So, our house was not invulnerable. We’d learned the obvious truth that a semi-detached house, of whatever age, and however stoutly built, is always at the mercy of those in the house attached to it. If it had not been for our regular escape during all the school holidays, to our Caldbeck bolt-hole, and our Algarve summer house, I don’t know how we would have survived all this noise. It was bliss to get to Caldbeck where the only sound in the night was the sheep coughing or the wind in the trees. Our only neighbour was a woman who lived a hundred yards away in another cottage from which no sound ever came. She lived an entirely secluded life, wanting nothing to do with us, but seeming to enjoy watching our children play. She’d look out of her window and smile and wave at them: the perfect neighbour. We wished we could transport her to Boscastle Road and have her there too, living next door.
Then one day, without any estate agent’s board going up, we heard a rumour that next door had been sold. The house market had taken another leap upwards and the owner had grabbed his chance. People were still coming and going, the noise was still the same, so we couldn’t believe anything was going to change. But it was. A great silence descended. Silence all day silence all night, no movement anywhere. There were several weeks when nothing seemed to be happening, and we waited anxiously to find out what our fate would be. Another property speculator? More than likely. The relief when a family with three children moved in made us light-headed. All our neighbour troubles faded away. From then on, the next door house changed occupants several times, but no one ever again ruined the peace and quiet of our house.
Other things did, though. Houses, of course, deteriorate just like bodies in old age. In spite of all the maintenance work that had been done on it, ours started to show signs of collapse. Cracks began appearing in the wall between the large ground floor room and the newly extended kitchen come living room. Each month they got wider until it was possible to stick a finger into the main crack which snaked right across the wall from top to bottom. The builder was called in. We hoped he’d dismiss the cracks as just plaster settling down, but he didn’t. He called in someone else, who also looked grave, and called in a third person to give their opinion. Even though the comparison was outrageously inappropriate, there were faint echoes of waiting for certain medical news . . . it would be bad. It was. The trouble, we were told, was subsidence. Subsidence? Apparently, this meant that our house was sinking at the back. If something were not done, the back wall would collapse. When? How long would it take? Hard to say, but if we were hoping that the answer might be . . . oh, maybe in another 50 years and we might outlive this event, and so need do nothing, we were mistaken. Something had to be done, something drastic, and at once.
‘Something drastic’ meant having a pit dug across the width of the back room and then having it filled with concrete. Nothing else would do. So the pristine new wooden floor was levered up in great chunks and the drills put to work. It was horrible to watch and the mess appalling. We had the area barricaded off, and a temporary kitchen made, but the thunderous roar of the drills could not be shut out. The whole house shuddered and tensed itself, and more and more images of it being a gravely sick body sprang to my mind. Many people move out of their houses when subsidence work is going on, but we didn’t want to leave ours even though it meant enduring the noise and dirt. I thought of films I’d seen of houses in the Blitz, and told myself this was not nearly so bad, only part of the house was being damaged and soon it would be made good. Only it wasn’t ‘soon’. It took a long time before the required depth was reached and the builder was ready to pour in the concrete.
We couldn’t resist doing the Blue Peter thing: burying a time capsule underneath the concrete. We got a biscuit box and filled it with information about who was living in the house, and what was going on in London and the world. Good fun. A newspaper was the obvious first thing to put in, and then photographs of us all, together with a detailed plan of the interior of the house and how each room was used. We added a tape of currently popular music and a signed photograph of the Tottenham Hotspur team together with a programme for the match played the previous Saturday. We each added one small item of significance to us but nobody else, to intrigue and puzzle rather than inform. I put in a fountain pen I’d just had to give up using after twenty years because the nib had sprung. That should baffle them – in a hundred years nobody might still be using an ink pen. We liked imagining what anyone finding this box in the distant future would think (but had a dreadful fear that the subsidence work would have failed and we’d find the box ourselves, all too soon, when the whole thing had to be done again).
