My Life in Houses Read online

  Our flat, or two rooms of it, had a door on the landing, cutting it off from the staircase, so that once inside it felt self-contained. We never heard Mr Elton, above us, or Mrs Woodcock, the tenant in the flat below. The house, it was easy to pretend, belonged entirely to us. They were both as respectful of our privacy as we were of theirs, and in no time at all we were comfortable with each other. Mr Elton was particularly pleased that Mrs Woodcock approved of us. We never discovered how the two of them came to be friends, or how Mrs Woodcock came to be living in his house, but he always seemed just slightly wary of her. If Mrs Brown, back in Winchester Road, had given the impression of aping gentility, there was no doubt that Mrs Woodcock was the real thing. She was a rather haughty, dignified, elderly woman, always well dressed, with coiffured white hair, slow in her movements but not because of any disability. She was unfailingly polite and gracious, but she had a sharp tongue if disagreed with which she didn’t hesitate to use. It would’ve been easy to be intimidated by her.

  We received a note, left for us on the hall table, in our first week there, inviting us for sherry at 5.30 p.m. one day. We both went, but after that first time it was usually just me, because Hunter would still be at work. It became an established routine that twice a week I would go down to Mrs Woodcock’s sitting room and take sherry, poured into exquisite crystal glasses, the sort to be sipped from slowly. Mrs Woodcock suited the house. She might not have been the owner but she looked, and sounded, as though she was, sitting in her Queen Anne armchair with a slightly imperious air. What contrasted with this impression of being above everyone and everything was her genuine curiosity. She was keen to know about us, but held back from asking direct questions because to do so was, in her opinion, impertinent. Information, which she badly wanted, had to emerge gradually without seeming to have been requested. It was a good game, which I played cunningly once I’d recognised it as such. We didn’t chat, we conversed. I noticed that I became affected by Mrs Woodcock’s ultra-correct speech. Careless grammar irritated her. She never said so, but if I came out with slang, she winced slightly, and so I tried to speak properly. There was no cut-and-thrust of real debate either, no interrupting Mrs Woodcock’s speech as ideas occurred to me. If I did cut in, knowing what she was going to say because it had become obvious and she was being long-winded, when I’d made my point she would simply resume, where I had made her leave off.

  But she did like to be challenged. The subjects we ranged over were usually chosen by her, and at first it was like a stately game of tennis. She would lob a question about the matter she’d decided on, often political, in such a way that it could be easily answered, but then she would direct another, tempting me to return it with vigour. She was quite pleased if we then had a disagreement, and would smile as though she had won a point by provoking me. Her standards of morals and behaviour were high, and she expected others to adhere to them. Vulgarity, or what she termed vulgarity, in particular offended her, and what she considered vulgar could seem to me simply funny. The Sunday Times colour magazine’s first issue was an example. The day it was delivered, I saw her hold it in a pair of sugar tongs and ostentatiously drop it into the dustbin, turning her head away as if she was holding a rotten, stinking fish.

  I think Mr Elton was relieved that Mrs Woodcock seemed to like us because it took some of the responsibility to be sociable off him. Why he felt he ought to be sociable I don’t know, but he clearly did. She tried to boss him about, and though he would agree with what she told him needed to be done, about house, he didn’t always do it, or not until it suited him. He also didn’t like being drawn in any way into looking after her when she was not feeling well, which was where I came in useful. She had a son, and also a niece, and she sometimes wanted them to be called upon to do something for her but she wanted this obligation to be made clear to them by someone else. I didn’t like doing it, but I allowed her to enlist my help, and would agree to ring either the son or the niece and say I’d found their mother, or aunt, in rather a bad way, feeling breathless, and I just thought they would want to know . . . they didn’t in the least want to know, and deeply resented my do-gooder calls, but usually they came, and that would satisfy Mrs Woodcock for a while. Mr Elton was very glad to be excused this sort of chore.

  He came to our flat, very occasionally, for a drink, though Mrs Woodcock never did, in spite of repeated invitations. She claimed that the stairs were too steep, and refused all help to manage them, but I think the truth was that she always preferred to be on her own ground. Anyway, there would have been nowhere for her to sit except for the stools in the kitchen. We hadn’t yet got any easy chairs, just some big cushions. We’d got it into our heads that a gracious room like our sitting room needed gracious furniture, and we trawled through antique shops in Camden Town, trying to find it at a price we could afford. We were probably influenced by Mrs Woodcock, who held modern furniture in contempt, especially any betraying a Scandinavian influence. When we finally bought two second-hand wing chairs, poor copies of her genuine Queen Anne, she was rather approving as she saw us carrying them in. Battered though they were, and mere imitations, they were not ‘modern junk’. We quickly found out that modern junk might have been a lot more comfortable.

