How many people?
An hour later, I have a crowd of names in my notebook.
After Henry and Charlotte Hayward, there’s Elizabeth and then Lucy Spawton, Isabella Bloomfield Hinkley and Walter Hinkley. Then Charles Edwin Hinkley, Walter Stephen Hinkley. Beatrice Haig, Phyllis Askew, Vera Palmer, Annie and Theodore Blaine, Amy and John Costello, Joan Russell, Olive Russell, Rita Wraight, Mavis Jones-Wohl, Dorothy and Wilfred Bartolo. By 1960, Gloria Duncan, Aston and Melda McNish, Louisa and Stanley Heron, Clarence Hibbert, Salome Bennet, Vincent Dias, Gerald Sherrif, Thomas H. Kyle, Veronica and Doreen Ricketts, then the Pidgeons, then –
I gaze at my notebook, almost dizzy with the sheer number of names, the sound and shape and idea of them. What is it? Didn’t I expect to find so many? Had I even thought about it? I suppose, when your house is a hundred and thirty years old, it’s not so unlikely that all these people will have lived there. But so many different names, sometimes all at once – presumably the house was sometimes rented out as rooms. It’s a shock. Or maybe it’s the names themselves, each one bulging with a mass of possibility, each one suggesting a life, an attitude, a type, a race, a class.
Most of us live in our homes knowing we’re not the only ones to have done so. But we rarely confront those shadows in any significant way. Why should we? This is us and that was them. Their clutter, their smells, their noises, and their way of doing things is long gone. We’ve painted, plastered, demolished and constructed or converted – a loft, a bigger kitchen, a new power shower in the bathroom.
Our moments have blotted out theirs. Maybe this is a necessary element of domestic living – maybe it’s the only way we can co-exist comfortably with each other’s past lives, each other’s ghosts. If Lucy Spawton or Melda McNish – a wonderfully sharp-tongued tartan name! – or Salome Bennet ever stood in our kitchen and sobbed or kissed or opened a fatal telegram, then it’s all gone now. If it wasn’t, the sense of claustrophobia would overwhelm us. We’d be stifled by years of emotional history every time we passed through a doorway or climbed the stairs.
When Jacob was about four years old, he asked me why people had to die. ‘Why, Mummy? Why does it have to happen?’
I thought quickly and came up with what I decided was a brilliant (and true) answer – for a four-year-old anyway.
‘Because, darling, if people didn’t die, then the world would fill right up and there’d be no room to move or have fun or anything.’
He frowned. ‘We’d have to stand on top of each other?’
‘Exactly. It would be very uncomfortable and everyone would get very grumpy and it would be awful.’
It’s 4.30 – closing time at the Minet Library. As the librarian slides the bolts on the big wooden door and turns the sign to ‘Closed’, I go and sit in my car outside and leaf through my notebook again and look at all those pencilled names (no biros allowed near the archives). Louisa Heron, Salome Bennet, Thomas Kyle, Gloria Duncan, Isabella Bloomfield Hinkley …
It’s beginning to rain. I don’t know why I feel oddly deflated when actually I’ve just found out so much. This, then, is it – the beginning of the trail. I should feel inspired and excited, but in fact I just feel sad.
I flick on the radio and it’s a repeat of a programme I heard earlier in the week, about a Hungarian who fell in love before the war and lost her sweetheart; then, through a series of coincidences, she met up with him again more than fifty years later and married him. A year later he was dead of cancer.
We moved into 34 Lillieshall Road on 4 July 1988. It was a hot day and still early enough in my pregnancy for me to be feeling constantly sick.
The only other thing I remember is that some good friends of ours happened to have moved into a house on a parallel road on the exact same day. In the evening Jim and Ruth came round and we shared an Indian takeaway among the cardboard boxes and packing cases. The turmeric in the sauce stained our best grey melamine coffee table bright yellow.
We tried everything, but nothing would remove the bright yellow cloud. And then one day, almost a year later, it just disappeared all by itself.
‘That’s all you remember?’ Jonathan says. ‘About moving in here?’
‘It was a big thing,’ I tell him, ‘one of those things you can just never explain.’
Dinner at Nick and Beth’s in Wandsworth. They are a bit older than us and, I half-suddenly remember, old friends of ‘Bubbles’ (real name Susan) who happens to be John Pidgeon’s ex-wife.
In the seventies, Beth lived in Macaulay Court, the 1930s art deco block at the far end of Lillieshall Road, where it turns sharply left and becomes Macaulay Road. And Bubbles lived at 61 Lillieshall Road with John and wore gold platform boots – or at least that’s what Beth once told me. And eventually John left her to live in our house, on the other side of the road and just a few doors down.
Now as Beth and I walk up their garden steps to inspect her echinacea and phlox before dinner, I decide I ought to question her about John Pidgeon. Bubbles must know where he is. So could Beth give me Bubbles’ phone number so I can ask – as delicately as possible of course?
‘Oh, Bubbles and him, they really really don’t get on,’ Beth says. ‘But he works at BBC Radio now, I think – he’s big, head of something – just send an e-mail to the BBC, you’ll get him.’
Next day, in the kitchen, Jonathan – chopping onions – asks me what I did today.
I tell him I sent an e-mail off to John Pidgeon at the BBC.
‘That’s all? But did you at least start chasing the deeds? You need to know which of those millions of people actually owned the house.’
I tell him the truth – that I’m a bit stuck on that. Because the other day I called the Bank of Scotland, our mortgage company, and all they would give me was a fax number for the deeds department.
‘You mean you can’t phone them?’
‘No, they said there wasn’t a number for them – only a fax number. So I faxed them, explaining.’
‘But that’s ludicrous – will they fax you back?’
‘I think they said they’d phone or e-mail.’
‘How soon?’
‘They didn’t say.’
From: John Pidgeon
To: Julie Myerson
Sent: Friday, March 10, 2003 2:51 PM
Subject: 34 Lillieshall Road
Julie
yes it’s me and yes we’d be happy to talk about the house. As for who we bought it off, the name Ricketts does ring the vaguest of bells but it was a long time ago. I saw the house towards the end of 1979 – I was already living in Lillieshall Road (at 61) but parting from my first wife – and moved in in April 1980. I bought it via the ABC estate agency. The interior doors were covered with hardboard and painted orange. There was a purple carpet in the front room. I fell in love with Julia (my wife) there. We were very fond of 34…
Best
John
I ask him where he lives and if it would be possible to come and see him. He says they live in ‘deepest Kent – between Canterbury and Hythe’ and that his wife Julia has ‘quite a stash of 34 Lillieshall Road photos’ and that I can come