My Life in Houses

by Margaret Forster

  At any rate, no attempt, so far as I know, was ever made by my father to be something he was not. He went on renting our council house, improving it year by year to a considerable degree. Every now and again he would rage that I was doing nothing to help – ‘“Get a bigger house, and I’ll help”, she said’. I didn’t remember saying this. He somehow implied that he’d moved us to an enormous mansion, with endless corridors and staircases as well as rooms, instead of to a house with one more bedroom and a parlour which took hardly any more effort to look after now that it was spick and span. And he himself, unusually for a working-class man of that era, did quite a lot of the housework. His speciality was vacuum cleaning (it was never called a Hoover). On Sunday mornings I’d waken to the horrible noise of the ancient vacuum cleaner being pushed round the carpet surrounding the bed. There was very little dirt or dust upon it, but on and on the noise would go, the vacuum cleaner pushed backwards and forwards remorselessly. If I groaned, he would say, ‘Got to be done,’ and carry on until the poor carpet was cleaned until it was threadbare.

  My A level results came out in August 1956. They were good enough for me to be allowed to return to school to sit the Oxford and Cambridge entrance exams (at our school, this was how the system then worked). It was a big risk because if I failed to get a place I’d have wasted a year when I could already have been at a less prestigious university. And by then I had a distraction from my devotion to studying. I’d met, that summer, and become very involved with, a boy called Hunter Davies who was in his second year at Durham University . . . Maybe I should go to Durham. But I went ahead all the same and sat the exams. I got interviews at both Girton and Somerville, the first stage, but doubted if I’d negotiated either successfully. I was full of gloom by the time the telegrams came offering me an exhibition at Girton and a scholarship at Somerville. I don’t remember feeling thrilled so much as relieved – taking those exams had seemed such a gamble and I’m not a gambler.

  In March 1957, I left Richardson Street to go to Bordeaux, to be an au pair to a French family. It wasn’t my idea, but I was charmed by it. The suggestion that I needed six months in France to improve my poor French was made by Somerville. I couldn’t understand why, since I was to read history, I needed better French. I only hoped it didn’t mean a lot of the history I’d be studying was going to be written in French.

  I’d never, of course, been abroad, not that this was unusual in the 1950s. There’d been a school trip to Paris which I couldn’t afford to go on, and was furiously jealous of those who could. Otherwise, I’d been no further south than Oxford and Cambridge, for interviews, so the thought of France, anywhere in France, was so exciting. Our French teacher fixed up the au pair arrangement, and there was then an exchange of letters and photographs between me and the family. The snap of the five children I’d be helping to look after was taken in what was labelled ‘the garden’. I naturally thought it was the family’s garden. It looked promising, with lots of lawn and trees, surely the garden of a big house. I didn’t realise ‘garden’ in this case meant Public Park, and that the family, in fact, had no garden or any kind of outside space. The number of children – the eldest seven, the youngest eighteen months – daunted me, but I was assured I’d have every afternoon off and I’d have my own room. My parents had no part in these arrangements. My mother was worried about me going so far away to a foreign country, but she was also quite impressed, and my father thought there was ‘no need’ for it, and ‘no point’ in going to Oxford either, but he didn’t interfere. I was given up as lost, definitely trying to be something I was not.

  After these six months, I’d be leaving again to go to Oxford, so even though I might have to come back for some vacations for the following three years, this leaving to go to Bordeaux was the real breakaway. I was well aware of it. I couldn’t wait to get away from this house. I thought – consciously thought – goodbye dreary cramped bedroom, goodbye poky parlour where I’d spent so many hours hunched over biographies and history books, goodbye to all that. I already, in my mind’s eye, saw myself in my very own room in Bordeaux, conjuring up a romantic vision of ‘the garden’ I’d be looking out over, and the bright blue continental sky with the sun always shining. Looking around for what felt like the last time, I felt already that I’d never lived here. There wasn’t a trace of me hanging about. The walls couldn’t speak, they had absorbed nothing of me, but then how could they have done. I’d just passed through this house – that was all.

