My Life in Houses

by Margaret Forster

  It was perhaps a kind of contradiction, that I loved that house and my room in it. It was extremely small, and since I’d complained for years about feelings of claustrophobia at home you’d have thought I’d have felt this even more strongly here. But I didn’t. There was barely room to move, with a bed, a chest of drawers, a small table and a chair filling the space, but I thought it snug, not cramped. This, I felt, had always been a woman’s room, though I based this feeling on the evidence alone of the wallpaper, a rose pattern on a cream (or once cream) background, and the curtains, also a washed-out rose-patterned cotton. I asked Fanny once if it had ever been her bedroom. She didn’t reply, just ignored the question, but her expression suggested she was quite shocked at the idea, though I couldn’t think why.

  She often put her head round the door when I was in my room, ostensibly to tell me something there was no need to tell because she’d told me already, and I knew she was checking that I hadn’t taken down the net curtain shrouding the lower part of the window. This was not allowed. It was there ‘for decency’, and if Mrs Brown discovered it had been removed she, Fanny, would be ‘for it’. It was no good arguing that there wasn’t any need to worry about this ‘decency’ because no one could see in anyway, so I just pulled the net to one side, to let in more light, and Fanny let this pass.

  Inside the cupboard, where I hung my clothes, there were some coat hangers covered in pretty material and with a little lavender bag attached. The scent of lavender had long since faded but if the cupboard was closed all day and then opened there was a faint trace of it, just the merest whiff, and then it was gone. I imagined the dresses which had once hung there, the sprigged cottons, the fine muslins . . . but more likely the drab grey and brown of servants’ dresses. I imagined more than the dresses. It was the sort of room that nurtured and encouraged the imagination, especially with the fire lit, flickering away and creating those shadows which could be turned so easily into people. Lying in bed on a winter’s night with just the bedside lamp on – it had a pale pink silk shade which, just like the net curtain, could not be changed – that room wrapped itself round me as securely as the old-fashioned eiderdown. The atmosphere was always, on these nights, gentle and soothing, but as the fire burnt itself out it became more mysterious, not so innocent. If I’d believed in ghosts, that is when I could have convinced myself the room was suddenly crowded with them, all women or girls, sighing their way to my bed, their long hair unbraided, their white nightdresses catching the dying light of the fire’s embers . . . I’d grow dangerously sentimental before I fell asleep.

  I never knew how much the house in Winchester Road was worth, but made the mistake of thinking that as it was small, and not in good condition, it might, one day, be within what I hoped would be my means to buy it. I thought I could definitely live there (with Mrs Brown, Fanny and Reg ejected, of course, in another of my merciless fantasies). I didn’t long for the Edwardian villas of Carlisle’s Norfolk Road any more – too big, too lacking in the charm of Winchester Road, which I now recognised. I fancied myself by then a good reader of the character of houses, though if asked I doubt if I could have defined what I meant in this instance by ‘character’. I’d been in a good few houses during my three years at Oxford, including some in London, where friends lived. Size, I’d learned, was not everything. You could get lost in some of these houses, and they could be exhausting, with so many stairs and so many hidden rooms at the end of corridors which made no immediate sense. I certainly didn’t yearn for a ‘cosy’ house, in spite of my love of Winchester Road, but I saw the drawbacks of ‘rambling’ too. I sometimes could hardly grasp that one family could inhabit the five floors of a Notting Hill mansion and apparently hardly notice. There were rooms, more than one, which were libraries, shelves and shelves of books with more piled on tables and the floor, and others that appeared to be solely for music, with a piano in the centre and a cello in the corner. I didn’t know how, whatever life I was going to lead, I could ever cope with the opportunities of such a house.

  There was another house I was invited to, in the Cotswolds, which was a shock in another way. I’d been told it was a cottage, so I imagined it would be like Winchester Road, but with a good garden and standing on its own, not in a terrace, and maybe (I did hope so) with a thatched roof. It did have a thatched roof but there the resemblance to any cottage I’d ever seen ended. It was such a beautiful house, only one storey, but with eight rooms stretching over a large area and surrounded by a huge garden which had a pond full of water lilies and a gazebo and stone steps leading down to a tennis court. I fell silent. It was too much to absorb this ‘cottage’. All the way back to Winchester Road I was wondering if I could ever live in such a perfect house and surprising myself by deciding no, I didn’t think I could. It was too much, I wouldn’t be up to owning such an impressive house. Clearly, choosing a house, when the time came, was going to be much more complicated than I’d ever expected. There were so many aspects to take into consideration. How a house felt was as important as how it looked.

  But buying a house wasn’t a privilege I was going to have for many more years. There were other more important things to think about as we approached finals, such as careers. What was so urgent about having a house? It was materialistic, worthless as an ambition. Houses were places of shelter, that was all, and had no significance in themselves, surely. A roof, four walls, bricks and mortar – nothing to get excited about. Being free of property was preferable. But not to me. I worried more about where I was going to live than what job I was going to have, though at least I could see these two things were closely related and interdependent. Surroundings had always mattered to me. Whatever work I was going to do, coming home to somewhere I hated would result in my working less well – a high-and-mighty deduction which didn’t bear examination, it was so silly.