Everything was eventually put back as it had been, but we were nervous for a long time. It had been a reminder that bricks and mortar are not as solid as they look. Nothing about a house remains solid. We were only just beginning to learn that maintenance work never stops, something that may be obvious but it hadn’t been to us. And it needs a certain attitude of mind to cope with the loads of things to do with looking after a house which need attention, the bodily equivalent of regular hair-cutting, teeth-filling and so on. We didn’t have the right attitude. We moaned and groaned every time there was a leaking pipe, or a faulty electrical connection or a tile came off the roof. A house, our beloved house, was then in danger of becoming a nuisance, something we were close to resenting because it took up too much time to look after. We had to remind ourselves that we were very, very grateful to have a house at all.
There are, of course, and always have been, people who are protected from all the bother the maintaining of a house involves: those who have staff to do it for them. I only appreciated what a difference this could make when I started researching a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who never in her life had to interrupt her writing to deal with plumbers, electricians and builders. Other upheavals in the houses she lived in certainly affected her work but not the dreary detail. Yet the state of these houses, what was being done to them even if this didn’t involve her, influenced the progress of her work. Her various houses each had their own atmosphere and this atmosphere in turn affected her mood and her poetry. I’d always thought it a bit of nonsense for biographers to argue that visiting the houses their subjects had lived in was essential to understanding them but I gradually changed my mind. There is, after all, often something a house can tell you that hadn’t been obvious, or hadn’t been sufficiently stressed before.
That, at any rate, was my justification for going to visit every house Elizabeth Barrett Browning lived in. I knew before I went there that Coxhoe Hall, six miles south of Durham, where she was born, was a ruin, and I knew, too, that since she left it when she was a mere three years old it was of little significance. But I still wanted to see what there was to see, to begin the story of her life where it had, in fact, begun. I think maybe I’d had a vague notion that Coxhoe Hall might have been in, or near, a mining area, but it could not have been more rural. It wasn’t set among blackened pits, or among bleak northern moors. It once stood on a slight rise, not far from a village, off a turning after the crossroads. The remains of the original gates were there, and the back wall of the old house, but otherwise the site was cleared. There was a good view over fields to hills beyond, with everything looking green and pleasant. The old walled garden, in which Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s mother had walked when pregnant with her, was densely overgrown. Huge beech trees behind where the house had been made the place secluded, which Elizabeth’s father, in particular, had liked.
So, a beginning, but not much to be gleaned there, though I was still glad I’d gone, if just because it made me feel closer to Mary, Elizabeth’s mother. She never wanted to be moved from her family home in the north-east (which her husband came to share with her, when he married her, his own family home long since left in Jamaica). But she had no choice about leaving to go to Herefordshire where Edward Moulton Barrett had bought an estate of 475 acres which included farmland, woodland and parkland. Hope End was a seventeenth-century mansio
n, lying in a hollow, circled by low hills. Edward immediately had the Queen Anne house knocked down and an oriental-style house built, with neo-Turkish minarets, cast-iron domelets and a massive glass dome. Inside, this utterly out-of-keeping flamboyance continued, with a vast circular drawing room, decorated Italian style, mahogany doors inlaid with mother-of-pearl, crimson flock wallpaper in the dining room and brass balustrades which, Mary wrote to her mother, reminded her of the Arabian Nights.
But it was all demolished in 1873, so once more I couldn’t enter a house where Elizabeth lived, and this time the house had been incredibly important to her development and much loved by her. She spent twenty-five years there and when the time came could hardly bear to leave it. But all was not lost, because it was the situation of Hope End that was most important to her, and that has hardly changed.
‘Hope End’ means ‘closed valley’, and that is precisely what it feels like. The house that stands there now, near to where the Barrett house stood, is hidden until the last moment, whichever direction it is approached from. There is total quiet, only the birds making any sound, all the way along from what was once the south gate of the estate. Trees of many varieties, including lots of firs, shelter the grassy paths where, in spring, the aconites Elizabeth loved still bloom. It would never have been possible, in the house, to know anyone was coming until they arrived, visitors from an outside world which barely seemed to exist. It is all quite eerie. ‘I love every stone and blade of grass,’ wrote the young Elizabeth, and the location of the house she spent her childhood and youth living in, still evokes the atmosphere which wrapped itself round her.