  But coming back six months later, it surprised me how differently I regarded it. In Bordeaux, the family I lived with had three rooms, four flights of stairs up above a newsagent’s shop. There was no bathroom – ‘all-over washes’ were the order of the day, and they took place at the sink on the landing, which served also as a kitchenette. The lavatory made me wonder why on earth I’d resented the outside lavatory at Orton Road which, I now saw, was luxurious. What the family had was the typical French variety meaning not a flush toilet but one with a metal platform inside the bowl which, when lifted by a handle at the back, dropped anything deposited down a chute. I didn’t like to enquire exactly what happened when waste got to the bottom. I did, as promised, have my own room but it was not the room I’d imagined. No window, for a start, only a skylight, and this might have been romantic but it wasn’t. The skylight didn’t open, and the room was stifling. Mice scurried about all night, and the mattress was infested with fleas. I learned later from a relative of the family that three previous au pair girls from England had left within days.

  I did, though, see another side of how some of the French lived. The grandfather lived in a beautiful house, with a balcony, in a leafy street, and another relative not only had what I thought of as a proper mansion but also a beach house on the nearby coast. My host family, surprisingly, also had a country cottage among the pine woods at Salaunes, not far from Bordeaux. It was primitive – cooking was on an open fire, the water obtained from a well, and the only lavatory was the woods. But it was the definition of ‘picturesque’, built of stone with a tiled roof (holes in it, but still . . .) and framed by trees, some of them cherry trees which were laden with fruit. It was straight out of a fairy story and I loved it there, expecting either Hansel or Gretel to appear at any moment.

  I ought, always, to have seen the merits of Richardson Street, considering I’d already had my aunts’ flats to compare it with, but somehow I hadn’t appreciated the sheer luxury of living in a whole house, whatever the house was like, till I went to France. It did me a lot of good, being an au pair in such circumstances, doing a great deal more than improving my French. It made me finally ditch my snobbery about houses, just in time, before I went to Oxford where, to my astonishment, living in a council house was apparently a source of wonder.

  MY ROOM IN Somerville College was in the library block, built in 1903 along the northern perimeter of the grounds. Somerville wasn’t ancient, like the men’s colleges, so many of them possessing ‘dreaming spires’, but it was imposing enough for me.

  I had a corner room with a mullioned window overlooking a lawn and a cedar tree. It was a peaceful, pleasant view. I could sit in the window seat and read and watch undergraduates coming and going. The room was square and large and sparsely furnished with a bed, a table, two chairs and a bookcase, all well worn. It was roughly three, maybe four, times the size of our living room at home, and I struggled to fill it. My stuff looked not just lost in it but wrong. The cups and saucers I’d bought in Woolworths looked ridiculous in that setting – I should have had my grandmother’s Crown Derby – and even the modern kettle I’d been so pleased with looked ludicrous. I’d brought two Picasso posters, but I didn’t put either of them up. The room would’ve screamed. I could see that this room was, in fact, quite shabby, but its very shabbiness was somehow grand. I felt aware, all the time, of those who had gone before me, fitting comfortably into a place probably not dissimilar to their room at home, though there was no obvious trace of these women. The carpet, of
indeterminate colour and pattern, bore the marks of many feet, and the bedspread was frayed through use. The table had had ink spilled on the surface, and when I looked closely, I could see scratches – initials – along the rim, which I couldn’t quite make out.

  Outside my room there was a door leading from the main part of the college to the library. The slap of the door opening and shutting, and the sound of voices as people swept through it, disturbed the otherwise intense hush. I supposed I would get used to the noise outside, the ebb and flow of the human traffic, but I never quite did. It was a constant reminder that I was living in a community even if I did have, at last, a room of my own. But that was the trouble. It didn’t feel at all like my own. It felt like somebody else’s. I felt, increasingly, as though someone was watching me, breathing down my neck, asking what I thought I was doing here. How foolish, to imagine this could ever be my room.

  It didn’t take me long to discover that living in a college didn’t suit me. Somerville was an attractive college to live in, the atmosphere pretty free and easy, but I just didn’t like being surrounded by other people though many of them were now my friends. It was the sheer noise I disliked. The common room didn’t appeal either, in spite of the comfortable sofas and all the magazines and newspapers. It always seemed to be full of braying voices discussing their own opinions. I wasn’t in the least intimidated by this type of girl, but I didn’t like their company. This reaction to college life was all a shock to me. I’d always fantasised about going to boarding school, the sort of school featured in Angela Brazil stories, and I’d imagined a college to be a blissful version of this which I would immediately love. Instead, I longed to escape, so very early in that first year I started plotting to move out of college in my second year.