  Her influence extended into other areas too. The first time I had sherry with her, she said I would need the telephone number of her greengrocer, butcher and fishmonger so that I could place my order and it could be delivered at the same time as hers. The thought of having an order had never entered my head, but I was quite charmed with the idea. Perhaps living in this house required such behaviour. Mrs Woodcock pointed out that the walk from even the nearest shop was a long way, and that carrying heavy bags would be bad for my back, best to be sensible. I thought I’d try it, and solemnly rang up, as instructed, and read out what I thought amounted to ‘an order’. Gosh, it was jolly good fun – I felt I was in a radio play, or maybe Mrs Dale’s Diary (a popular soap). A van from each of the various establishments duly arrived, and I tripped down the steps, ever so ladylike, to collect my order. I committed, what in Mrs Woodcock’s opinion was, a faux pas by paying in cash there and then, when the done thing, as I should have known, was to have an account. The fruit, the vegetables, the meat and the fish were all of excellent quality but they were also, of course, extremely expensive. I never had an order delivered again, as Mrs Woodcock undoubtedly noticed, though no comment was made.

  She was quite right, though, about the long walk from the shops. It took me a while to work out the best way to get to and from the High Street with so many different routes available and all of them interesting to walk along. Hampstead was such an unusual area, full of contrasts everywhere, with large houses mixed up with little terraces of cottages, and all kinds of narrow passageways connecting the broad roads. It was all uphill and downhill, with views of the Heath appearing suddenly at almost every corner. I learned more about houses, just walking through Hampstead than I ever had before – Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian, all there, muddled up together and yet somehow fitting. This, I thought, is where I want to have a house, as near to the Heath as possible.

  I spent six weeks at home in Heath Villas, writing a novel and then, when an agent I sent it to turned it down (though what his reply actually said was ‘come and see me’ and I interpreted that as a rejection), I began teaching. I didn’t want to be a teacher but it was the only job I thought I was qualified to do. (In 1960, it was reckoned that a degree was enough, with no extra training.) I left the house every weekday to get two buses to Paddington where I’d been sent as a supply teacher to a secondary modern school there. The job was quite well paid and all my earnings were going towards buying a house one day, so however hard the work it was worth it with such an end in the far distance. On the bus, I read a newspaper which at that time had a double-page spread summarising current affairs for easy understanding. I absorbed the main points and then, whatever lesson I was supposed to be teaching, I taught current affairs instead. The children
quite liked this, preferring it to maths or geography or any other lesson, and the other teachers didn’t care so long as they themselves didn’t have to fill in for the absent real teacher. I went from Paddington to various other schools, a week at a time usually, and then I was sent to Barnsbury, in Islington, for a whole term.

  This school was still a secondary modern, but it was much better than any of the others I’d been allocated to. There was no getting away with cobbled-together current affairs lessons, for a start. I was filling in for an English teacher on maternity leave and I was expected to carry on with the syllabus she’d been teaching. I settled in quickly, and though it was exhausting it could also be rewarding. Half the battle, as every teacher knows, was imposing discipline, which to me was simply a form of acting – acting harsh, acting fierce, acting stern. I’d cast myself in different parts according to the behaviour of the class and once I’d got control of the more rowdy elements I had no trouble with the actual teaching.

  It was always, during this period at Barnsbury (which went on two years in all, with a proper job offered after that first term) such a comfort coming back to Heath Villas. I had such an easy and pleasant journey to and from school every day, walking as I did across the edge of the Heath to the South End Green overground station where I took a train a few stops to Barnsbury, then had a short walk to the school itself. However tired I was at the end of each school day, the climb up the hill into the Vale of Health was always soothing. I always came the back way, cutting across Lime Avenue to approach the pond and stood watching the ducks and the occasional swan before going round the corner to Heath Villas. Twentieth-century life fell away, and I always felt that at any minute one of the literary luminaries who had lived in the Vale might suddenly appear to admire the view I was admiring. Entering our house, the intense silence added to this feeling that this could not be London, that I could not be living so near to its centre.