A visit, then, that helped understand her, but I still hadn’t actually been inside any of the houses which influenced her. Until Wimpole Street. The very address, thanks to the play and film The Barretts of Wimpole Street, conjures up immediately a forbidding image. Number 50, where the family came to live after a brief and disastrous spell in Sidmouth and a short stay in Gloucester Place, was destroyed by a bomb in the Second World War. But the other houses in that long street are intact, so it was possible to go into one of them and see a room (now an office) which corresponded to Elizabeth’s third-floor room at the back of the house, and look out, as she did, on the ‘high star-raking chimneys’. It faced south-west, so it got the late afternoon and early evening sun, which suited her daily routine. Her room, crowded with furniture and books and busts of poets and philosophers, was very different from the almost bare office I stood in, but the same stillness she described was there. Even in twentieth-century London, where continuous traffic thunders past, it couldn’t be heard. In Hope End, the entire house had been cut off, sealed from the world; in Wimpole Street, Elizabeth’s room was equally protected. The only great difference was the view.
50 Wimpole Street is often referred to as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘prison’ from which she struggled to escape, hating the house, but it was only towards the end of her time there that she wanted to leave it. Most of the years she spent within that house, she appreciated being at the heart of London. It excited her, when the family moved there, to think of living in a house so near to famous places she’d read about, and which gave access to so many literary luminaries who would never have come anywhere near Hope End. She would never have had the chance there, of meeting them, as, in some cases, she eventually did. Wimpole Street may be a rather daunting, austere street, with its tall, terraced houses, all so grey and colourless with no greenery in sight, but it was a good address to have. It was near enough also to Regent’s Park, where Elizabeth became strong enough to walk, and only a short carriage ride from Hampstead Heath, with its illusion of countryside.
But it is the next house which best emphasises the importance to Elizabeth Barrett Browning of the building she lived in, and it was not a whole house at all. Her love for it was passionate. Robert Browning took a year’s lease on six unfurnished rooms in the Casa Guidi in Florence. The building they were in had once been a palace, and was opposite the side of the San Felice church which meant the windows looked out on a stone wall. There was a terrace outside the drawing room and dining room, very narrow but just broad enough for Elizabeth and her husband to walk up and down. They had space to put plant pots filled with greenery to compensate for the lack of any garden. All the rooms, except the kitchen, were huge and high-ceilinged, which made them cool, a great advantage in the summer heat of Florence.
I knew all this before I visited, and had a layout clear in my head, but the Casa Guidi still was a surprise. Coming into the building from the street it seemed so dark, as though all the light and dazzling brightness of Florence had been left behind, and that the stairs were leading into a great gloom. The entrance hall to the Brownings’ apartment is narrow, with a stained-glass partition dividing it from the first room, the dining room, which was empty (at the time I saw it) and had no particular atmosphere, but then going on into the drawing room then the bedroom everything changed. Both of these rooms retain the charm they had for Elizabeth and match, uncannily, her descriptions in letters. The drawing room is twenty by thirty-three feet, the ceiling ‘immensely high’, and here she wrote her poetry. It was a room which that day seemed full of shadows even though there was no one in it, the brilliance of the outside sun filtering through the long windows at an angle but not reaching the corners, where anyone could lurk. The bedroom was even more mysterious, the light here subdued. It contains the bed in which Elizabeth gave birth to her only child, a son, and in which she died. It really is an emotional experience to stand there, in the half light, remembering what happened in this room, and remembering especially what the Casa Guidi meant to Elizabeth. She was never really happy away from it, always longing when, during the fierce summer heat, another house was rented in the hills, to return there, to her home which was like no other she’d ever lived in (though never one she owned). The Casa Guidi, her ‘house’, gave her not only deep pleasure and satisfaction but also strength. It made her feel safe and secure and lucky. She felt protected within its walls, with Robert at her side, and a new creative power surged through her poetry.