  I knew this would be thought odd, maybe even suspicious. I had the privilege, as a scholar, of being able to stay in college the whole three years, whereas others had to move into lodgings at the end of the first. Why did I want, voluntarily, to go into lodgings? What was the motive? Saying that college life didn’t suit me sounded vaguely insulting, and considering I had a choice room it seemed ungrateful. But I was listened to with patience and at last, with some reluctance, I was given permission to look for lodgings, though these, of course, had to be on the college’s approved list. I didn’t find them myself. One of my friends, Theodora, found the two rooms we were to rent. They had been let to undergraduates for the last decade, though only lately to women. The house in Winchester Road was a small nineteenth-century terraced cottage in a quiet area round the corner from a line of shops called North Parade. It was only a ten-minute walk from Somerville, where we would still be having our meals. We went to look at it, and to be looked at, by the landlady.

  Mrs Brown was sitting in her front room waiting to receive us. She was straight out of Jane Austen, wearing a little lace cap on her white hair and a shawl round her shoulders. She sat very upright and peered at us through her wire-rimmed spectacles. She had a slightly regal air which seemed somehow affected, yet it never slipped, and she had perfected a gracious nod of reply to anything said to her, so that it was impossible to tell if she had actually heard. Mr Brown, we assumed, must be dead. He was never mentioned, not even as ‘my late husband’ and Mrs Brown referred to ‘my’ house all the time. She had rules, which we eagerly agreed to, none of them at all troublesome. She then spent quite a lot of time boasting about the ‘young gentlemen’ who had been her lodgers in previous years, one of whom was, she told us, now famous. We had never heard of him, but pretended we had, and expressed our admiration. Then Mrs Brown dismissed us, with a slight wave of her hand, into the care of her sister Fanny, who would show us the rooms.

  Fanny was different, very different. She was small, under five feet, and plump, with wild, white hair pushed back from her face, and she smiled all the time. Whereas Mrs Brown was elegantly, if quaintly, dressed, Fanny wore a white apron over a blue dress which reached almost to her heavy, black shoes. Her accent was different too. Fanny had a broad country accent, not quite West Country but near to it, and Mrs Brown a refined accent (though she spoke so slowly that this was perhaps acquired). Fanny, who was all friendliness, chattering away and addressing us as Miss Margaret and Miss Theodora, showed us the two rooms we were to have, one at the front of the first floor of the house, one at the back. The front room was much larger than the back one. It looked out on to the little front garden where roses grew in a ragged, chaotic way round a tiny bit of grass. This room had a gas fire and a gas ring big enough to balance a pan upon it, so if we wanted we might manage to cook scrambled eggs, or at least make cocoa. This was to be Theo’s room (she, after all, had found these rooms). The back room, mine, was less than half the size and looked out on to a yard but it had a real fire which I was told I could use if the weather was exceptionally cold.

  I loved Winchester Road from the moment we moved in. It was an odd set-up, but we fitted in surprisingly quickly. Mrs Brown sat in her front room all day, with Fanny coming and going in answer to the rap of her walking stick on the floor. Fanny never sat down, so far as we could tell. She did all the work in the house, commenting loudly on whatever she was doing, often with what sounded like resentment towards her sister – ‘sweep the hall floor, she says, as if it wasn’t damned well swept already’. It was impossible to believe that Mrs Brown and Fanny really were sisters since they were so unalike in every respect, and though this is familiar enough in many families there seemed an extra strangeness about this relationship. It was no good being inquisitive – even the most harmless questions were turned aside by Fanny – but though she appeared to be fond of us, I don’t think she really was. She muttered to herself when she thought we were out of hearing, and some of these mutterings revealed the same sort of suppressed fury she harboured towards her sister – ‘won’t be long in the bathroom, they say, won’t be long, what’s nearly an hour, an hour, and all the hot water used, damned more than won’t be long . . .’. We tried very hard to keep on the right side of Fanny, aware that it was she, not Mrs Brown, who really ran the household.

