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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 and visit them this Saturday if I like. I tell him that would be great and we fix a time.

      I bound downstairs and tell Jonathan I finally have a date to talk to someone from the house. ‘One down … and about forty-five to go.’

      ‘The Pidgeons are the easy ones,’ he says, as if I needed reminding.

      

      I leave it a couple of days and then I decide Enough is Enough. I am going to phone the Bank of Scotland to chase the deeds. My faxes have all gone unanswered.

      The man starts to ask me for my name and mortgage account number and I interrupt politely to explain that it’s not an enquiry about the mortgage.

      ‘What then?’ he asks me in a slightly ruder voice. I explain that I’m a writer, actually; that mine is an unusual request; that I just want to look at the deeds of my house for research purposes. I faxed them four days ago and I’ve heard nothing. Can’t I just be put through to the department. Please?

      ‘No one,’ he says very frostily, ‘can actually speak to the deeds department.’

      ‘But why?’

      ‘They don’t deal directly with people.’

      ‘But – why?’

      ‘It’s just the way they work.’

      ‘So they’re only reachable by fax?’

      ‘That’s right.’

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