I must simplify this somehow.
Right, Lucy Spawton lived in the house from 1895 to 1944; no one has ever lived here longer. So if I can just find her children or, if they’re gone, her grandchildren, they should be able to tell me all about her. Shouldn’t they?
The Family Records Centre in Islington is a daunting place – a big, modern, purpose-built building with lots of wide, automatic glass doors and wheelchair ramps, nylon staticky carpets and metal warehouse shelving.
It’s full of the retired and the semi-retired – the Bettys and the Kenneths and the Rosemarys, the ex-teachers and the ex-accountants from Surrey and Pinner, who bowl up here with massive energy and enthusiasm, to investigate their ancestors and research their family trees. They’re here for the day, they bring sandwiches, they have ring-binder files.
Relishing the sudden novelty of so much free time, they’ve come to find out where they came from, what the dead who gave them life were called. They want names, dates, places. The notes they make are meticulously legible – geography essay handwriting, purposeful and clear.
‘I’ve gone back as far as 1764,’ a man in a bottle-green sweatshirt with a picture of a golf club on the front tells a grey-haired woman as they wait for the lift. ‘My wife’s gone back further on her side.’
You might expect it to be a quiet or reflective place, but it’s not. It’s frenzied, hectic. There’s the constant sound of volumes being pulled off the shelves for a start – opened, flicked through, snapped shut, banged back. Handbags are shifted cagily along the carpet, books and biros gathered up, but coats and shopping bags must be deposited in the lockers downstairs. You need free hands in this place, if you mean business.
I decide to look in the registers of death certificates for Lucy Spawton, starting with the year when her name leaves Kelly’s Directory, when she’s no longer resident at our house. I’m going to assume – rightly, wrongly? – that she died in 1944.
I pull out a heavy black register – black for Death – and slam it down on the sloping counter. There are four registers for each year, each labelled MAR, JUNE, SEPT and DEC, and inside long lists of hand-typed names. The paper is greasy and brown with a million thumbings. Flick to the right page, then down the list: SPAVINS, SPAWFIELD, SPAWSON, and then SPAWTON. But no Lucy in March 1944. Hoist the volume – metal-cornered and about as big as a church bible – back into the shelf and take out the next. No SPAWTON, LUCY. Hoist it back, slam the next down.
And there she is. SPAWTON, LUCY. She was seventy-seven years old when she died and her death was registered in July 1944.
I know what to do next. I’ve seen other people doing it. I reach for the purple form, ‘Application for DEATH Certificate – For use in the PUBLIC SEARCH ROOM only’. I write Lucy’s details into the form, write my own name and address, and sign it. Then I queue at the cash counter, wait for the airport-announcement ding-dong to call me to the next window, pay seven pounds, and then the man behind the glass says, ‘It’ll be posted out to you on Friday.’
This is fun.
Flushed with success, I go straight over to the red birth registers, find the reference to Lucy’s birth (easy once you have her age at death) and order her birth certificate as well.
I’m on my way.
The Pidgeon photographic archives – the thirty-odd photos that Julia let me borrow – move and fascinate me far more than I ever thought they could or should.
I sit at the kitchen table and shuffle them, unsure of what exactly I’m looking for, and unable to understand why they touch me so deeply. They’re just ordinary snaps, the sort you’d find in any normal family album. Some are good, some indifferent, some sharp, some fuzzy, some taken on ordinary days, some on birthdays. The subjects seem sometimes to be willing, sometimes not, sometimes – in the best ones – oblivious.
But this is the recent past. There’s nothing especially noticeable or exotic about the 1980s. If I can find photos of Henry and Charlotte Hayward – the 1880s – now that will be exciting.
So why, then? Why do these pictures shake me up? Is it just that they show me something I know about, but would never normally get to see: another family living and talking and having birthdays and Christmases and babies in a home that is, quite recognizably, ours? Our house. Julia’s sponge-effect walls survived enough years to appear again and again in our own family albums, yet here they are – somehow preposterously! – in theirs.
There are whole pieces of the past that lie just around the last corner, closer perhaps than we’d like to think. We may choose to forget this, but the house doesn’t. The house has seen it, done it, felt it all before.
So there’s Julia, grinning widely and pushing a pushchair up the front path just as I’ve done, another baby in a sling (just like I used to have) – our familiar green-yellow privet hedge lit by the sun, the old wooden white gate (which eventually fell apart, never to be replaced). And here she is again, photographed from above, sitting cross-legged and tender-faced, on the lawn with a child in her arms. The garden is new-laid and freshly dug around her – strangely clean and young, yet recognizably our garden.
‘here she is again … cross-legged and tender faced’
Here’s Collette, about five years old, standing squinting in the garden, red hair lit by sunlight. And Leon – also red-haired – kicking a football, scowling at the camera. Maybe he resents that he has to stop for even one second for the shot. He wants to keep on moving, he doesn’t want the camera to freeze his life for the sake of posterity, to curtail the urgent swing of his foot. Here he is again, looking happier – winter. He’s just built a snowman. This time he doesn’t mind being photo-graphed. He knows the snowman will melt and the photo will be his only lasting proof.
‘he knows the snowman will melt’
And here’s Leon yet again, sitting in the kitchen – our kitchen! – patting a dog, a birthday cake on the table. How many birthday cakes of ours have we had in that kitchen? Just counting our own three children, I make it thirty-seven! So how many birthday cakes has the house seen in that kitchen? Hundreds? How many lit candles? Thousands, maybe?
‘What’s the matter? What are you thinking?’ Jonathan asks me, finding me almost in tears over the Pidgeons’ photos.
‘That we’re just the latest layer,’ I tell him, ‘that we’ll go and there’ll be others.’
‘Mmm … so?’
‘It’s just kind of shocking to realize it, that’s all.’
He smiles and touches my shoulder. ‘You’ve only just realized it?’
I shuffle the photos. ‘Only just seen photographic proof, I suppose.’
‘But they’re really nice photos.’
‘I know, I love them. They seem like a nice family. Nicer than I used to imagine actually.’
‘So … that’s a good thing.’
‘It’s good but – it’s so sad. It seems like nothing, no time at all – but these babies, these kids are all grown up, just as ours will be any minute. It all goes so fast. I can’t bear it.’
‘Funny girl,’ he says. ‘If you hadn’t seen the photos, then you’d never have given it any thought.’