All very comforting, yet I didn’t adapt as well to my new circumstances in Grasmoor House. There was always the worry that if disaster struck again, which at some point it would, I’d be an uncomfortably long way from the Royal Free and the doctors who treated me. In Boscastle Road, I was ten minutes away from help; in Grasmoor House, an hour away from any hospital likely to be able to help. Being in the depths of the country is not a good place to be with my sort of disease. Going north in May, instead of being exciting, something eagerly looked forward to, now made me a little nervous. Usually, I had a CT scan before we left, and even if that showed the cancer was stable, I’d still feel apprehensive. It took me weeks to settle down and really relish the longer walks I could now do and, because of these, the longer spells of writing. It was remarkable to find that walking must be somehow related to writing, that it somehow fuelled it. I’d always enjoyed walks, and seen them as an essential part of each day, but I hadn’t appreciated this strange connection. The walking loosened the writing.
I was on the lookout, of course, after the events of spring 2007, when my walking became unsteady, for any of the same signs, but the signs of danger this time had nothing to do with walking and so yet again I failed to recognise their significance. All that happened was that I had waves of pins-and-needles in my right arm. They were strong, but of short duration, and I concluded that I’d been writing too long or else carrying something that was too heavy. This was in July 2010, when we were in the Lake District, with the next appointment at the Royal Free at the end of August. The pins-and-needles came and went but otherwise I was fine, except I didn’t know I wasn’t. The pain itself, in my spine, didn’t start until the beginning of August, and when it did it was only there when I was standing or sitting, so I thought it was my old slipped disc trouble. I ended up back in London having radiotherapy to two parts of my spine. The poor Unknown Bridesmaid looked like remaining unknown for ever.
It is now 2013 and I am on the last of the hormone treatments, given by injection into the muscles of the buttocks every four weeks. This is the sixth year since secondary cancer was discovered, so I am lucky not only to be still alive but to be doing remarkably well, which is to say that though I tire frighteningly easily, I can still carry on with my normal life to a surprising extent. I walk, wherever I am, for at least an hour a day, sometimes two hours (with lots of rests) and though I need a stick I am not leaning on it all the time. It’s partly sheer determination that keeps me walking but determination wouldn’t in itself be enough – it’s much more the effect of the controlling drugs.
Soon, the control will start to slip. The hormone drugs will fail, and then it will be some sort of chemotherapy, if I agree to it. That sounds very grand – ‘if I agree to it’ indeed – but though I like to think I might not, I’ve seen how people, who have thought the same, jump at any chance, so I’m not confident that I’d say no thanks, I’m seventy-five, I’ll just go. The going is the problem. Where am I to do it, this dying? The desire to die at home, in one’s own bed, seems so strong in some people, as though to succumb anywhere else is a failure. Relatives speak with pride that ‘he/she died at home’, with their help. Since my house means to me what I’ve tried to show it does, you’d think I, too, will want to stay in it, to die at home, but I’m not sure that I do. I don’t want to somehow taint the house by dying in it. I don’t want it to become, for the period of this dying, a mini-hospice, filled with all the equipment I’ve seen needed: the special mattress, the device delivering morphine, maybe another for oxygen. I don’t want it having all the essential, wonderful nurses trooping in and out, the district nurses, the Macmillan nurses, the Marie Curie nurses . . . I’ve seen it all, I know how the house would change its character, how all this would make it a place I no longer knew, its privacy shattered.
So, why not avoid this by going into a hospice? What would there be to lose if my house would no longer be itself? Well, there are other people to consider: my family. For them, it might be a lot easier to have me at home so that they wouldn’t have to go backwards and forwards to a hospice. But, on the other hand, I’ve noticed that when people are dying in a hospice it helps distance their family and partners from the dying. The dying person, once in a hospice, is removed from their usual surroundings and this can help to prepare for the final removal. The hospice setting provides a separation which may seem hard at the time but maybe it helps. Dying at home, no matter how caring those attached to the dying person are, places a huge strain on them. Maybe I could do most of the dying at home then go into a hospice for the last bit. ‘Bit?’ Whatever do I mean? I make it sound as if this is some sort of game. Probably, I won’t be able to make the decision anyway. It will make itself, ‘events’ will dictate the pace, or it will all happen more suddenly than I dare to hope.
I wouldn’t, though, like to be leaving my house knowing I was never coming back to it – God, how awful that would be. I thought, this year, coming back to it after a brilliant summer, a whole four months without having to rush back to London, how much it meant to me. Suppose, while we were in the Lake District, it had been destroyed, in a fire maybe, and there was no house to come back to. What would be lost, apart from the contents? What could not be recreated by moving into some similar other house and replacing these contents? Is it the furniture/pictures/belongings which matter? Or is this love of a house a matter of what has taken place within its walls over fifty years and has nothing to do with the building itself or the things filling it? But this history, these memories, already have a safe place in my mind. The house might disappear, but what it has represented cannot. The building, the bricks and mortar, are not important, surely.
Yet somehow the house itself, its very fabric, is of importance. An intimate knowledge of its layout, of how all the rooms are arranged and used, stimulates a weird pleasure. I know this house. It has been changed by us not only in the real, practical sense of altering its appearance and internal geography, but by our living within it. Instinct guides me everywhere. I don’t have to wonder where I am going or what I will find. The house doesn’t need to remind me of what has taken place, why certain rooms are of a significance nobody else could possibly guess. Take the building away and it is alarming to realise memories might not be enough. Something indefinable would be lost. I need the house’s influence – the ‘influence’ that Leonard Woolf thought ‘might well be the subject of a scientific investigation.’
My investigation has not been scientific, nor has it really any claims to have been an investigation, but I share Leonard Woolf’s conviction that it is not ‘nonsense’ (as he feared) to think that a house lived in for a long time by the same people reflects something of them and gives them something back. Of Monk’s House, where he and his wife Virginia lived from 1919–1941, he said it was ‘the most powerful moulder’ of how they lived their lives. I don’t think I would go that far. Our house has not exactly ‘moulded’ me. But, on the other hand, it has provided a structure and a privacy which have been of immeasurable value. I was not mistaken, as a child, to believe that having a house, never mind a room, of my own was, for me, hugely important.
Coming home this year, 2013, was different from returning in other years. For the first time, we had had no one living in the house, though one or other of our children had been in and out every day. This meant that everything was as I’d left it, with no need for me to rush around arranging things how I liked them. It was as though I’d merely been out for an hour, walking on the Heath, and here I was, home again. But as I went through the various rooms and began to unpack, I thought, no, it isn’t as if I’ve just been gone an hour. Something is different. The house knows I’ve been away four months. It needs to get used to me again. There’s a stillness, a sense of caution in the air. The house needs to settle around me again. I’m not fully accepted yet. It takes two days to feel that finally we fit – the house and me.
And I’ve come full circle: as a child, I always wanted to be in other people’s houses.
Now, though still fascinated by those other houses, I am only really comfortable and relaxed in my own. My house is like a garment, made to my exact measurements, draped around me in the way I like. I never want to change it.
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Copyright © Margaret Forster 2014
Margaret Forster has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Chatto & Windus
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Words from Downhill all the Way reproduced by kind permission of the University of Sussex and Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Leonard Woolf.
My Life in Houses Page 16
