My Life in Houses

by Margaret Forster

  The house was on a slight rise, so that from the gate we looked up to it. This gate, painted green, was an old wooden gate, set in a tall thick hawthorn hedge. There were fir trees growing either side which had been trained to form an arch across the entry to the path up to the house. This path, going straight up, had box hedges all the way either side. The garden sloped upwards and looked attractively unkempt with daffodils bunched in thick clumps all over it. The house was double-fronted with a pretty porch in the centre. The windows were large, especially for this part of the world where windows were usually kept small to keep out the weather. It looked quite an eighteenth-century sort of house, but the estate agent’s details said it was built in 1869. There were lots of houses we’d gone to see which I wouldn’t even step inside, because from the first glimpse they didn’t appeal to me. But this one certainly appealed.

  Inside, the rooms were all empty, and had been vigorously cleaned. It looked as though it had been scrubbed from top to bottom, though all this cleaning couldn’t conceal the general shabbiness and poor state of repair. But that was a plus, meaning we could start from scratch and not have to put up with ripping out perfectly good fixtures we didn’t like. There were two rooms either side of the hall on the ground floor, with one of them, the kitchen, looking as if it hadn’t been touched since 1869 itself. The staircase had a gracefully curved banister following the stairs round, and upstairs there was a bathroom and four bedrooms, all with these long windows looking out onto Grasmoor, and just a glint of the lake. It wasn’t a sunny spring day, but the light throughout the house was strong – it was full of light.

  Before we went back to Caldbeck, we walked round the area. Loweswater was a hamlet rather than a village, its centre the sixteenth-century pub, the Kirkstile, and the church, St Bartholomew’s. Other cottages straggled along the road, but there were not many of them. There was no shop, and though there was a school house it had long since stopped functioning as such. The little road ‘our’ house was on led to a lonning (a lane) which went through fields of cows and sheep to the lake, a ten-minute walk. Once at the lake, we found another path leading to Lauthwaite Woods, making a circular tour back to the house. By the time we’d finished this preliminary exploration, we were desperate to buy the house. It was the perfect size, and in the almost perfect situation, surrounded by fells we longed to climb (and one of which we already had, on an outing from Caldbeck).

  The house, called Jenkin’s Hill, then, was to be auctioned at the Globe Inn in Cockermouth on 7th May. By then, we would be back in London, but we were advised it would be wise to attend the auction if we really wanted the house. Leaving a bid, or appointing someone to act for us, wouldn’t allow for all kinds of imponderables. Bidding was expected to be competitive and the auction well attended. So Hunter went by train, booking in for the night at the Scale Hill Hotel. Before he left, we agreed on the maximum price we could afford, which was roughly based on what we thought we’d get for the Caldbeck cottage plus the Algarve house. The auctioneer alarmed Hunter by saying, in his introductory remarks, that this house was in ‘the loveliest of valleys’ where houses rarely came up for sale. The bids came in thick and fast, which was apparently unusual at Cumbrian auctions, and rapidly reached then passed our agreed limit. Hunter and one other bidder, not there in person, hung on in there, inching upwards more slowly, until the stand-in for the other bidder had reached his instructed limit, and withdrew, and the house became ours.

  There was an excitement about buying this house. It was going to be as important to our lives, we felt, as Boscastle Road had been. As Virginia Woolf put it, when she and her husband bought Monk’s House, it would be ‘as though one clapped on a solid half-globe to one’s London life’. And there was the excitement of a new area which offered delights Caldbeck couldn’t deliver, such as the prospect of swimming in the lake and climbing all the surrounding high fells. Our cottage had been in a wild, bare landscape which had its own appeal but now we would be in an almost lush landscape by comparison, full of trees, thickly green and verdant. Once we’d had the renovations carried out we would also be living in what amounted to luxury so far as space went – after the cramped nature of the cottage – with a room each to write in.

