My Life in Houses

by Margaret Forster

  The suspicion was growing that my grandfather was going soft in his old age. Arranging for a new fireplace to be put in could only be explained by what was obviously his regard for my mother. This regard was never expressed in words, and she’d been given no overt signs up to then that it existed, but it was surely there. His next act of uncharacteristic generosity couldn’t be explained so easily.

  He just made one of his unnerving appearances one day while I was sitting in the parlour with a board across my knees writing something for homework. He’d been brought in to admire my brother’s handiwork (he’d built bookcases round the bottom part of the bay window). He said nothing, of course, but an instruction was (later) received to ‘be in, Tuesday’. I was at school, but when I came home I was told by my smiling mother to ‘go and look in the parlour’. Grandfather George had bought a bureau. It was no antique job, just a reproduction piece, but it was new and shiny, and had a leaf that let down so I could use it to do homework and lots of little cubby holes in which to keep pens and rubbers and paper clips. It set the tone for what this house, and this room, was to mean to me: a place of study.

  What years those were, 1952–1956, each one heavy with ambition and determination to do well at school. Leaving school with my bike wobbling, the basket in front so weighed down with books, a girl once jeered: ‘You’re a swot!’ and I nodded. Yup, I was a swot. A teacher had mentioned ‘university’ to me, and though I only had the vaguest idea what a university was, the thought of being able to leave home and go there appealed to me. I loved school, and university sounded like a sort of extended school, only with lots of other advantages. I was worried that going there must cost money and since I didn’t have any, and my family certainly didn’t (grandfather George’s purse might stretch to fireplaces and bureaus, but, I imagined, that was the limit) I wouldn’t be able to go even if I qualified, but it was explained to me that, with my father earning so little (though it wasn’t put like that), I’d get a full grant. I might also be awarded a state scholarship. From then on, I was determined to go. All it was going to take was concentration and hard work.

  There was no self-denial involved. I liked the studying. I didn’t have to force myself in the least. Every evening, I sat in the parlour (it was always called that, never becoming a sitting room) and worked my way through homework, and then some extra reading. I didn’t find the books I was reading myself. I had a teacher who fed me background reading, and who equipped me, at my request, with a long list of books a well-read person should’ve read. Until then, I’d been picking and choosing at random from the library shelves which was fine, up to a point, but now that point had been reached. It was lucky that, in this house, I had a room to study in and was no longer banished to a freezing bedroom. I actually had a fire there, a gas-fire in the corner, which spluttered and hissed alarmingly, its white tubes alternating between orange and red, but it gave out a good, if probably unhealthy, heat. I’d hear my father saying to my mother ‘Has she got that fire burning money again?’ but I was never told to turn it off.

  I sat there long after I’d finished my famous studying, acting as though this was my own room. If any other family member dared to come in, I’d look indignant. Didn’t they realise this room was dedicated to scholastic endeavour? What were they doing here? They’d come, sit in one of the two easy chairs, or stand looking out of the window, and then they succumbed to my silent glare and left the room. They were much more comfortable next door in the living room, I assured my guilty self, with a real fire on and the wireless, they didn’t need to be in the parlour. Gordon didn’t come in much, except occasionally to admire the bookshelves he’d made, which now held his collection of Book Club volumes he’d gathered while doing his National Service in the R.A.F. (I’d learned a lot from these books – one of them was Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead.) Mostly, though, he was rushing in and out of the house, working all day at a photographer’s shop and taking wedding photographs at the weekends. It was Pauline who was next door with my parents, and she appeared, at that time anyway, to be quite content with their company. But my mother began to worry that it wasn’t healthy for a teenage girl to be stuck in a room on her own reading for such long hours. I should be out. Out where? Just out, in the fresh air, but she didn’t really mean I needed fresh air. She didn’t say it wasn’t normal for a girl my age, but that was what she meant. My answer was to take her literally. Fresh air? Right. I went out and walked in the cemetery for half an hour. Satisfied? Then I returned to the parlour. I wasn’t after all going to be there for ever. Soon, I’d be leaving this house.

  In my last summer there, things were a bit better. I took my books outside – plenty of fresh air – and sprawled on the minute patch of lawn allowed by my father, surrounded by the leeks and cauliflowers essential to feed the family. He’d worked hard on this garden, which had been in the same woeful state as the house. It was a huge improvement on Orton Road because it was all at the back and enclosed by a high hedge. There was still no real privacy but there was an illusion of it, and I was grateful for it. I was grateful, too, that we were in this house but somehow I wasn’t grateful enough. I was greedy. I wanted more, specifically my own bedroom and bed, though I was at least realistic enough to realise it would be a long time before I ever had my own house. It had dawned on me that even some professional people couldn’t afford to buy a house – teachers, for example. I’d somehow always thought teachers would be if not well off then certainly comfortably off, enough anyway to own a house. But one of our teachers at the High School had invited four of us home to look at some slides of her travels in France and Italy during the last summer holidays, and ‘home’ turned out to be a bed-sitting room in a house in Warwick Road. She’d been there years. It seemed to me inexplicable, but then I’d no idea how much a teacher earned or how much the cheapest house cost.