  I was married from Winchester Road on 11th June 1960, disappointing Fanny by not looking as a bride should. No long, white dress and veil, no bouquet, no grand car, with white ribbons streaming from it to carry me to the church. No church either. We were married at the register office in St Giles with Theo and Mike, an old friend from Carlisle, as witnesses. My belongings had already been packed and despatched, for the moment, back to Carlisle, and I’d said goodbye to Mrs Brown, Fanny and Reg. Fanny even managed a few tears, though what exactly provoked them I’m not sure (maybe disappointment that I wasn’t having a ‘real’ wedding rather than because she was sad to see me leave).

  Already, that day in June 1960, when I left Winchester Road, that house had started to become a memory, its influence upon me not at all easy to decide. Quite quickly, its hold on me started to lose its power, so much so that I became unsure why I’d loved it in the way I had. I tried to cling on to the feelings my little room had given rise to, the sense of security and calm it seemed filled with. And then, of course, there had been many happy hours there, sneaking Hunter in (Theo sneaked her man in too) while Fanny pretended not to be aware of what was going on. That room was the first place we had any privacy (Somerville was never guaranteed private, though women managed, and men had to be out by 7.30 p.m.). Previous to that, in Carlisle, we had never had a room. Hunter, when at home during the university vacations, lived on a council estate, St Anns Hill. His house was much more crowded than ours. His father, who had MS, was, by the time I came on the scene, mostly confined to bed in their equivalent of our parlour. His twin sisters had one of the bedrooms, his mother another, and he shared the other with his younger brother. When he was at Durham, a lodger took his place, and was often still there in vacations. So, no privacy there, and none of the sort we wanted at my house. On wet, cold evenings, we took long bus rides on the top deck, which was often empty before it reached the terminus. Winchester Road had given us a whole, warm room to ourselves, with no danger of parents or siblings bursting in.

  But I knew I’d just been an interloper in the house’s history (which I didn’t even know). Theo and I passed through it, gone in a flash,
like so many other undergraduates. Probably in a couple of years Fanny would have difficulty remembering our names when she had a whole sequence of names to recall. I never went back, but then I didn’t go back to Oxford until twenty-eight years later, and then only for the day.

  We were going to live in London, but, thank God, not in the flat my husband had been living in and which I’d thought might be my unwelcome fate. That flat was in Kingscroft Road, Kilburn, and I’d spent a long vacation there and hated it, swearing melodramatically that it would make me ill to have to live there when we were married. The flat was on the top floor of an ugly semi-detached house in a dreary road off Kilburn High Road. It consisted of two rooms – plus tiny kitchenette and bathroom – squashed under the roof. That’s how it felt to me, squashed, compressed, barely able to breathe, the insubstantial walls squealing with the effort of staying upright. It was let as a furnished flat and this furniture was hideous, as was the decor, all large patterns and garish colours. The windows were tiny and impossible to open more than an inch, and there was a smell about the house the moment the front door, shared with the other occupants, was opened. It wasn’t a bad smell, just a fusty one, as though the house belonged to an elderly aunt who had recently died and nobody had yet cleared her stuff out. But if I detested this perfectly adequate flat so much, it was up to me to find an alternative before our wedding day.

  So I did, through friends of Theo’s. The day we were married, we went not to Kingscroft Road but to Heath Villas, Hampstead.

  LONDON, EVERYONE KNEW, was a huge city, crowded with buildings and endless streets so that the idea there might exist a ‘heath’ within its outer boundaries was, I thought, a nonsense. ‘Heath’ meant a wild space, a mixture of rough ground and trees and bushes. This ‘Hampstead Heath’ must just be some sort of park, and the ‘Vale of Health’ not a ‘vale’ at all but a romantic misnomer for what was probably a miserable little square of grass. The reality amazed me. Coming from Spaniards Road down a narrow path the Heath turned out to be indisputably a heath, stretching as far as the eye could see over the thickets of bushes and trees, and there at the foot of this path, was what could genuinely be described as a vale, a dip surrounded by greenery. I’d never imagined anything like it could exist so close to the centre of a capital city.

  Heath Villas was not as old as other houses in the vale. Numbers 1–6 were built in 1862; 7–12, round the corner, were built in 1868. They were all Victorian terraced houses, with a basement and then three floors above, and numbers 7–12 backed on to a pond. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were fifty-three houses in this vale, and what was once an area of bog had become a most desirable address. There was only one road leading into it, and one short road leading off that in turn, but there were little paths, cuts, connecting the various cottages. Opposite the house in which we hoped to rent a flat, there was a triangular patch of ground surrounded by railings, which appeared to protect nothing more precious than a couple of spindly trees and some bushes. This was the centre of the vale, if it could be said to have a centre at all.