  We sold the Caldbeck cottage in October 1987, and moved into what we renamed Grasmoor House that same half-term week (Flora was still at school). Renaming the house was not, we realised, a wise or popular thing to do. We knew local people would frown upon it, thinking it a bit of a cheek when the name Jenkin’s Hill actually appeared on some maps. But the renaming was for a good reason. The nearest house to it was named ‘Jenkin’, and there was endless confusion possible over which was ‘Jenkin’ and which ‘Jenkin’s Hill’. We renamed ours Grasmoor House, after the fell it faced. It made the house seem instantly more ‘ours’, as though no one had lived there before us.

  But they had, and the signs were everywhere. The master carpenter had crafted exquisite floors of pine. The boards were broad and closely fitted and needed only a coat of seal to reveal the deep golden colour. There were shutters on the ground floor rooms, equally well made, and when we pulled apart modern electric fires it was to reveal old fireplaces with tiled backs to them, each tile a Victorian artwork. It seemed marvellously ironic that as a girl I’d hated our old-fashioned, black leaded range and here I was thrilled to find we had in our house fireplaces I would be happy to black-lead myself. We tested the fires and they worked perfectly, except for one in our bedroom which had been blocked up. We’d be able to have log fires. It was no good mocking ourselves – ‘real log fires’ were the thing for the country idyll.

  The builder we hired to do all the changes we wanted was no J.P. Brown and he didn’t employ unskilled labourers. The carpenter who worked for him was a perfectionist who used the best materials and wouldn’t tolerate a single ill-fitting joint. He was slow, and we were impatient, but he wouldn’t be hurried. When we urged him to take some short cut to get the kitchen ready sooner, he just gave us a look, and said nothing, and continued at the same rate. Sometimes we changed our minds about how we wanted something done when he was already halfway through doing it, and neither of us dared to tell him. We hinted at a possible change, and he looked appalled, so we hurriedly said it didn’t really matter, that of course we wouldn’t want him to rip out the immaculate work he’d already done.

  It was six months before the house was as we wanted it and we were ready to begin living and working there half the year (though, in fact, it was another two years before we began doing that, the full May–October, when Flora was eighteen). The woman who had lived there before us had run it as a bed and breakfast establishment as well as a tea-place. Her teas had been famous for her cakes and tarts and scones, all of which she’d produced out of what seemed to me a Stone-Age kitchen. She was still living locally when we moved in and I thought she might like to see what we’d done (or rather had had done) to the house, so I invited her to tea. I worried that she might find it a little upsetting, visiting the house which had been her home for something like twenty years, and where her husband had recently died, but she was on the contrary curious and eager to see the alterations. She loved the room we’d made into a kitchen, exclaiming over the pine cupboards more than over the new cooker and hob, and was astonished to see the huge L-shaped bedroom made out of two of the old bedrooms. The bathroom was completely revamped, but she was pleased we kept the large old-fashioned tub which she said had been nearly new and it would’ve grieved her to see it thrown out. Then we had tea. I’d made a cake and offered a piece to her in that self-deprecating middle-class manner I’d picked up. ‘Have a piece of this cake,’ I said, ‘though I’m sure it won’t be as delicious as the cakes, I hear, you made.’ She took a piece, ate half of it, thought for a moment, and then said, being a Cumbrian, ‘No, it isn’t, but thank you, it’s very nice.’

  So began, in 1990, the living of two lives, our London life, in Boscastle Road, and our country life, in Grasmoor House, Loweswater. It
wasn’t at all like having a holiday house in the Algarve, or Northamptonshire, or a bolt-hole in Caldbeck. The switch – either way but especially from London to Loweswater – was, and is, always fraught, the build-up to the going looming large with so much to be remembered and organised. There was always someone moving into Boscastle Road to look after it, with the deal that it would be rent- and bill-free in return for the garden being kept tidy and the house safe and clean. Usually, these house-sitters were friends of our children who needed temporary accommodation and had no money to rent anywhere, or sometimes it was friends between flats ‘who had a gap to fill’. My theory was that if I left the house in near perfect order then it would be in the same condition when I returned, so setting my standards high took exhausting effort. Going the other way was much easier. Grasmoor House was smaller and it had mostly just been the two of us living there so there was less to do. Also, from the beginning I’d been determined to keep it as simple and uncluttered as possible, not heaped with possessions of one sort or another, as Boscastle Road was after nearly thirty years of five of us living in it.