  There was clearly a lot to learn about the economics of houses. The childish game of wandering down Norfolk Road and mentally occupying a house had stopped, but I was still obsessed with the general unfairness of house ownership. What was needed, I decided, was a new law (not that I knew anything about the existing ones). This law would make it illegal for one person to live in a large house when big families were crammed into small ones. It was not fair, and it should be made fair, for everyone. This last bit, ‘fair for everyone’, troubled me. I saw difficulties. Would it be fair to turf my grandfather out of his house? He was seventy-six and had lived at 84 Richardson Street since he bought the house in 1920 while working as a mechanic at Pratchetts, a local engineering firm. Buying it had been a triumph, a real by-the-sweat-of-his-brow sort. I doubted if he had any affection for the house itself except that it was his, and this ownership signified a great deal. Its discomforts (many) didn’t seem to worry him. He was used to them. He didn’t mind still boiling water in a big, blackened kettle which hung on a hook over the fire so that he ran the risk of scalding himself every time he removed it to pour water into the waiting teapot. Apart from this fire, he had no other form of heating – quite normal for the times, or his times. But would my new imagined law make it right to move him out and a family in? No, of course not.

  I couldn’t kid myself. My grandfather’s house was, I’m sure, full of painful memories for him, full of the sound of his wife lying for years in a bed in the corner of the living room, moaning with the pain of her rheumatoid arthritis (plus several other severe conditions). Wouldn’t he want to escape from a house so filled with suffering? No. I knew that any suggestion of his house being taken from him would outrage him. He wouldn’t even be interested in alternatives: somewhere smaller, warmer and cleaner? No! A home, perhaps, living companionably with others his own age. No! So, what was my proposed law to do about this problem? I toyed with the notion of getting the Queen to set an example by turning Buckingham Palace into flats, but even if she did this wasn’t relevant to the problem of people like my grandfather. I just couldn’t see how ‘fair for everyone’ could be made to work. I
t gave me a headache. Ambition to become a Member of Parliament and then Housing Minister faded. Houses were complicated; I wasn’t up to tackling the rights and wrongs of ownership. My final thought, at that stage, was that nobody should be forcibly removed from their house if they had owned and lived in it for more than twenty-five years.

  But what if they’d lived in it twenty-four years and six months?

  I had other things to think about apart from the housing problem: Advanced Levels – the all-important A levels. Once they were over, in the summer of 1956, I emerged like a tortoise, slowly creeping into the kind of ‘normal’ social life my mother thought I should be enjoying. It wasn’t that I’d been without friends all this time, but I’d never been part of a group doing the kind of things groups do. The group activity I got into the summer after A levels was fell walking. This was boy-led. We would set off on Friday evening, stay in a youth hostel, walk all the next day, stay in another youth hostel then come home. I loved it. The walking was often real climbing, and soon I’d climbed all the major fells in the northern lakes, rucksack on my back, and sampled every youth hostel from Keswick to Grasmere and Ullswater. I began to treat our house the way so many teenagers do, as a place to go and get a hot bath and good food, or, in other words, as a hotel which didn’t charge. Sometimes we camped, and it nearly always rained, so coming back to our house then was even more appreciated. A house was a place full of material comforts, and that was all that mattered.

  To some, it must have looked full of more comforts, in the way of possessions, than it actually was. We were burgled. All the burglar got was a few coins in a missionary box of my mother’s, a little blue cardboard box with a slit in the top into which she slipped loose change now and again until it was full, when she handed it over to the vicar who passed it on to an appropriate society. The burglar had ripped the box open, easily done, pocketed the pennies, probably in disgust at how few there were, and thrown the box on the floor. He must quickly have realised there was obviously nothing of value, doubtless looking around in despair at the lack of jewellery or ornaments that might fetch a shilling or two. How many rooms he’d searched we never knew. Nothing, except that missionary box, was touched. He’d come in through the back door, which was on the latch (as most back doors were then, in our sort of houses). It had no bolt drawn across the top because the house wasn’t unoccupied. I was in it, alone, asleep. Or, as my father, in a rage, put it later, ‘We had a dog, but it never barked.’

  It was so very rare for my parents not to be at home in the evening. They’d gone out with my mother’s sister, Aunt Nan, and Uncle Jack, and what may have given our burglar the wrong idea was that Jack had driven up in a Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce, and Nan was draped in a fox-fur stole. They were, by then, Jack having prospered, our well-off relatives and they’d come to take my parents out. My father, who loved cars but hated Jack, who flaunted his minor public school education and his new wealth, hadn’t wanted to go, but allowed himself to be persuaded just so that he could experience the ride. They’d all come back apparently remarkably jolly (considering the tension that existed between my father and Jack) to find the front door wide open. My mother’s first thought was for my safety so once she found me sound asleep, a book open on the pillow beside me, she accepted the loss of her missionary box money philosophically. My father didn’t. He never believed for one moment that I’d been asleep, though I was very relieved that I really had been.

