open ground to the river Caldew, which meant we had easy access to a riverside walk all the way to Cummersdale. So, it was a pleasantly situated house, as long as being opposite a cemetery, and having hearses regularly pass by, wasn’t found too depressing.

  It didn’t depress me in the least. I was familiar with the cemetery from an early age because my mother used to take me every week to tend her parents’ grave. It was an outing I enjoyed. The cemetery was just a park to me, full of hidden paths criss-crossing between the gravestones. It was beautifully maintained, with generous flower beds all along the main drive full of startlingly colourful bedding plants in the summer. There were poplar trees and fir trees mixed up with oak and ash trees, giving the whole place a deeply green appearance, and at the top, beyond all the rows of crosses for the war dead, there was a magnificent view of the fells. It seemed to me, as a child, quite a nice place to be dead in, if you had to be dead. I liked the jobs my mother gave me when we got to her parents’ grave. The best one was being sent to get water from a nearby tank, to fill the metal holder in front of the white gravestone. We put flowers there every week, and the little bit of grass, surrounded by a white marble border, was carefully clipped by my mother. All around us, there would be other people doing the same, everyone intent on making graves as attractive as possible. My father thought this was morbid, but he had his own reasons for occasionally walking in the cemetery. He liked to pass his grandfather’s grave, where his own name, Arthur Forster, attracted him. His grandfather’s age, ninety, was a target he aimed at (he reached, and then passed it, dying at ninety-six). There were lots of other Forster graves I came to know as landmarks in the cemetery, though not so many on my mother’s side, the Hinds. As far as I was concerned, the cemetery wasn’t at all creepy. I was quite content to say that I lived opposite it. Looking out of our bedroom window, over its wall, at dead people, was fine by me.

  The house itself was an undeniable improvement on the one we’d just left, but the condition it was in, was not. The inside was unbelievably dirty and dilapidated but there was no chance to do anything about this before we moved in and so we had to get cracking straight away, scraping the grime off the floors and walls, and scrubbing all the surfaces. The famous indoor lavatory, so longed for, took bottles of bleach and hours of repeated vigorous brushing before it was anything but disgusting. My mother, who of course had left Orton Road immaculate, was almost hysterical. Fastidious to a fault, it literally made her ill to be living in such a house, and she was the one living in it all the time while the rest of us escaped to work or school. It was a wet and cold October, making everything seem worse, and I dreaded those first few w
eeks, coming back to this house (though I never wished we were back in Orton Road, haven of cleanliness though it was).

  Slowly, very slowly, the house was licked into shape, every wall painted or papered, my father doing all the decorating himself after his long shifts at the factory. After six months, there were so-called refinements taking place, some of which puzzled me. Doors, for example, which seemed fine to me. They were just wooden doors, four panels in each. But my mother wanted them ‘flush’. This meant fitting a thin layer of plywood into the four panels so that the surface of the door was flat. I understood better her wish to be rid of the black range fireplace, the same sort we’d had in the Orton Road house. Black-leading the wretched thing went on being a nasty job, but it had to be done and it was my mother who did it. Funds wouldn’t, as yet, stretch to having it removed and a modern fireplace put in.

  Then, one day, my grandfather, George, arrived while my mother was doing this black-leading. He had taken to doing this since we arrived at the top end of his street (Richardson Street had privately owned houses at the bottom end and council houses on the hill after the road turned the corner). He didn’t come to socialise. He came on the way back from visiting his wife’s grave in the cemetery, and all he did was come in at the back door and stand there until my mother appeared and asked him if he’d like a cup of tea. She knew perfectly well he’d shake his head, or just grunt. There would be an awkward moment or two when, if he was in an expansive mood, he might make some comment on the weather – ‘wet’ – and then he’d turn and go. But this particular morning, when my mother didn’t appear, he came into the house and saw her on her knees doing the black-leading. My mother said he just stood and stared, as ever saying nothing, then he left before she’d finished. He returned later that day. My father went to the door, hearing the latch being lifted, and came back with the startling news that a new fireplace had been ordered and would be put in the following week. It was something called an Osborne All-Tile fireplace complete with a steel grate. Oh, rapture! I was as thrilled as my mother. I’d never seen any beauty in the black range, which to me stigmatised the house. When the new fireplace arrived I was as admiring as everyone else, failing entirely to see how cheap and ugly it was.