  But I was, we were. The strange thing was that we were not tucked away in some backwater with little idea of what was going on in the wider London world outside our house. On the contrary, we were part of it, leading a very London life in spite of where we lived. Hunter was now on the Sunday Times and all kinds of perks came with the job. We went to theatres’ first nights, openings of new films, previews at art galleries and to every kind of restaurant. Coming back to the Vale of Health after these evenings it seemed more and more incredible that it could exist, so free of noise and traffic, untouched by the feverish atmosphere of the West End. The only time there was any disturbance was on bank holidays when the fair arrived. Then, the road into the Vale would get jammed, and crowds would spill out all round it coming to enjoy the roundabouts and other fairground attractions. Even so, the sounds that floated above the tree tops were not deafening by the time they reached our windows, but instead simply lively and somehow quaint, a reminder of all the other times the fair had come over the years, giving a reassuring feeling of continuity. Even Mr Elton didn’t object to this particular, short-lived racket, and Mrs Woodcock never referred to it as vulgar.

  Once, around the time of a fair, Mr Elton took us out for the evening, an obvious sign that he approved of us as tenants. He took us to a variety show at the Victoria Palace theatre, and then for dinner at Overton’s the fish restaurant. It emerged afterwards that he’d gone to see the show first, to be sure that it was enjoyable, because he didn’t want to risk disappointing us. The highlight, in his opinion, was a man who imitated bird songs – ‘extraordinary, as if there were a blackbird in the theatre’ – and a juggling act – ‘marvellous dexterity’. He hardly ate any of his dinner, but we scoffed ours, appreciating the food and wine rather more than the bird noises. Over the meal, he made it clear that he was very happy to have us in his house and that he felt we fitted in remarkably well. We were pleased with the compliment, knowing it was a genuine mark of favour bestowed upon us because Mr Elton loved his house and wanted to see it loved by others. We got on so well with him but he was still shy and went on communicating by hand-written note. These notes were left on the hall table, where Mrs Woodcock also left hers, and we replied to them the same way. Sometimes it became quite ridiculous, with us passing each other on the stairs to leave a note saying what could easily be said in person, but still I loved this form of communication. It suited the house. Telephones, though of course we used them, didn’t. The moment ours started to ring, I’d leap to silence it. Notes were quiet. They gave time to think and compose a reply at leisure. If Mr Elton was eccentric using them, then I was just as eccentric myself, encouraging him. The house, I felt, approved.

  After almost three years of living at Heath Villas the time to leave was coming. We didn’t want to, and Mr Elton didn’t want us to, but we wanted to own a house and stop paying rent (six guineas a week). We also were beginning to realise we wanted children. So, in the autumn of 1962, we began looking for a house in Hampstead. What a joke! Our limit was £5,000 (with a substantial mortgage to obtain, of course). There was no house in Hampstead proper for that price.

  At first, we refused to believe what the estate agents told us, diligently searching every road and square, convinced there must be some little house everyone else had overlooked, or had thought too dilapidated to take on. We would find it. But after weeks of tramping round, we began to give up hope. Facts had to be faced, and the facts were that we couldn’t afford a house in Hampstead and if we were still stuck on buying a house then we would have to forget Hampstead and move away. Either that or we could perhaps buy a flat – in one of the big mansions in areas like Frognal. We’d lived happily in our current flat and could very likely find an equally good but roomier flat where children were not forbidden.

  No. No because we longed for the independence and privacy a house would bring. So we began looking round the fringes of South End Green where there were some houses, in poor condition, just over our limit, which might be possible, but they were invariably under offer before we even got to look round them. Next stop was Kentish Town. I hated Kentish Town High Road, a long, flat traffic-choked road with scruffy shops either side. The estate agent there was Jennings & Sampson, who had on their books houses in the streets leading off this depressing High Road for which we might be able to get a mortgage. I wouldn’t go inside some of them. Just standing there, so near the thunder and dirt of the main road, I thought how depressed I’d get coming home to this every day. Having a house wouldn’t be worth it. The situation mattered, maybe not as much as the house itself but still, it mattered. A house for sale in Tufnell Park, out of the range of the High Road, sounded better. It would be a brisk, fifteen-minute walk to the Heath, but for a fit couple in their mid-twenties that was nothing. This house, though, had five storeys, and if we bought it we’d have to let half of it, and we didn’t want to become landlords ourselves.