  Arriving at Grasmoor House what impressed me, always, was the atmosphere of calm. It’s a quiet house, looking outwards towards the high fells all around and somehow absorbing their unchanging nature. The silence inside is intense, as though the walls are noise proofed throughout, and this makes moving around it an unhurried affair. We don’t thunder around, running up and down stairs, or banging doors violently as we are inclined to do in London, always rushing, but instead take our time. On the surface, my life continues exactly as it does in Boscastle Road – write in the mornings, walk in the afternoons, read in the evenings – but it feels quite different. The difference is due to the situation of the respective houses. In Grasmoor House, there are no interruptions, and nothing is happening all around. I look out on the flank of Melbreak and the rising spur of Hen Comb and know nothing has changed in hundreds of years. There is nothing man-made to disturb the undulating line of the horizon. Sometimes there are sheep on the fell sides, sometimes not, and that is the extent of the variety. There is no sound of traffic, only of the wind in the giant ash tree, or the strangled cry of a sheep caught in a hedge. If the telephone rings, it is thunderously loud.

  Unlike our cottage in Caldbeck, this house has no lingering feeling of hard lives once lived here even if they were. It seems made for a certain standard of living, one in which separate rooms were allocated to sleep in, eat in, relax in, and study in. It was never a cottage and it was not a farm house, which gave it a pointed status compared to other buildings in the village. When we bought it, it didn’t look very attractive, because the walls were a dirty grey stucco and the windows had a border painted round them, Lake District style, which was a dark, dreary green, but once the exterior was painted off-white and the surrounds on the windows white, it looked fresher and more gracious, coming into its own. Wordsworth, of course, would not have approved, believing, as he did, that buildings should blend into the landscape and not stand out from it. He didn’t like seeing these white dots scattered over the countryside, especially if they were on hillsides, but we loved having our house as a point of reference when we looked down upon it from the top of Grasmoor or Melbreak.

  Sometimes, walking along old bridle paths, we would come across the ruins of a house, tucked away in the folds of a fell side, far from any road. It’s hard to imagine how such houses were ever built in these inaccessible situations. How was all the material needed brought to it, the cement, the wood, the pipes? The stones are nearby, the same sort of stones the dry stone walls are built of, but everything else would have to be ferried over rough ground for a mile at least, probably in a cart. Someone wanted to build their house in these locations badly enough to go through organising all this laborious business, and now it was a ruin, abandoned long ago. Such a disturbing sight, these ruins. So much of the basic structure remains, the clear outline of how the rooms were arranged, even though the roof has gone and all the doors and windows. Stepping over the collapsed front wall and peering into corners there is always the carcass of a bird lying there and often the detritus of some fell walkers’ picnic. The wind and rain will have stripped the interior of plaster and paint, but the floors will still have the remains of coverings, odd patches of broken tiles showing through the dirt, a reminder that the place was once lived in. The local people will know the story of any ruined house. They will have tales of who built it and why, and of what happened when it was vacated and left to rot, instead of being sold and passed on to someone else. But the ruined house tells its own tale of some mistake, some disaster that could not be surmounted. Better, I always think, that it should be levelled, every stone removed, because what remains is not just sad but frightening – a house, a solid stone house, reduced to this.

