The Handmade House

by Geraldine Bedell

  The Handmade House

  The Handmade House

  A Love Story Set in Concrete

  GERALDINE BEDELL

  VIKING

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 2005

  1

  Copyright © Geraldine Bedell, 2005

  The back endpaper is reproduced courtesy of Azman Owens Architects/© Keith Collie

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright

  reserved above, no part of this publication may be

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  EISBN: 978–0–141–90128–2

  1

  We didn’t intend to build a house. We just wanted to move – somewhere a bit bigger, with more of a garden: commonplace enough ambitions, especially for families with young children, especially in Britain, where property is wealth, and so, in some vague and unexamined sense, identity. Not that we were thinking about anything like that.

  It was December 1999 and I’d just had my fourth child. Ned was small and sucky, all mouth and blindly pawing hands, but he took up a ridiculous amount of space. He came with cot, high chair, bouncing deckchair for sitting on kitchen worktops, different bouncing contraption for dangling from doorways, Moses basket, pushchair, car seat, changing mat, monitors, sterilizing equipment, rattles, baby bath, specialist infant unguents… so much stuff that entire floors of department stores are given over to it, chains of shops have been established on the basis of it. Most of it was superfluous, but we had it anyway, and we were squashing it into a narrow four-storey house in East London which was already over-inhabited by our inconveniently sized family.

  We are so inconveniently sized because we’re what the sociologists like to call a ‘reconstituted’, or, more tweely, a ‘blended’ family. Reconstituted definitely does not sound like your authentic, ten-out-of-ten, top-of-the-range version; more a powdery, just-add-water-for-a-convincing-flavoured family. And blended is as bad: a euphemism for miscegenated, produce from around the world, thrown together in a factory staffed by the underpaid. Possibly I am over-reacting; but marrying twice was never a big ambition, and I am inclined to be a bit defensive about it. I am always resisting what I assume to be other people’s conclusions that there is something illegitimate about us.

  We are certainly untidily shaped. The two older children, from my marriage to a banker who now paints, were sixteen and twelve when Ned was born. Neither the banker nor I had ever, I suspect, been entirely sure why we were together. He occasionally expressed this openly, although the words didn’t match his behaviour, which was intuitive and responsive. But perhaps he was more intuitive than he could cope with, and the words were not so much a joke as an attempted inoculation, fending off the whole truth with a taste of it.

  Whatever, the consequence of my failure to take seriously the questions he raised was that when I had one child of seven, and another of three, I saw Charlie across a crowded room at a party. It can’t have been that crowded, in fact, because I am rather short; it was probably more across a table. Charlie claims he fell in love with me at once, but he is lying: what he fell in love with was my dress. I’d bought it for my sister’s wedding the year before – a dusky-pink silk jersey shift from Catherine Walker. Even though it had been in a sale, it was the most expensive dress I’d ever bought and it gave the wholly erroneous impression that I was classy.

  I already knew who he was, vaguely, but I hadn’t expected the jolt of recognition over the cheese sticks and Twiglets. He tried to get around the table to talk to me, but it was a long table: I turned and fled, found the host’s elderly father, talked to him with concentrated effort for twenty minutes, and then left.

  The relationship, Charlie’s and mine, didn’t start for nearly another year. But beginning in October 1991, we conducted a five-month affair which was perhaps mainly remarkable for the number of trees that had to be cut down to keep it going. During these months we wrote to each other with an energy that would have alarmed Barbara Cartland – long letters every day, sometimes two a day, pages and pages of handwriting on thick, creamy German paper. We were like an interminable eighteenth-century epistolary novel. Eventually, something had to give – quite apart from anything else, neither of us was getting any work done – and the only solution seemed to be to live together. That way, we figured, we wouldn’t have to write every tiny thing down, and then analyse it and send a commentating letter back.

  My husband was pretty helpful at this point. I had confessed to the affair about three months in, having always been a lousy liar, and initially he had scoffed that the relationship was ‘just words’ (hey, but a lot of them!). Some six weeks later, he acknowledged that the idea of our staying together was hopeless.

  I continue to have mixed feeling about all this. A part of me would like to be able to write that I am ashamed, and I am, certainly, ashamed of marrying for the wrong reasons the first time, and sorry I had to kick around other people’s investment (of which there proved to be more than I had realized) in my marriage. My children’s lives were disrupted in horrible ways that are still unspooling. I don’t want to pretend there’s no sadness or guilt. But the main things I feel are relief that I found Charlie, a sneaking pride that I had the courage to live with him, and, finally a persistent and possibly irritating determination to prove that we are a successful family. (Charlie, incidentally, would regard this last as absurd: in his view we obviously are.)

