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

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‘blonde and dimpled and dungareed’

      But these are just a writer’s irresistible imaginings, not facts. What do I know? The totter may not have come that morning at all, and anyway the fireguard may still have been in use. And it might all have been quite the other way round. Charlotte might have been a quite different woman – shrill, sharp-tongued, wealthier by birth than her husband who, she never ceases to remind him, may be an author but is hardly a successful one. He’s yet to earn more than a few shillings from it. It’s pathetic, at his age – all very well to dub himself ‘author and journalist’ when the census man calls round, but when’s he going to get more than the odd article published in the South London Press? If it wasn’t for the money left her by her mother, they’d still be living out in the falling-down cottage in Deptford and would never have afforded somewhere so swanky and clean and new.

      This summer, we’ve lived at 34 Lillieshall Road for exactly fifteen years. It’s a narrow, three-storey, slightly subsiding, dirty red-brick, mid-Victorian Clapham terrace with a mature, spreading hydrangea in front of the bay window and a glossy scented jasmine that climbs up past the front door to the first-floor window.

      The bedroom windowsills each sport a wooden window box, made by Jonathan and painted hyacinth blue by me and filled with whatever flower I can keep alive each season. The paintwork around the windows is white and peeling. The bricks need cleaning but it would cost a fortune so, like everything else, we put it off. There used to be a lawn in front but now there are seaside pebbles, bought by the bagful from a place behind Clapham North tube station. It’s a stylish, romantic look but would be much better if we’d killed the weeds first. As it is, the dock and groundsel and nettles spring hopefully up between the pebbles. Shingle beach meets urban waste ground.

      I am perfectly, unquestioningly, at home in this house. After a childhood spent moving house almost every year, I had told myself roots didn’t matter, that being with the people you loved was all there was. I think I even believed it. I used to brag about my lack of domestic continuity, my aloof and nomadic style. Until I met Jonathan. He lived in a terraced cottage with two cats, a full fridge, and honeysuckle round the door. He was only six months older than me yet somehow had managed to achieve this state of grown-upness, of stability and domestic warmth. I fell in love with the life as much as the man.

      We decided to have a baby. And a joint mortgage.

      Big things and small things have happened to me in this house. I became a mother here – once, twice, three times – and, later, a writer. Standing holding the phone in the far corner of the bedroom, I listened to my mother tell me that my father had sealed himself in his garage and killed himself. I was leaning against a wall that no longer exists because we made a door through into the bathroom. Downstairs in the hall, I had my final terrible argument with my younger sister and watched her walk away down the front garden path. I sat and trembled afterwards on the bottom step of the stairs.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