  We walked, we climbed, and we swam. The lake was where we spent our afternoons whenever there was hot weather, taking a picnic down to the tiny pebble beach known as Sandy Yat. ‘Yat’ means ‘gate’, and a gate is still there, but if there was ever sand it has long since been washed away. The view from Sandy Yat is of the whole of Crummock Water stretching away to Buttermere, an expanse of water which, on still days, is literally like a mirror, reflecting perfectly the fells all around. Going into it to swim, the aim was not to shatter these reflections, to swim so carefully that in spite of a slight ripple on the surface they were undisturbed. It was as if we were moving not through water but through hills. Once, on such a day, I got up before dawn and slipped out of the house – I felt it held its breath for me – and walked rapidly along the side of Melbreak to Buttermere so that by the time the sun was up I was climbing Red Pike and stood on the summit by nine o’clock with the sun bouncing off the lake below in a million tiny lights as it hit the water. There was the sensation, standing alone there, of being completely insubstantial, of having no place amid all this natural glory, of disappearing into the landscape. I thought how satisfying it would be, when the time came to die, to die in such a place, just melting into the rocks. It wasn’t a morbid thought at all, but quite the opposite. Then I came down and swam from Ling Crag.

  This was our alternative life, but we always knew that however much we loved it our real home was in Boscastle Road and if we had to choose there would be no contest. The missing elements, wonderful though our Loweswater summers proved to be, were largely human ones. In London were our children and, eventually, grandchildren, and our friends, friends of many years, and work connections (for Hunter especially). And, as the nights drew in come October, there were theatres and cinemas and art galleries, and all the cultural riches London offers. There was also a kind of trigger London pulls which starts ideas off whereas, for us, the Lake District soothed rather than fired us. Great for working when ideas had taken root but not, in our case, so great for thinking of them. We returned each October refreshed and refuelled though within days we’d be shattered already, barely able to cope with ordinary things like crossing a busy road. We had, each autumn, to learn again the art of city living – but it was always exciting, exhilarating. We might feel faithless to Grasmoor House, but we were home.

  THE OLDER I became, the more I liked being in my house. When I did go out, coming home to it was always a relief, however shabby it was becoming. By the year 2000, when we’d been in it nearly forty years, I could see that it needed redecorating. Curtains were well worn and faded, and sofas sagging with children endlessly jumping on them. But it was familiar and relaxing, and I couldn’t bring myself to care about that horrible word ‘refurbishing’.

  I was by then becoming a less than good housewife. Virginia Woolf once wrote to a friend, ‘Does housekeeping interest you at all? I think it ought to be just as good as writing, and I never see . . . where the separation between the two comes in . . . my theory is that they mix indistinguishably.’ An odd thing to say, especially as Virginia Woolf would never be thought of as any kind of housewife, amazed as she once was to discover what an effort it took her to wash the d
ishes after dinner. But I’d found that being a housewife as well as a writer could be made to work perfectly well, without any help, so long as the energy and the ability to organise time were still there.

  I used to like saying, when anyone asked me what I did, that I was a housewife. If I wasn’t actually in the process of writing something that was what I reckoned I was, even though the very word ‘housewife’ is now denigrated. Nobody calls herself a housewife, for goodness’ sake. It’s taken to mean a woman who ‘just’ looks after a house and does nothing else. What can one say to such a poor creature? Best say nothing, and smile, and turn pityingly aside. How, after all, can a woman marry a house? It’s ridiculous. Unless it’s said – ‘I’m a housewife’ – with a self-deprecating laugh, making it clear this is a joke, it embarrasses people. If it’s said for real, humbly, the listener will be horrified and hope you will crawl away quickly before their expression reveals contempt.

  How this came about I’m not sure, but it happened after the end of the Second World War. Until then, for a woman to say she was a housewife was perfectly acceptable. Then, within twenty years, it became something of a term of abuse, especially when the word ‘little’ was put in front of it – ‘Oh, she’s just a little housewife’, meaning one-of-little-brain. Mrs Thatcher made things worse by proclaiming her own ‘housewife’ qualities. It is partly the word itself that does the harm, conjuring up a ludicrous image. A ‘housekeeper’ sounds better but carries with it servant status; a ‘house manager’ would be better still, since it could mean man or woman, and a proper job; or maybe the term that emerged in the seventies is best of all as an alternative to the unfortunate ‘housewife’: doesn’t ‘I’m a home economist’ sound grand?