  For my generation, making a home is a more self-conscious activity than it was for our parents, for whom it was more or less a matter of buying a house and sticking your family in it. For me, it was even more than that: a test, and a proof. Creating a home together was a statement that it was OK, we were OK; it had been worth it.

  By August 1991, Charlie had sold his workman’s cottage near the Columbia Road flower market in Bethnal Green, and I’d sold my share in the four-storey terraced house in Islington to my former husband, who was living there with his new partner. Charlie and I bought another four-storey terraced house in the London Fields area of Hackney and, a year on, did what you were supposed to do to such buildings – restored the cornicin
g and the shutters, sanded the floorboards, reinstalled the marble fireplaces that had been ripped out during the period when the houses in the area had been little more than slums.

  For as long as we had two children, it was fine. But then we had Harry in 1995 and Ned in late 1999. By this time, we were also both working from home, Charlie in our bedroom and I in the sitting room. I tripped over books with titles like Liberals and Communitarians and Wellsprings of Knowledge on my way from bathroom to hairdryer – interesting books, I am sure, but most saliently, for me, fat books. When Charlie sat on the sofa, he had to look at the pastel-grey, wire-sprouting back of my computer squatting toadlike on my desk, and at the box files in which I store my research for articles I’ve written. I can’t remember ever having referred to any of this research subsequently, but I am too neurotic to throw any of it away.

  In practice, we spent most of our time in the basement, which is where most converted four-storey mid-Victorian houses have their kitchens, and where we also had our dining table, television, most of the toys and a large, curved sofa, on which we could all just about fit. So, despite having a house that had three perfectly adequate floors above ground, we lived most of the time underground in a sort of troglodytic bunker, only dimly aware of the weather, or anything much except the passing legs of the neighbours.

  The house was all stairs and, with four children and at least one untidy adult, stuff was always being moved on to the wrong floor (usually the basement, where there was no room for anything, because it was already full of people). I was for ever making little piles of toys, hairbrushes, books, ironing and dirty washing, about which I fondly hoped people would be responsible, collecting their possessions as they passed. In practice, everyone ignored them, perhaps imagining they were little votive piles for my amusement or spiritual enhancement, I don’t know. It took me all of Saturday morning to put them back.

  The original inhabitants of our house would hardly have been posh or rich. Not unlike us, then, except they could have expected to employ a servant to carry things around. I didn’t want to be that servant. Nor, despite my family’s fond suppositions, was I into purity through bending.

  My skivvying predecessor wouldn’t have had so many things to transport, anyway: the Victorians had fewer possessions, not least because you couldn’t fit them in for the people. My grandmother, born at the beginning of the twentieth century, when our house would have been forty years old, grew up in a tiny factory cottage in the East End of London with three sisters and four brothers. My father, born in 1926, was the youngest of seven children brought up in another, very similar, East End cottage, and they managed to cram in two lady lodgers as well, in a room on the half-landing called the orff room.

  At the start of the twenty-first century, by contrast, children expect their own bedrooms, music systems, miniature office space and walls to cover with Blu-Tacked pages torn from Heat magazine. When Henrietta, my eldest child, was sixteen, she kept complaining that she couldn’t bring her friends home because there were too many little children in the house. My great-grandmother, the one who had four boys and four girls, actually gave birth to fifteen children. I was modest in my childbearing ambitions by comparison, but was regarded by my own daughter as more or less verminous.

  We were using every inch of space, we believed, although it is conceivable we were overusing some inches and not using others very smartly. It was a philosopher called Daniel C. Dennett, however, who finally persuaded me that we should move, when I stubbed my toe on his book Kinds of Minds.

  We had the house valued, pleasingly, although at this time it was virtually impossible to have a house in London valued unpleasingly. In 2000, property prices in the capital saw their highest ever recorded year-on-year increase, 23 per cent. In the previous decade – and we’d had the house for nearly eight years – prices had risen by 60 per cent. In the summer of the following year, which happened to be the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, it was reported that over the fifty years of her reign, property would have been much the best investment any of her subjects could have made.

  We still didn’t really know how much more we could afford to spend on top of the capital we had accidentally accrued, because it was unclear how much Charlie was earning. Or even, in fact, what he was doing. In the first year after he quit his job as a newspaper executive, he wrote pamphlets with titles like Civic Entrepreneurship and The Self-governing Society (Henrietta and her brother Freddie referred to them as Charlie’s leaflets). The second year, he did more consultancy, which was better paid, but the money was what I think bankers like to call lumpy, i.e. quite often non-existent. And if it was difficult even to explain what Charlie did – his mother asked my mother, who asked me, and I asked Charlie and, I expect, got a clear response, but not one that I could remember long enough to pass on to anyone else – it was a nightmare trying to gauge how much money he was liable to earn over the twenty-five-year span of a mortgage.

