Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House. Julie Myerson

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СКАЧАТЬ totally unprompted. ‘I went there!’

      ‘You did?’

      ‘Oh yes, dear. When I was a little girl, in the 1930s it would have been, quite a few times. There was an old lady who lived there.‘

      ‘Lucy Spawton?’

      ‘That’s right, I knew her.’

      ‘You knew Lucy Spawton?’ I can’t believe what I’m hearing.

      ‘That’s right, dear. She lived upstairs, you see, and there was this old couple called the Hinkleys –’

      ‘You knew the Hinkleys?’

      ‘Well, yes, dear, at least I only met them a few times I suppose but –’

      Jake comes up the stairs, slumps on the landing carpet in stained school shirt, breathing hard, waiting to complain about Chloë. Furiously, silently, I bat him away, push the door shut with my foot, lock it. I hear him tut and slump for a moment with his weight against it, then turn and go back downstairs again.

      ‘This is just so wonderful,’ I tell Mrs Clayton. ‘You see you’re the very first person I’ve spoken to who actually knew these people.’

      Mrs Clayton laughs delightedly. ‘Really, dear? Well, it’s nice to be able to be of some use to someone.’

      I wonder how old she is. I ask her how old she was when she knew Lucy.

      ‘Well,’ she says, ‘Miss Spawton lived there for fifty years, she was a spinster, you see, dear. And she lived upstairs and let it out to people, I know that. And when she died, I think it was during the war, she left the house to her nephew Tom who lived somewhere nearby –’

      ‘Park Hill?’

      ‘That’s right! And when he died – not that long after Lucy, poor Tom – our Auntie Til sold it to a Mr Reggie Povah – that’s P-O-V-A-H if you’ve got a pen handy and want to write it down, dear. And Reggie Povah was related to us by marriage, and he was sold it a little on the cheap on the condition that he didn’t throw the Hinkleys out – they were old by then – but as soon as he’d got the house the horrible man put them in an old people’s home!’

      ‘In Hackney?’ The day before I had received their death certificates and couldn’t understand why, after thirty years spent living in our house, they had died in Hackney a year or so later.

      ‘Yes, well, you see, I think he did it up and let it to Americans and Canadians. Oh, it was a horrible thing he did. I don’t think the family really forgave him, you know.’

      I think of those names through the forties – the Costellos, Rita Wraight, the Blaines. I explain to Mrs Clayton that I know Margaret Phyllis Askew lived here in 1947.

      ‘Yes, well, she was my sister, my twin in fact. She’s passed on now. And she had three children and one of them, I think Diane, probably lived there with her mother and father. Diane lives in Brighton now. Would you like to talk to her? Shall I get her to ring you?’

      

      Downstairs, Jonathan is back from his committee and has a phone in one hand, a beer in the other. Both boys are sitting on chairs in the kitchen doing a five-minute penalty for deliberately kicking a ball in Chloë’s garden. Raph looks furiously sulky but Jake just looks resigned. Chloë is swinging on the swings, clearly relishing the sight of her brothers stuck on kitchen chairs.

      ‘Guess what. I’ve just spoken to someone who knew Lucy Spawton and the Hinkleys,’ I tell Jonathan.

      He smiles and tells the boys the penalty’s over. They rush out into the garden.

      I tell him how Diane Askew may have lived here as a child with her parents Phyllis and Peter. And I tell him about Reggie Povah and Audrey Clayton calling him A Horrible Man and saying he threw the Hinkleys out.

      ‘So we have a baddie?’

      ‘It’s a good story, isn’t it?’ I say – forgetting for a moment that this is all horribly real.

      

      At about nine-thirty the phone rings.

      ‘Julie Myerson?’ says a crisp and rather focused voice. ‘This is Diane Askew.’ Diane says she’s had a very excited phone call from her aunt.

      ‘But I’m afraid I’m too young,’ she says quickly, as if genuinely sorry to dash my hopes. ‘I was born in 1955 and I never lived there. However, I’ve spoken to my brother Bob – he was born in ‘47 and lives in Manchester now – and he says he has 34 Lillieshall Road on his birth certificate. Also I looked in my box and it turns out I have a photo of his christening, outside a church with great big white pillars –’

      ‘Holy Trinity? Or St John the Evangelist? That’s on Clapham Road. Both have big columns.’

      ‘Well, I don’t know – which would it be?’

      ‘This is wonderful,’ I tell her. ‘I can’t say how much I appreciate your ringing.’

      ‘Not sure if I can be of much help,’ she says again. I tell her every word is gold dust and that I would love to talk to Bob.

      ‘My aunt told you,’ she says, ‘about Reggie Povah?’

      I say, yes she did, and I ask whether there’s any way of finding out more about him.

      She laughs.

      ‘Well, he died quite recently,’ she says, ‘and he was a bit of a – well, let’s just say he wasn’t too popular in our family. But his daughter Alexa lives near me in Brighton. I see her all the time. I can put you in touch with her easily.’

      

      In a daze, I make the kids tea and burn the fishcakes. Chloë carefully picks the outside breadcrumb bit off. I try to tell them what’s happened – that today I’ve made a breakthrough. I’ve spoken to people who are related to people who actually lived in the house.

      ‘Great,’ says Raph, absently forking peas into his mouth. ‘More people cluttering up my room.’

      

      An hour later, Diane rings back.

      ‘Well, it’s all very weird,’ she says. ‘You see I’ve spoken to Alexa and I don’t think she knows much, but when I told her I’d been speaking to you, she said she knows you and she’s actually been to the house.’

      ‘What?’ I try to do something with this information but it makes no sense. ‘Really? How do you mean, been to the house?’

      ‘Your husband is a writer and director called Jonathan Myerson?’

      I sit down. ‘Yes.’

      ‘Well, Alexa used to be an actress and she came to your house to rehearse something, with Philip Lowrie, who played Pat Phoenix’s son in Coronation Street.’

      ‘My God, yes, that makes sense, years ago.’

      ‘So, СКАЧАТЬ