  There was also a third person living there: Reg. We never knew his surname. Just as Mrs Brown was always Mrs Brown, Reg was always Reg, and his relationship to both these women went unexplained. Fanny bossed him around, treating him with what would often sound near to contempt. Reg never reacted. He was an elderly man, we reckoned about seventy but, of course, we were going on appearances and to nineteen-year-olds he looked ancient. We may have been misled by his shaggy white moustache and sparse white hair and his old-fashioned, much-worn clothes. He wore loose grey flannel trousers, much too big for him, held up by a belt with a snake fastening on it, and a brown tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows. He also wore a tie, striped red and black with something, some emblem, repeated between the stripes. It was no good trying to ask him about this tie, or anything else, because he was terrified of us. If we met him in the hall – though the passageway was hardly a hall – he’d panic at our ‘Hello, Reg!’ and flatten himself against the wall until we’d sailed past. He shuffled round the house all day, with Fanny bawling at him to ‘bring the damned coal in’, or ‘get on with them potatoes.’ Doing these jobs meant, we thought, that Reg could not be a ‘paying guest’, but if he wasn’t a lodger, what was he?

  Another of his jobs was to look after the garden. This was definitely his favourite occupation. It got him away from Fanny, and he made sure that this gardening took him a long time. He’d stand with a pair of secateurs in his hands observing the overgrown borders and then after a great deal of apparent thought he’d choose one rose and clip round it. I thought he was pruning, but it was hard to tell when the clipping seemed so random. Mowing the lawn was another task he devoted himself to. This lawn was a mere six feet by nine feet. He had one of those simple mowing machines which make such a soothing, gentle rushing noise as they go backwards and forwards, and Reg loved both the sound and the minimal effort needed. It was a job that required only five mi
nutes once a week, but Reg made it last half an hour and would have done it every dry day if Fanny hadn’t yelled at him to stop that damned mowing again.

  Reg, like Mrs Brown, never seemed to leave the house. The highlight of his week was Saturday evening when he went up to the attic where he slept and after a bit of shuffling about we’d hear a rhythmic pounding of his feet as he sang ‘Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!’ Did he have a bottle of rum? We hoped so, though if Mrs Brown had known she would have had him out of the house at once, so strong was her antipathy to alcohol – ‘strong drink is wicked and leads to evil’ she’d told us, as she’d warned us not to bring it into her house. We didn’t know if Fanny heard Reg, but it seemed unlikely when he was so far above her quarters.

  What exactly these quarters consisted of, we never knew because we were never allowed in them. There was a door, next to the door which led into Mrs Brown’s sitting room, which we used to go and knock on if we wanted to ask Fanny something. She’d come out and stand with her back to the door while she talked to us, never allowing us to glimpse the room beyond. But there must have been more than one room. I could see from my bedroom window that there was a back addition to the house, so I reckoned there was a kitchen and another room at least. Fanny must have slept in this other room, but that left Mrs Brown. Where did she sleep? With Fanny? It was hard to credit, knowing the gulf she liked to keep between herself and her sister.

  The rooms Theo and I had would obviously have been the bedrooms in the house, and I wondered if giving them up to lodgers had been a decision Mrs Brown had been forced to make for economic reasons. After all, what other reasons could there have been? Perhaps, in spite of her carefully cultivated gentility, she had no other income. It probably helped that no money actually changed hands. The college did the paying, so the pretence that we were ‘guests’ was maintained easily. Certainly none of the money was spent on the house itself. Everything was clean and neat, kept so by Fanny’s labours, but the walls and paintwork hadn’t been touched for a long time, and the stair carpet was worn. The tread of our own feet, plus that of our many friends, wore it out even more, though Fanny didn’t seem to hold this against us. She was particularly interested in what she called our ‘gentleman callers’, though they were just friends, some of whom took the time and trouble to ingratiate themselves with her. They may have thought themselves successful, and believed the chuckling Fanny loved them, but she muttered about them afterwards just as she muttered about us – ‘looking blooming, am I, and what do you want, smarming me’. She let them come and go after hours, but made it clear Mrs Brown must never find out. A lot of tiptoeing went on, and lots of winks and fingers-to-lips from an (apparently) gleeful Fanny.