  I visited estate agents, told them I thought we could afford £600,000, and explained our requirements: five bedrooms, one for each child and one for us (though six would be nice, a spare room always coming in useful), two studies, a large kitchen, which could possibly incorporate a dining room, and a sitting room. And a den to watch television in, and not on a busy road; and we needed a garden, preferably bigger and certainly nicer than the one we already had.

  Some of the agents managed to suppress their smirks. ‘But,’ I said – this was my trump card – ‘we’re very happy to stay in Hackney.’

  The London Borough of Hackney is widely believed by people who do not live there to be one of the most dangerous places in Britain. Or, in fact, the world. And they may have a point: it was reported in 2001 that Hackney was more dangerous than Soweto, measured by shootings. But we managed to remain oblivious to the Yardies, other than when they occasionally roared down the street in their souped-up black four-wheel-drives playing hip hop very loudly. There was, admittedly, the occasion when I arrived home on a sunny afternoon to find police swarming all over the garden, having just found £8 million of heroin, then the most valuable single haul in the UK, in the roofspace adjoining ours. The Turkish woman from next door, who spoke almost no English, was taken into custody and claimed in her defence that she’d been looking after the boxes for her boss and had no idea what was in them. She got off after her case collapsed because the police refused to disclose the source of their tip-off.

  But even this impacted on us only to the extent that it created a mild ethical dilemma. Our neighbour was technically innocent, but she’d incontrovertibly had 8 million quid’s worth of heroin in her loft. In such circumstances, was it appropriate to smile and say good morning, or to frown and look coldly disapproving? On a personal level, we’d always found the family cooperative. On the very rare occasions I’d asked her teenage sons to turn their music down, when, say, the baby was sleeping in the afternoon, they’d responded immediately. I guess if you have £8 million of heroin in your loft, you probably don’t want to draw attention to yourselves.

  Most of the estate agents dealing with our area were actually located in the next-door borough of Islington, to which Hackney owner-occupiers were deemed to aspire. Houses in Islington were very similar to our own, perhaps with the addition of another storey, rendering them even more inconvenient. The main difference was that they cost twice as much. Islington was already gentrified – as, in fact, so much the epitome of gentrification that it had become something of a joke, referred to in the papers as ‘the trendy theme park of Cool Britannia’ or ‘the home of champagne socialism’. Not that Charlie and I would have minded any of this. We hadn’t been at all gentrified as children. My family came from the East End and moved out along the Central Line with increasing affluence until, when I’d left for university, my parents finally made it over the borders into Essex. Charlie’s family was Northern-respectable – Yorkshire-Methodist and Lancashire-Anglican stock, ambitious for the standing in the community that comes from plain living. We
would have been quite grateful to be cool anything. But any house we might have wanted in Islington would have cost far more than we had to spend.

  We did see an Edwardian house in Highbury that we liked. But having, as we thought, secured it at the asking price, we found ourselves in a bidding war with some people who’d put a note through the vendors’ door and to whom, I suspect, they had been intending to sell the whole time. Our role, it seemed, had been mainly to jack up the price. Aggrieved, we refused to offer above a couple of thousand more, not realizing that in the fervid property jungle of the inner London suburbs in 2000, this sort of low behaviour was completely normal.

  So we were happy to stay among the drug dealers in Hackney, where we tried the tactic with the notes ourselves, in a street where the houses were bigger than most. I trailed up and down with the pushchair and my handwritten requests on the German stationery. Not a single person rang up to ask how much we thought a ‘generous offer’ would be. Meanwhile, I had the sense that our combination of pickiness and poverty was starting to annoy the estate agents. There was a second competitive-bidding episode, for a white stuccoed house in a pretty street, where again we didn’t offer enough and lost the house to some people who lived in our road in London Fields. (Nobody liked them.) But it was just as well, because we were supposed to be moving for more space and this house, as my sister brutally pointed out, was a cottage. House-buying is a potentially idiotic, brain-dislocating process, in which it is perfectly possible to get sidetracked by light through a south-facing window and streets laced with cherry blossom and overlook the fact that the house itself doesn’t work.

  So then we started wondering whether we should stay where we were, and somehow refurbish the shed at the bottom of our garden in a way that would get Charlie out of the bedroom. We already knew that it was unlikely that we’d be able to expand into the roof. We’d bought the house in 1992 hoping we could put in a loft extension, but Hackney Council’s Planning Department had given us to understand that it wasn’t even worth submitting a scheme. The house was on the end of a terrace and any addition would visibly wreck the roofline – and, since then, we’d become a conservation area. But maybe we could do something lower down. What we needed was someone who could see these things. What we needed was an architect.