But I do not feel as though I own the place. I feel as though I have been given the job of looking after it. That is because I had no part in its design, or its construction, or its extension, or its most recent alteration; nor can I change its exterior or substantially redesign its interior, to make it mine, because the building is listed, Grade II, and the death watch beetle has more right to tenure, and potentially more freedom to amend its structure, than I have. His natural habitat is stained oak and old panelling, and mine is not. If he survives, he deserves his home behind my dictionaries and reference books not just because that is his ecological niche, but also because he withstood the fiercest chemical assault to maintain his place in my study, if not in my heart. The house was drenched with woodworm, furniture beetle and fungal killers when we moved here early in 1985, and the study was attacked again, in a second intense chemical foray, when it became clear that the first assault had left survivors. Ironically, for weeks afterwards, I could not tolerate more than a few seconds’ exposure to the fumes that lingered in the room. But Xestobium rufovillosum made it through: he clung on in a bunker deep in some timbers where the murderous chemical cocktail could not reach, and for some time afterwards I would occasionally hear him beating his head against the wood. And then finally his tick fell silent.
His links with the house predated mine. His ancestors may have moved in with the first lumps of green heartwood – probably already fungus-enfeebled – when some eighteenth-century artisan began to build a cottage that is now the kitchen, almost three hundred years ago. Or perhaps the death watch beetle migrated, involuntarily, from a church in France or a dismantled folly somewhere in England around 150 years ago, when some ambitious tenant converted an old mill or coachman’s cottage into a gentleman’s residence, complete with higgledy-piggledy, hand-me-down panelling that varies from room to room, stained glass, beams, tiled and carved fireplaces and distinctive windows of the kind sometimes called Victorian gothic. The study, with its imperfectly fitted wooden panels and uneven plaster, is a kind of untidy rehearsal for the entire house. You step in through the front door into a modest porch. Two doorways open off the porch: one into the study. You have been there already. The other leads immediately into a hall floored with old brick and lit by a huge Victorian window.
From this roomy half-panelled hall, a staircase leads to an assortment of bedrooms, a bathroom, a library and the attic. A winding corridor leads away to the front of the house and a large drawing room and a music room. The curve of this corridor suggests that the original property may have been associated with something round, perhaps a windmill, in the eighteenth century. One thick oak door opens onto a panelled dining room. Another thick door opens into yet another small lobby and a bathroom and then to what would once have been the stable yard. Another passageway winds down a cramped staircase into a large and partly subterranean kitchen that in turn has doorways into a pantry, a larder and a large cellar. I have an auctioneer’s poster dating from 1872 which describes the house as a
very valuable and desirable villa residence in the Parish of St Clement, Hastings, delightfully and romantically situated on the West Hill, in a well sheltered position, about 360 feet above the level of the sea; the house faces west and commands unrivalled and extensive sea and inland views of great beauty.
It doesn’t command extensive views any more: you can’t see the sea for all the other, more recent houses that have colonised the hill. But the advertisement provides me with a second set of coordinates: I am located in time, as well as space. The property has height, width and length, but it also has duration, and the auctioneer’s advertisement and the calendar on my wall supply two points on a temporal continuum. These two points become my starting point for a sedentary exploration, an immediate geography, an imaginary journey, and I quote these details to remind myself how little the place has changed in 140 years.
The music room is a twentieth-century addition, and so is one bathroom. A little conservatory now connects and simultaneously insulates the music room and dining room. Otherwise, the man who put the place up for auction at the Royal Swan Hotel, Hastings, on Saturday, 7 September 1872 would still find himself entirely at home. He would of course marvel at the electric lighting, he would appreciate the plumbing, he would certainly applaud the red, gas-fired Aga that heats all the household water and bakes all its food; the telephone points and broadband links would take some explaining. He would also ask about the corners in the dining room and sitting room where the oak panelling abruptly comes to an end, and I would then have to tell him about our other mutual tenant, Serpula lacry-mans, or dry rot. This little fungus is another long-term investor with a taste for old houses, and by the time we moved in, it had swelled into a science-fiction monstrosity, had spread its tendrils and had devoured the timbers on either side of an adjoining wall. But the person who owned this house in 1872 would still know the place, and recognise it as his. So, if it is his, in what sense is it mine? Did it shape him, or did he shape it? If he shaped it, then what have I done to it, and what has this house done to me? Can we both, to put it another way, really have the same address?
The answer is, of course not. His habitation was of its time, and so is mine. We all of us occupy more than one home at a time; we all of us have more than one set of geographical coordinates. British listeners and viewers go to Ambridge to keep up with the Archers, or to Albert Square to observe the EastEnders. So much, so obvious, but along with the broadcast soap operas, somewhere in our memories are thousands of other destinations imagined by someone we never met, and never thought much about: the Never-Never, South of the Border, Oz, Middle Earth, the City of Dreadful Night, the Land of Nod, the Little House on the Prairie, the Golden Road to Samarkand, Camelot, Vanity Fair, Pooh Corner, Ruritania, Shangri-la, Utopia, Barchester, Metropolis, Tuxedo Junction, Penny Lane and Blueberry Hill. Some of them have a tenuous connection with reality, and have become embedded in the global cultural canon, but for all most of us will ever know, they might also be fiction: Ur of the Chaldees and Babylon and Nineveh and the Promised Land Flowing with Milk and Honey; Troy and the walled city of Jericho; Sodom and Gomorrah; Xanadu and El Dorado. They have a ghostly reality in a disorderly index; they make up a directory or a gazetteer of places that may now have no palpable existence, but remain stubbornly addresses in imagination’s atlas.
So my forgotten predecessor inhabited the house I now live in, but in 1872 he might also have sat Under the Greenwood Tree, in Wessex, or moved to Erewhon, in the southern hemisphere, because Thomas Hardy and Samuel Butler that year each published a novel that was to become a fixed address in the imagination’s gazetteer.
Whoever now lives in Derby Street, Devonport, Auckland, New Zealand – the first lines of the address I would write in my exercise books more than five decades ago – occupies a different place in a different world. That house was, and I believe still is, a detached wooden villa with a corrugated iron roof and a front veranda and the stump of an old pepper tree in the front garden, and it is still instantly recognisable as ‘our’ house; but whoever lives there now also inhabits a different set of superimposed geographies. I lived there in 1956: I knew about, although never visited, Peyton Place, the bestseller of the year; I could have moved into the Towers of Trebizond, with Rose Macaulay, but I did not. I was fifteen at the time and I had of course, like almost every other teenager in the English-speaking world, just found a new place to dwell: it was down at the end of Lonely Street, in Heartbreak Hotel. Elvis Presley’s song that year reverberated around the planet: it also reverberated within the damp cement changing sheds excavated under the road at Cheltenham Beach, Devonport. This grimy facility – it smelt of dried seaweed, wet sand and stale urine – provided a cold-water shower and toilet for beach users, and a place to hang sandy clothes and wet towels, but more potently, it also provided an impromptu echo chamber in which one particular tiny assembly of exuberant teenagers could improvise their own stumbling versions of what was to become an anthem for gloomed youth.
The emergence of Elvis Presley in 1956, along with James Dean’s debut in East of Eden and the worldwide introduction to Bill Haley’s soundtrack ‘Rock Around the Clock’, over the credits of the movie The Blackboard Jungle in 1955, is now presented by social historians as the moment of an epic shift in the Western cultural continuum – the birth of rock and roll. That’s what it seemed like at the time, too. But I cannot hear Presley’s version of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ without also hearing tuneless voices in a shadowy concrete chamber, a few paces from a stony square of grass