My Life in Houses

by Margaret Forster

  There were quite a lot of British expats living on Gozo, and it was through one of them that we heard about a house to rent in the Algarve, Portugal. This person had been there, and raved about this tiny fishing village, Praia da Luz, where this house was situated, right on the beach itself. We’d never thought of going to Portugal – didn’t speak the language, for a start – and we knew very little about the Algarve, but as the heat increased during July, and being so far from the sea grew more and more irritating, we began to think about moving. We had eight months still remaining of the fourteen we had planned to be abroad and it seemed stupid to go on staying in a house we were not happy in.

  So we went to Portugal, which proved as big a success as Gozo had been a mistake. Even the drive from Faro airport along the coast road showed a more appealing landscape. Here, the countryside we passed through seemed almost empty of buildings, whereas in Gozo the land was crowded, and huge churches dominated the views. The Algarve was green, with mountains in the distance, and all the settlements along the way were of small, low stone houses with red-tiled roofs. There were few cars on the winding road but lots of horse-drawn carts, the occasional donkey being ridden by boys who waved at us. It took ages to reach Lagos, the town nearest to Praia da Luz, but long before we got there we were already sure we’d made the right decision. By the time we arrived at the village, and turned down the rough cobbled little road to the Quinta das Redes we were thinking that whatever this house turned out to be like at least its position was perfect.

  We stopped outside a high wall with a green wooden door in the middle. Stepping through it was such a surprise – we had never expected the enormous garden, half of it given over to what looked like a market garden, rows and rows of cultivated vegetables, and then round the perimeter small trees that turned out to be almond and lemon. There were stone paths dividing the garden up, and a long veranda running down one side of the house which was covered in bougainvillea and vines. The house had once been a sardine factory so was in itself no architectural gem, just a one-storey stone building covering a large square area. Inside, there was one huge sitting room, a small kitchen, a bathroom and four bedrooms. It was cool and quite dark inside, though there were windows in each room, but unlike the Gozo house this was a house which had been furnished in the local style, which is to say full of Portuguese rustic pieces and fabrics. Nothing looked new. Everything was ever so slightly shabby but in an appealing way, colourful and relaxed. There were paintings on the walls, mainly of fishing boats, and a bookcase with a hundred or so books in it, all well thumbed, and a lot of them guidebooks to Portugal. On the old, scarred, wooden table there were brown glazed Portuguese plates and bowls, and the bathroom was tiled in the blue-and-white Alentejo tiles. Straw mats were laid out on the floor in the bedrooms and on the beds were the cream-coloured linen counterpanes produced locally. We could hardly believe our luck.

  Settling in was easy and the writing, for both of us, picked up fast. The garden, enclosed as it was by the high wall, was perfect for four-year-old Caitlin and two-year-old Jake to be let loose in without any worries. There was actually a gardener, employed all the year round by the owners of the house, and he and the boy who worked with him didn’t seem to mind the children (or if they did, they never complained). There was also a housekeeper, Fernanda. We had no choice about having her, but unlike Josephine and Lily, she was a huge asset: she cooked sometimes and she babysat occasionally in the evening when we went to see the friends we soon made. It turned out that she had been taught to cook by a man who’d rented the house for a long time, and so her repertoire was not just Portuguese dishes, none of them particularly thrilling, but French Provençale.

  We had a room each to write in, another luxury. We took it in turn to have two hours with the children on the beach and two hours writing, and then in the afternoons we’d go exploring further afield. Later on, when it was not so hot, we went on expeditions up to Monchique, in the mountains, and along the coast to Sagres, the most westerly point of the Algarve. Always it was a pleasure to come home to a house which truly felt a home in spite of it being regularly rented. It was the house as much as the Algarve which we loved. We fitted in, effortlessly. There was nothing beautiful about the old building but it was solid and spacious – though, in fact, its solidity was severely tested one November night. We woke up in the early hours to hear what we thought was a lorry thundering down the track. It’s going to crash, I thought, and waited for the bang as it hit the beach, but no, the thundering grew louder and nearer, and then the walls of the bedroom began to shake. We had no idea this was an earthquake until we staggered up and saw cracks appearing in the ceiling and heard glass shattering somewhere in the garden. We had no idea, either, what to do: was it better to stay inside, or rush outside? Where was most safe in an earthquake? No sooner had we realised what was happening than it was over, the only evidence that it had happened were the bits of plaster that had come down from the ceiling and the broken glass covering some plants in the garden. We were told later that the thing to do was to stand under an arch, and if the earthquake was a big one (how would we know?) then get away from the sea as quickly as possible. The Quinta was a pretty safe house to be in, though, unlike some of the newer houses going up in Praia da Luz which didn’t have the right kind of foundations and collapsed.