Five years later, I felt the power a house can have in the life and work of a writer even more strongly when I researched another biography, this time of Daphne du Maurier. Menabilly, the house on the Gribbin peninsula in Cornwall where she lived for twenty-five years, gave her a physical thrill when first she came across it, hidden as it was among trees and situated so that it could not be seen from the nearby sea. It was not the grand stately house, owned by the Rashleigh family, which she had imagined when she heard about it, but instead a two-storey, long, low house, the walls covered so thickly with ivy that most of the many windows were half obliterated. She thought it looked asleep, and that it had a melancholy air about it which she wanted to investigate, and which attracted her. This reaction, which sounded so fanciful, so fey, made immediate sense to me only when I saw the house. Finding it is still difficult and this difficulty seemed exciting, like being on a quest in some fairy tale. The walk from the house through the woods, to the little beach described in Rebecca, is intensely quiet and looking back, the house rapidly disappears, long before the sea is reached, as though it has been spirited away. This was what the secretive Daphne du Maurier had always yearned for, a house to match that part of herself which was the writer.
But though the influence of living in Menabilly was immense, it could never belong to her. She spent a quarter of a century restoring it, which cost a fortune, knowing, and dreading, that one day, when the lease was up, she would have to leave it. Reading in her letters about this passion she had for Menabilly it seemed so exaggerated to identify, to the extent she did, with a house. I’d studied drawings of it, and seen lots of photographs, but nevertheless nothing made sense until I saw it and wandered about inside, the bats swooping about in the kitchen. Then, the fascination the house had for her didn’t seem so hard to understand. While she was living for a short time in Egypt, she wrote that in her dreams she was alway
s imagining she was in Menabilly, hallucinating almost, so that when she woke up and found she was not she was sick with disappointment and a strange kind of grief. The house, without a doubt, fuelled her imagination, her love for it burning through her work.
Menabilly is a perfect example of the power a house can have.
IN THE LATE 1980s, we began to think we could do something we’d long wanted to do, which was live and work half the year in the Lake District, from May to October. But we couldn’t do it in our Caldbeck cottage, though it had served us well for a decade. It was ideal for holidays, but there was no space there for both of us to have a room to write in. And, besides, we wanted to be near a lake.
The children, in any case, weren’t any longer coming with us every school holiday because two of them were by then no longer at school. Caitlin was in America, doing an MA after graduating from Sussex university, and Jake was in Italy for a year before going up to Cambridge. Only Flora still came with us, often with two of her cousins, all of them sleeping in the barn which we’d converted into a loft and a games room. But soon she, too, would be off, and we wanted to be ready.
So, a little early, we started looking for a house. It couldn’t be too far away from Carlisle, because we needed to visit our parents often, and we didn’t want a large house. Preferably, it would not be in a village but, on the other hand, nor would it be entirely isolated. We started off looking in the Ullswater area, but nothing suitable came up. Then, one April day in 1987, we went to look at a house in the Lorton Valley within easy reach of three lakes, Loweswater, Crummock Water and Buttermere. We drove from Caldbeck along the back roads, passing Bassenthwaite before climbing the winding road over Whinlatter Pass. The view of the valley below, when we came over the pass, showed a swooping line of fells, Grasmoor on the left, Melbreak to the right, and straight ahead, in the far distance, Red Pike and Haystacks. The route through the valley twisted and turned and finally crested on Scale Hill before dipping dizzily down to a bridge over the river Cocker. The house we were going to see was over the bridge and down a little slip road, where a sign said ‘No road to the lake’, though our map showed the lake, Crummock Water, was very near, a mere few hundred yards away.
My Life in Houses Page 13