  The burglar may, of course, have looked in on me, and perhaps got a fright, having believed the house was empty, so scarpered quickly. Or he may never have come up the stairs at all, one look having told him there were no rich pickings to be had. There were plenty of fingerprints when a bored policeman came to investigate, so the burglar hadn’t thought to wear gloves. Probably just a lad, chancing it, was the opinion. But whoever this lad was, his little visit changed the feeling of the house. We’d been lucky – nothing really had been stolen, nothing harmed or wrecked – but the house no longer felt absolutely safe. A burglary was the kind of thing which might be expected to happen across the river Eden in Stanwix, or even in nearby Norfolk Road, but on the Longsowerby estate? What was the world coming to? There were limits, and they had just been broken. Afterwards, the nightly locking up took ages. If I came home later than 9 p.m. I had to give advance warning. If I didn’t, back and front doors, sporting newly fixed bolts, would be found securely in place, defending the homeland.

  Soon after this incident, my grandfather died, and his house, about which I’d worried so much, was put up for sale, the proceeds to be divided equally between my father and his younger brother, Bob. If this house had been a dismal place while still inhabited, it was twice as dreary and depressing now it was empty. I saw it after it was cleared of all the furniture and belongings – straight to the saleroom, nothing kept, not even the Crown Derby china I’d always ogled as it sat in its cabinet – and it was an almost frightening sight. The sun shone outside that day but very little sneaked into the rooms. The windows were still shrouded in net curtains, unwashed for a long time. Everywhere, the wallpapers were faded and discoloured, the paintwork chipped and worn. Where large pieces of furniture had been removed, it was a shock to see that what I’d thought a pattern of pale grey flowers mixed with darker grey ivy was once a pretty deep pink joined with a bright emerald green. What struck me, tiptoeing from room to room – the house seemed to demand a cautious tread – was that the place had no story to tell except one of neglect and exhaustion. The only atmosphere was one of a general decay. Whatever had happened in these rooms, nothing lingered. I knew some of the things that had happened – my brother’s birth in the front bedroom, my grandmother’s illnesses and her incarceration in the living room – but this didn’t help bring the rooms alive. Mostly, there was a lingering feeling of unhappiness, but then perhaps most old houses, left in this state, feel that way.

  It had always struck me as odd that my mother chose to give birth to her first child, my elder brother, in this house. Why didn’t she have him at home, in her own house, in Orton Road? Or why not her mother’s house? When asked, she said my grandmother Agnes so wanted her to have her first grandchild at her house that she had agreed. Agnes, at that time, was of course in good health and liked looking after people, whereas my maternal grandmother had a heart complaint. And Agnes, having no daughters, loved my mother and it was probably a way of showing her affection that she wanted to care for her during her ‘lying-in’. Anyway, this was one happy event that had taken place, and I tried to imagine it as I took a last long look at that forlorn, shabby room, but my imagination for once failed me.

  Viewers must have been as put off by the house as I was, because it took a long time to sell and when it did it was for far less than had been expected. My father, who was suddenly a firm believer in the law of primogeniture, was furious that the sum realised had, according to the terms of his father’s will, to be split equally with his brother. It was wrong. He was the elder son and he should have the family house. By then, he and Bob had not spoken for eleven years. They both worked in the same factory, though Bob was a draughtsman while my father was a fitter, and they passed each other all the time without either brother giving any acknowledgement to the other. But quite apart from his being the elder, my father also reckoned he was entitled to the house because of the way he and my mother had looked after my grandmother. Who had come to the house three times a week to change her bedlinen and wash her? My mother. Who had brought her tasty home-baked scones and cakes? My mother. And where had Bob’s wife been all this time? Nowhere near. Illness apparently upset her. And she ‘wasn’t too well’ herself. My father was furious at what he perceived as rank injustice. It did no good. Bob got half. My father vowed he would never speak to him again but as he already hadn’t spoken to him for so many years, the vow lost something of its force.

  Houses, I now saw, could mean trouble. My father never tried to buy his own, but that was because he didn’t have enough money, even wi
th his share of his father’s house, to buy one outright and he was afraid of taking a mortgage in case he couldn’t keep the payments up. That, at least, was my reading of the situation, though I never asked him the reasons. Houses were too much of a sore subject. It came to my father’s attention that Bob had bought a modern semi-detached house on London Road, to the south of Carlisle. Hearing this, presumably from workmates, my father cycled to London Road to look at Bob’s house from the outside and came back announcing, contemptuously, that he didn’t think much of it, and that Bob was ‘trying to be something he’s not’. I asked what that meant, and got only a withering look, so I cycled to London Road myself, only to remain baffled. There was nothing remarkable in any way about Bob’s house. It was just ordinary, nothing flash, nothing about it was different from any of the scores of semi-detached houses being built at the time.