  There was no such risk of collapse about some houses being built, at Porto de Mos, a few miles further down the coast. These were like little Lego houses, four of them, built as a block into the hillside above the beach there, and designed by a Portuguese architect. We were taken to see them by a friend of his, who’d also become our friend, with a view to possibly buying one. If we loved the Algarve, as we’d grown to, and would definitely want to come back again and again, why not buy one of these houses instead of always renting? They were nothing like the Quinta, obviously, no rustic charm here. They were unfinished when we saw them, raw and very, very modern. But their situation was, if anything, better than the Quinta’s, they had magnificent views. The Quinta had no views, enclosed as it was by the high wall. The Porto de Mos new houses were perched high on the cliff top, set slightly inland, and the view of the sea and the cliffs stretched all the way to Sagres. Then there was the beach. Whereas at Praia da Luz the beach, though pretty, was small, here the beach was enormous. It was reached from the houses by a narrow path snaking through fig trees and vines which in turn met the top of the cliff path which wound its way to the far end of the beach. There was nothing there except for a beach cafe, a wooden shack on stilts. It was all so beautiful, the wide empty beach, the lack of any buildings, the wild feeling to the whole area.

  Since the houses were built into the slope of the ground, the ‘front’ door led into the first bedroom, which had a bathroom next to it, and then there were wooden stairs going down to the living room/kitchen, with another bedroom halfway down. This main room had sliding glass doors opening onto a broad patio with nothing in front but the path to the cliff top. Already it was easy to envisage what they would look like when completed: simple, neat – the perfect holiday house. We chose the end one in the block. Buying it was complicated (this was 1968, pre- the revolution that deposed Salazar) but it was completed two weeks before we were due to leave, though there was no time to move in. We did, though, have the chance to choose the tiles for the bathroom, and the colour of the paint, and things like that. We arranged for a bed to be made by a local carpenter, knowing how small Portuguese beds were. Given the measurements, 6 feet by 5 feet six inches, the carpenter said what did we want, a bed or a playground? He also agreed to make wooden seating we could put cushions on, and chairs for the patio. The friend who’d taken us to see the houses agreed to supervise all this work, which, of course, we wouldn’t see for many months.

  On our last visit to Porto de Mos, a woman came out of the little stone house adjacent to the new houses. With her were four children, three boys and a girl, all of them staring at us eagerly. We had just enough Portuguese to u
nderstand that the woman was asking if she could be our criada, our maid. She was willing to do anything, to scrub – mimed vigorously – and wash clothes, anything. Her name was Emilia. She was only thirty, my age, but half her teeth were missing and she was desperately thin and worn-looking, though she smiled all the time. We said we didn’t need a criada now, but that maybe in the future we might take her up on her offer. She smiled even more, and invited us to her house. We went over to it, and sat on a bench with the four children lined up, standing staring at us, while their mother rushed into the house to get cups of water. The cups were plastic but the water came out of a big carafou. We never saw the inside of the house but it was impossible not to notice the hole in the roof and the broken window and the door hanging on one hinge. Everything spoke of a hard life, but Emilia was excessively cheerful, and thrilled at the prospect of what the new houses might mean to her, and to her husband: work, money. He, she said, was useless, a drunkard, but he was strong and if we wanted a garden made he could do it. Water drunk, and our Portuguese tested to the limit, we said goodbye. Emilia and the children beamed and waved goodbye over and over. What she was really thinking, and whether the smiles vanished, the moment we were out of sight, to be replaced by an expression of resentment, we couldn’t know. There was something not right about the situation, however happy Emilia had appeared to be.

  But buying the Porto de Mos house made leaving to go back to London not as much of a break as it would otherwise have been. We were leaving only to come back, and we were not, in any case, as reluctant to leave as we’d thought we might be. We’d been living a false sort of existence for fourteen months, spending hours every day swimming and playing on the beach. There was no stress of the London kind, no noise or bustle, no traffic, but it was a lotus-eater kind of life. We’d got to the shocking state of thinking, as we looked at the bland blue sky, not another perfect day, half longing for the excitement of a storm and a wild wind to whip up the waves. It was humiliating to have to admit it, but this kind of life, soothing though it was, was not stimulating. For us, it lacked something. It was pleasurable, but it lacked bite – the days were simply rolling over us, hypnotic in their lack of variety. But a lesson had been learned: a way of living, many people’s ideal, something to be striven for, had been proved to be not, after all, what we wanted for more than the fourteen months we’d had.

  Even leaving the Quinta, a house we loved, was not too sad. It was odd that, though so content living in the Quinta, I’d regularly find myself, if I was awake in the night, imagining I was back in Boscastle Road walking up and down the stairs, counting them, and becoming puzzled when I couldn’t remember if there were thirty-six or thirty-eight. And what exactly was the pattern on the hall wallpaper? Birds of some sort, but what sort, and how designed? A neighbour wrote and said how she missed our window boxes full of geraniums, which immediately made me wonder about the state of the garden. Was the grass being cut, the flowers watered? How was our house surviving?

  It was time to get back to where we belonged. Living in other people’s houses would not do.

  Caitlin, by now five, and Jake, nearly three, had no real idea of what home was. Their memories of Boscastle Road were vague, and the house itself meant nothing to them.

