Upstairs, at the top of the house, I wrote a novel in the spare bedroom. I wrote another two in the tiny room on the first-floor landing. I walked fretful babies up and down the bathroom in the dead of night and, pregnant and exhausted, I once lay down on the kitchen floor in front of two baffled toddlers and wept. A squirrel terrified us when it became trapped in the chimney in Jonathan’s study. It scratched and snuffled and panicked all day. A funny and beautiful friend ate pasta at our kitchen table and told me straight out that she was dying. I watched a terrified man jump from the top floor of the refugee centre opposite when it was on fire one scary summer night. Another time, another summer, a burglar came into our bedroom as we slept and rummaged through my handbag.
All of this in our house. Real drama, yes, but no more or less than has happened to most people in most houses.
I loved 34 Lillieshall Road from the start but I was never someone who thought she’d stay anywhere long. And then one day it dawned on me that I had been here ten years and might actually be here another ten. Might even grow old here. I was surprised that the thought didn’t frighten me. In fact far from it – it was oddly comforting. It tempted me. All those years you rush around, waiting for your life to happen. And then you realize it’s just a question of taking a breath and daring to stand still long enough. Let your life come floating down, let it settle around you.
‘I’m going to write a detective story,’ I tell Raphael as he kicks a dog-chewed foam football around our kitchen, closely followed by Betty, the dog who chewed it. ‘About our house.’
He looks worried. Why do my kids always look worried when I try to tell them about what’s in my head?
‘And we’re the detectives, right?’
‘That’s right. We’re going to find out everything we possibly can about every single person who ever lived here!’
Even as I say it, it sounds unlikely and Raph looks suitably incredulous.
‘Even the children? Even the dogs?’
‘If we can – even the dogs. Cats too – if there were any.’
He likes this. But then his face falls. ‘But – what if we can’t find it all out?’
This has occurred to me too. Mostly in the middle of the night when this house seems to be one great big, ferocious, empty space full of secrets. ‘Then I’ll write about that too.’
‘Huh! Great,’ says Jake with his own unique kind of deflating candour, ‘a book about nothing. Fascinating.’
‘It’ll be my job to try and make the gaps and blanks fascinating,’ I tell him – hoping I believe that myself.
Where Do You Get Your Ideas From? It’s one of the great reliable questions that every writer gets asked. A huge, baggy question that we tend, privately, to smile at. Which isn’t fair, because actually it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to ask.
But, deep down, it scares us. It’s impossible to answer because we really don’t know where our ideas come from. And most of us wish we did, because then we could make sure we never ran out. But the truth is they come from anywhere and everywhere and nowhere and sometimes they don’t come at all. We laugh about the question because it reminds us of just how tenuous and slippery a good idea is.
Until now. Because I know where my idea for this book came from. It came from all the things you’ve just read. It came from a fusty South London archive and a helpful librarian who showed me how to use the microfiche. It came from a happy coincidence, a man called Henry, whose wife may or may not have been self-effacing, who may or may not have given a fireguard away to a totter, but who once must absolutely certainly have walked up and down our front path and stood where our dustbin is now.
It came from my kids and their scary sharpness, their sometimes shattering curiosity, their likeable ability to cut through the fancy adult rubbish to the gleaming urgent flesh of fact beneath.
‘my kids and their scary sharpness’
And it came from a bit of over-hasty DIY on a dark Boxing Day afternoon and a house where we’ve spent such a significant part of our lives, but which is never quite the right colour. And the fact that, in the end, we all of us have one compelling thing in common. We inhabit spaces and we know we aren’t the first to do so and we know we won’t be the last either.
I began to wonder how it would feel to find out about the ones who came before – to turn them from the vaguest idea back into substance. I wondered whether it might be possible to persuade our house to give up its secrets, to allow me to know the people, to hear the stories, to resurrect these ordinary lives – some of them long forgotten.
‘It’s not really our house at all, is it, Mummy?’ asked Chloë soon after I’d started on my project. ‘It’s like we’re just the top layer. And one day there’ll be another layer right on top of us, squashing us down.’
I smiled. ‘Do you mind that?’
She gave me a sharp look and went back to cutting pictures of shoes out of magazines.
‘I’ll have to think about it,’ she said.
Chapter Two THE BOY IN THE TOTTENHAM HOTSPUR ROOM
The Pidgeons 1981–1987
We bought this house from a man called John Pidgeon.
Just walk through the hall and into the kitchen and immediately you’ll spot a couple of crucial things about John Pidgeon. The first is that he likes to do his own carpentry – all the kitchen cupboards are hand-made by him, with fat, optimistic little bluebirds carved in each corner. And the second is that he had a habit of not quite finishing the task in hand – none of the cupboards have handles.
Right from the start, we viewed this trait of his with a kind of frustrated affection. ‘Pidgeonesque’ became the word we used for anything where the idea was good but the execution lacking. Or maybe it was just that we identified with it so closely ourselves. After a year we decided to paint the white cupboards bright blue. It took us about six months to get around to the second coat. Maybe this syndrome was infectious.
When I first saw the house, in May 1988, Jonathan and I had just found out we were having a baby. We weren’t married but the baby was planned – though it wasn’t expected so quickly. Where was all the ‘trying’ you were supposed to do? At twenty-seven, we were young and romantic enough to feel we might have quite enjoyed the suspense.
Still, now that it had happened, we decided we had to move. It wasn’t just a question of space but also of a new start, a home that belonged to both of us. I didn’t mind about the lack of a wedding – or at least back then I didn’t think I did – but I wanted pots and pans, paint swatches, the paraphernalia of a life chosen together.
We looked at houses around Clapham but none of them were quite right. The only one I’d been drawn to wasn’t all that suitable – it was just, as Jonathan astutely pointed out, that the exhausted woman who showed us round had a dribbling newborn baby on her shoulder. Tiny towelling babygros dripped on a rail over the bath, the whole place smelled of Wet Wipes. I wanted it. Meanwhile details of a house in Lillieshall Road arrived in the post one Saturday morning. It was firmly out of our price range.
‘It looks absolutely gorgeous,’ I told Jonathan, ‘and look at that garden.’ The photo showed a smooth