  What it had in abundance was an association with lots of famous names. The blue plaques were everywhere. That first time we went there, it was D.H. Lawrence’s name that sprang out from all the others. He’d lived, though not for long, at 1 Byron Villas, on the short stretch of road leading to the fairground and the pub. It seemed so odd that there was still this area, on the edge of the vale, devoted to an annual fair, and here a few caravans stood all the year round. The huge Victorian pub was another surprise – why such a pub for so few houses? The more we traced the outline of the vale, the odder and more mixed-up it seemed. It wasn’t like any place I’d ever imagined living in.

  But we weren’t living there yet. The couple who were, friends-of-friends of Theo’s, explained that we would have to be vetted by the landlord, a Mr Elton. He was, they said, very nice but a little eccentric, with a phobia about noise. He lived at Heath Villas, on the top floor, and the basement and half of the ground floor were let to an elderly woman. The couple emphasised how inconveniently arranged their flat was, with the bedroom on the ground floor, next to the elderly lady’s sitting room, and the kitchen and living room on the next floor with the shared bathroom up again from that, on the half landing. Also, the flat was unfurnished, so we would have to bring our own furniture. I don’t think I was listening properly to any of this because I’d already decided I loved the flat and the vale and was determined to live there.

  The living room was a particularly attractive room, with two large sash windows looking out into the centre of the vale. The kitchen, opening off it, overlooked the pond and beyond the pond there was what seemed a never-ending vista of trees, not a man-made thing in sight. The bedroom, it was true, was awkwardly placed and small, with barely space for a double bed and a chest of drawers, and the view here was of a yard, rather like Winchester Road. But that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, except to secure this flat. A meeting was arranged with Mr Elton. I’d already imagined him as a kind of Reg figure, though tidier and better educated. He was a civil servant, and turned out to look how I’d thought a civil servant would look (never having met one in my life), which is to say neatly dressed, in a dark suit, bald, bespectacled and slight in build. He seemed nervous and hesitant, which was unexpected, considering he had all the power. As he asked us questions, he rubbed his hands together a lot, and blinked rapidly, never looking straight at either of us.

  It emerged, eventually, that there were three things about us which concerned him. One, our youth: we were twenty-two and twenty-four, and he felt that no couple in their twenties could possibly be as quiet as he wanted his tenants to be. Without openly criticising them, he implied that the current tenants (the friends-of-friends of Theo, who were in their early thirties) had most certainly not been quiet enough, though the examples he mentioned – including the banging of doors – didn’t seem too heinous. He made it clear that he would not tolerate any noise after ten o’clock at night, not even the noise of a lavatory being flushed (if used after ten, the lid should be put down and the first person using it in the morning would know to flush it). His second worry was what kind of financial backing we had. This was tricky. Of course, we had none. The delicate enquiries about our fathers’ employment soon revealed this, and it was only Hunter’s job as a journalist which went some way to reassuring him. I said I intended to get a job as soon as I graduated, so we would have two incomes and would be able to afford the six guineas a week comfortably. This brought him to his third concern, though he was such a shy, easily embarrassed man that he struggled to express it: children. He would not allow children because of the unavoidable noise. Once we’d sensed what he was hinting at, we said we didn’t want children yet either, not for years, though we didn’t point out that we’d successfully avoided having any for quite a long time already, feeling this would be a bit too much information for him. Finally, he said he’d think about it, and let us know. I went back to Oxford and wrote to him, thanking him for the meeting, and enthusing about his house, ending by saying that even if he decided we were not suitable tenants I would never forget his house and how much I loved it. A bit gushing, but I meant it.

  Mr Elton said yes, we could rent his flat, with a trial period of three months and, if satisfactory, a lease afterwards of three years. Hunter moved in on 1st June, and we arrived there as a married couple soon afterwards.

  Our flat, when we moved in, seemed even lovelier, now that it was empty of furniture, especially the main room. The fitted carpet there was a pale green, the walls white, and the large windows let in the sun through a latticework of leaves. It felt so airy, so spacious, the spirits lifted just to walk into it. The kitchen was equally cheering, the view of the pond dominating the whole room. The previous tenants had left an old deal table here, for which we were grateful, and two stools, and we had bought their cooker from them, quite enough to start us off. It would have been nice to have a fridge, but we needed a bed more, our fi
rst purchase.

  So that was it. By the end of June 1960, we were settled in our first home, except it didn’t yet feel like ‘home’. On the contrary, it felt strange, if delightfully so. We didn’t know the house itself, or our section of it. Coming back to it each day was a shock for many weeks. Walking down the winding road that led from East Heath Road into the Vale felt as mysterious as it had when we discovered it. It was like entering a secret hideout for which we might need a password (and cynics might say that password was ‘money’ – the houses were all expensive either to buy or rent). I felt ridiculously pleased to be able to walk up the steps to the yellow door of our house in Heath Villas and to own a key which opened it. It was so peaceful once inside the house that the merest creak going up the stairs sounded explosive and I soon learned to avoid the sixth stair, the one which had a loose board under the carpet.