  But, curiously enough, once back in London, it was surprising how sharp memories of Portugal remained. In the years that followed they became devoted to the little house we’d bought, all their ‘real’ childhood memories seemed to be associated with it. We mostly went for a month in the summer holidays, and sometimes for a week at Easter, but once we went for Christmas too. Emilia looked after the house when we weren’t there, the money she earned badly needed, and she was always eager to be helpful. That Christmas, she was adamant that she would provide a turkey. This was far too generous, but she insisted. What we hadn’t realised was that the turkey would be her own, still happily running round her garden. We were invited over and she sat us in a row before emerging from her house with a cleaver. Her children chased the turkey into a corner and she butchered it there and then, the screaming awful until it was done. She then plucked it, and handed it to us, the severed neck still bloody. It was certainly organic, but it was duly eaten without enthusiasm (and there was very little meat on the bird).

  WE HADN’T BEEN away from London for long enough to find it a shock landing at Heathrow Airport, with all its numbing activity, but the route to Boscastle Road was more depressing than we had remembered. No carts jogging along here, but instead a motorway clogged with heavy traffic, with drivers competing with each other as though on a race track. Row after row of tightly packed houses interspersed with factories, and enormous shopping centres, and everywhere bold and garish signs proclaiming the names of brands of goods. Hardly any greenery for the majority of the way, and the sense, all the time, of a tight compression, of there not being a single metre of spare space.

  At least when we got to the top of Highgate Hill there was some relief, with trees visible over the rooftops, and when at last we turned into our road it was as quiet as it had always been. I was nervous entering our house, prepared to find nothing looked right, and that I would feel a stranger, and maybe that I might even not like the house any more after the splendour of the Quinta, and what would I do then? And it did feel strange, nothing in its place, though everything was clean and tidy. But this strangeness was not so much to do with how the furniture was arranged as with the size of the rooms. I’d thought them spacious, but after the Quinta they seemed cramped. I moved restlessly about, literally repossessing my territory, not at all sure that I was as intimately acquainted with this house as I’d thought I was.

  Then Mrs Hall appeared, newly returned from another visit to her daughter in America and so sure that it would be her last that she was just going to stay at home from now on. We took the news badly. Never mind the sudden apparent smallness of the rooms – much worse was this reminder that we were back to sharing our house. The time had surely come: either Mrs Hall had to go, or we did. Maybe now we could persuade her to move out.

  The plan was to buy a flat for her to rent from us at the same rate as she was already paying, and which would be hers to rent for the rest of her life. Rather nervously, not at all sure what her response would be, we put this to her. Her first reaction was that we might be cheating her. How could she be sure she would be as protected in another flat as she was in our house, because of being a sitting tenant, and having the law on her side? She said she’d have to go down to the Citizens Advice Bureau and have any agreement checked legally. Fine by us. Then came the conditions: this flat must be within certain boundaries strictly drawn up by her. Kentish Town as far as the polytechnic would be acceptable, but not Tufnell Park. The boundary there was Dartmouth Park Hill, and on the other side, Highgate Road. She would also have to consult her daughters and she warned us that one of them had ‘worked for Churchill’ and knew ‘what was what’.

  But we could tell that she was keen on the idea, realising perfectly well that the thirty-eight stairs up to her flat in our house were soon going to be too much for her and she’d have to move anyway. So the hunt was on. It was by then 1969 and our area, in a mere six years, had become more desirable. There were fewer flats available as houses were being bought and converted by families, and those that still existed were often at the top of the house, just like Mrs Hall’s existing flat, and therefore had to be ruled out because of the stairs. But we saw that a new block was being built in Swains Lane, the northern boundary of Mrs Hall’s permitted streets. This block of eight flats was near a bus terminus, opposite shops, and across the road from the Heath. She was not as enthusiastic as we’d thought she would be, but said she’d look at a flat there when it was finished and consider it. But she didn’t want a ground floor flat, in spite of the condition of her legs. It must be on the first floor, so that nosy parkers couldn’t look in or burglars gain easy entry. Negotiations began, of various sorts, and eventually the deal was done. The flat cost more than our
house had done but turned out to be a good investment.

  It was an attractive flat, everything in it new and sparkling. Mrs Hall had the grace to be delighted with it, especially since she now had her own ultra-modern bathroom (alas, the blue rubber bath stickers never got transferred) and a proper kitchen. She had a bedroom and a sitting room, with a little balcony where she could have plant pots, and it was all on one floor. The stairs up to it were few in number and shallow, so she would be able to manage them for a long time (as she did, for twelve years). Best of all was an intercom system, so she could check who was ringing her bell without having actually to go to the door. The daughter who lived in England came to help her move and was fulsome with her praise, telling her mother how lucky she’d been. Mrs Hall was not prepared to go quite that far. ‘Boscastle Road was my home,’ she said, piously, ‘this will never be home in the same way.’ Considering she’d only lived in it for thirteen of her seventy-two years, this sentiment seemed not a little extravagant. She left our house in dramatic fashion, wiping the tears away and waving her hand, as though to a person.