  On and on it went, this trailing round looking at houses we didn’t like, in roads where we didn’t want to live, and every time coming back to the idyllic Vale of Health. We’d been round and round the Heath several times, searching all the fringes. Page 44 of the A–Z was tattered with use and increasingly we were thumbing page 45. Then, in late November, wearily looking yet again at what Jennings & Sampson had on offer, we saw another house for sale. It was in Parliament Hill Fields, on page 45, the other side of Highgate Road. It was described as flat-fronted, semi-detached, with a pleasant garden. There was a drawback, which was that the house had a sitting tenant, paying one pound and twelve shillings a week, living on the top floor. Sitting tenants were protected by law and there was little hope of getting them to leave unless there was an impressive financial inducement, which we wouldn’t be in a position to offer. The house itself was probably in need of modernising – ‘ideally suited for the discriminate buyer who is desirous of carrying out repairs and redecorations to his own requirements’ was clear estate-agent language for ‘it’s a wreck’. But it was near the Heath, very near, if on what was then thought the wrong side, so we went to look at it, on a bitter
ly cold, snowy day.

  The approach was promising. Coming from the Vale of Health, we saw, as we crossed Highgate Road, a fine Georgian terrace set back from the road, with trees and some grass in front of it. The house we’d come to view was in Boscastle Road, directly behind this terrace. We crossed Highgate Road into Dartmouth Park Road, a wide street with four-storey houses either side, and then left into Boscastle Road itself, another generously broad road. We were early for our appointment with the estate agent and had plenty of time to stand and stare at the house. It had a reassuringly solid look about it. The large floor-to-ceiling windows on the first floor looked like those of our flat in Heath Villas. That was good. So was the broad windowsill on the ground floor – I immediately imagined boxes there, full of geraniums cascading down the front, mixed in with some trailing ivy. How pretty it would look, especially with fresh paint everywhere and a bright yellow front door.

  The estate agent, when he arrived, had a struggle opening the front door. He blamed the snow, claiming there was nothing wrong with the lock it was just jammed up with icy particles. Eventually, after he’d twisted and turned the key several more times, the door began to yield. He still had to give it a hard push, but it creaked open enough to allow us to enter. We shuffled into the hall, and then recoiled from the smell. Even the estate agent suddenly had trouble breathing as he muttered that the house had been shut up a long time, which accounted, he maintained, for ‘the lack of fresh air’. But he knew, and we knew, the smell, the stench was due to more than the house having been closed up. It was the smell of decay somewhere, dead rats maybe, or of blocked drains, or of rubbish piled up in some forgotten corner. Whatever the source, it was an overpoweringly evil smell.

  We stood in the gloomy hall, looking at the dark brown embossed wallpaper covering the lower part of the walls. Above the dado rail which ran along the top there was dull beige wallpaper, some of it peeling off the wall revealing crumbling plaster. There was a little light leaking in from the glass pane above the front door, but this wasn’t enough to see anything properly, which was maybe just as well. The estate agent moved us quickly into the front room, which had heavy wooden shutters, meaning there was even less light here than there had been in the hall. He opened them with a flourish, and one immediately came off its hinges. Undeterred, he drew our attention to the ‘fine genuine marble fireplace’ and commented on the ‘generous proportions of the room’. We shifted uneasily on the bare floorboards, aware that some of them were clearly splintered and would maybe give way. The estate agent pointed to the ceiling rose and said it was ‘genuine’. We gazed upwards, but more at the bare wire hanging down than at the plaster decoration. But we were being moved on rapidly to the back room, dark not because of any closed shutters but because the light from the window was blocked by the back additions to the house. There must have only been a couple of hours a day when the sun could shine directly in, such was the tunnel effect. One of these additions was the kitchen. The estate agent was silenced, knowing nothing could be said to put any kind of gloss on the state this room was in. It looked as if no attempt had been made to clean it for years. The sink was black with dirt, half-full of scummy water which had lumps of grey matter, impossible to identify, floating in it. There was an ancient cooker, the top an inch deep in filth, with the door hanging off. A board running from cooker to sink was covered in a red and white patterned plastic, greasy and slimy. ‘The kitchen needs modernising, obviously,’ the estate agent said. Obviously.