Think of Julia on the lawn that day – the same lawn where I stood under the magnolia less than a decade later and found myself falling under the spell of the house.
Autumn – a smoky, sharp day, trees bending, a little chilly when the wind gusts, smoke billowing sideways into the gardens of 36 and 38. Is she wearing her jeans, an old, third-best pair perhaps, maybe a plaid shirt or a denim one, some kind of a waistcoat over it all? Are her cheeks smeared with dust and smoke, eye-liner smudged, eyes shining with the physical effort of it all? And does she know that John was watching earlier as she bent to gather up the mouldering underlay and chuck it out through the sash window and into the yard below? Rubber and old lino and dust falling through the air – decades of feet treading those boards, now worn to jetsam. Does she love him already? Does she know he loves her? And does he put his arm around her and turn with her to look back up at the wide, unblinking eyes of the house – the upstairs windows where so many other faces have appeared and disappeared over the years?
John and Julia tie the knot on a bright, freezing day in February 1984 at Brixton Registry office.
Ian MacLaglan, who toured with the Stones in 1978, comes over with his wife and they all get wrecked together the night before and then have a champagne breakfast before heading down to the Town Hall in Brixton. They queue for almost an hour to get married, but they’re so plastered and happy they can barely remember any of it. Afterwards they take over the Tim Bobbin, the pub at the end of Lillieshall Road, and the day after that they go to some wine bar in Abbeville Road for lunch. By the time they stagger back across the frozen Common to Lillieshall Road it’s almost dark, so they just fall into bed and stay there until about the same time next day.
Their bed. John designed and made it – just a simple, low, wooden plinth and above it small white carved wooden cupboards with mirrors in them and a shelf running between them, all of it backed by a panel of white cotton that Julia has lovingly painted with pale blue and pink and yellow stripes. Ice cream colours. She’s also done a matching flounce on the central ceiling light, and the walls are sponged lavender and blue. It’s a bit of a woman’s space, but John doesn’t mind that. In fact it gives him a little burst of pleasure – the way she’s already put her mark on the house in this fatally feminine way.
‘I love it,’ he tells her. ‘Everything you do, I love. I love you.’
‘I want a baby,’ she says, one morning in March.
‘OK,’ he goes and he’s surprised to find he means it.
They do the house up gradually, as and when the money allows. A songwriting deal with Virgin pays for the carpets – deep hyacinth in the bedroom and a sensible grey pattern for the landings and stairs. Cream for the sitting room – the sort of nubbly carpet that will go with the apricot walls. The house feels completely different with carpet – it makes the place look new and smell clean. That lino was vile.
Once, in a flush moment, they toy briefly with putting a sauna on the roof terrace – until they realize what it would cost. Thank God, they both agree a year later, that they didn’t.
Meanwhile they dig the garden over. At first John cuts the path down the left-hand side – just a straight path that will lead him and his barrow down to the compost heap, but he feels it doesn’t look right. So he scraps that and starts again, deciding finally on a plump figure-of-eight, with the lawn snaking in and out to create half-moon-shaped beds that he plants with shrubs, roses, hydrangeas, California poppies, lilies, and large saucer-shaped daisies.
When he first cuts the lawn to that shape, it looks too bald and forced. But he knows that once the plants have expanded, it will be fine. At first Leon helps him, lifting the discarded clumps of turf into a bucket. But soon the boy forgets what he’s supposed to be doing and ends up kicking a ball around instead.
John’s work is going well. He has quite a few projects on the boil. He does some songwriting for Island Music – lyrics and stuff – and he produces a huge documentary series for Capital Radio on the music of the seventies. Meanwhile he writes a book about the pop group Slade and it becomes a bit of a cult book – people write to him from all over the world trying to get hold of a copy. He starts up a rock magazine called Let It Rock with his friends Simon Frith, the rock music journalist, and Charlie Gillett, who lives down the road.
In between all of this they get on with the house – their project, their thing. If Julia chooses the colours and paints an atmosphere, then John’s forte is foraging for stuff and getting it cheap, or sometimes even for nothing. He frequently finds things on skips. He has an eye for pieces he can transform, and he really gets off on the idea that the house is made up of so many items discarded by other people but which still have life left in them, if only you can see it.
The stained-glass doors on the kitchen cupboards, for instance, are found in an antique shop on the Wandsworth Road – he happens to be passing and he knows they’re right and he persuades the man to part with them for about half of what he was originally asking.
Meanwhile, best of all, he’s still wondering what to do about the hideous orange front door with its crinkly glass panel, when Number 36 – where Frances and Chris Caiman live – is broken into, the whole door bashed in with a sledgehammer. He can’t believe his luck when he sees a brand new door being delivered.
He asks Chris if he wants the old one and Chris, baffled, replies that they were on the verge of ringing the council to get it taken away. So John rips out the untouched middle panel of the Caimans’ discarded door and uses it to replace the glass in his own door. It fits perfectly – these doors are standard. A lick of white gloss and it looks just fine – a proper Victorian front door, born from the scraps of two neighbouring front doors, the joins indiscernible. Just like the banisters.
Julia remarks that the place is fast turning into a Frankenstein’s monster of a house. John laughs. You could say the same of Lillieshall Road itself, which begins with eight tiny two-up-two-down cottages, some of them paint-peeling and short-life squatted since the fifties, others with their new pointing and Laura Ashley curtains in the windows.
After the cottages come the slightly larger, two-storey houses, two on each side of the road, then come the three storeys, like Number 34. On the even-numbered side there are five of these, only two on the opposite side.
And then as you walk further up the street, the even bigger houses begin – ending with Number 61 where Bubbles still lives with Leon and Lucy, who trot more or less happily back and forwards across the road. These have steps up to the front door and grand basement kitchens, big pine tables visible as you pass by on the pavement.
Quite a contrast to the tiny cottages with their buddleia-cracked walls and side entrances straight into the main living room. For many years the pop band the Thompson Twins reside in one of these but the landlord of the Tim Bobbin doesn’t like squatters and bans them from the pub. When their music career suddenly and dramatically takes off, they carry on squatting. But one evening they pull up at the Tim Bobbin in a limo. Out comes the landlord, furious-eyed, hands on hips, and says, I don’t care what fucking car you fucking well drive, I don’t want no fucking squatters in here.’
Meanwhile Julia discovers she’s pregnant. They work out that it must have happened almost immediately after the wedding in February which is weird because they’ve been very laid back about contraception all this time, so why suddenly now? A honeymoon baby! Except they didn’t really have a honeymoon, Julia reminds him. Well, OK, a love baby anyway.
Julia feels fine and looks great, a little pale and tired in the mornings but otherwise the pregnancy suits her, she’s so happy and excited. But long before she’s reached full term, she wakes one night, clearly in labour. They rush her to St Thomas’s Hospital and the baby – an impossible shred of a thing – is born in the early hours of the next morning. A boy. They both hold him, stroke the fragile curve of his small head, the doll hands,