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The Pidgeons 1981–1987

We bought this house from a man called John Pidgeon.

Just walk through the hall and into the kitchen and immediately you’ll spot a couple of crucial things about John Pidgeon. The first is that he likes to do his own carpentry – all the kitchen cupboards are hand-made by him, with fat, optimistic little bluebirds carved in each corner. And the second is that he had a habit of not quite finishing the task in hand – none of the cupboards have handles.

Right from the start, we viewed this trait of his with a kind of frustrated affection. ‘Pidgeonesque’ became the word we used for anything where the idea was good but the execution lacking. Or maybe it was just that we identified with it so closely ourselves. After a year we decided to paint the white cupboards bright blue. It took us about six months to get around to the second coat. Maybe this syndrome was infectious.

When I first saw the house, in May 1988, Jonathan and I had just found out we were having a baby. We weren’t married but the baby was planned – though it wasn’t expected so quickly. Where was all the ‘trying’ you were supposed to do? At twenty-seven, we were young and romantic enough to feel we might have quite enjoyed the suspense.

Still, now that it had happened, we decided we had to move. It wasn’t just a question of space but also of a new start, a home that belonged to both of us. I didn’t mind about the lack of a wedding – or at least back then I didn’t think I did – but I wanted pots and pans, paint swatches, the paraphernalia of a life chosen together.

We looked at houses around Clapham but none of them were quite right. The only one I’d been drawn to wasn’t all that suitable – it was just, as Jonathan astutely pointed out, that the exhausted woman who showed us round had a dribbling newborn baby on her shoulder. Tiny towelling babygros dripped on a rail over the bath, the whole place smelled of Wet Wipes. I wanted it. Meanwhile details of a house in Lillieshall Road arrived in the post one Saturday morning. It was firmly out of our price range.

‘It looks absolutely gorgeous,’ I told Jonathan, ‘and look at that garden.’ The photo showed a smooth green lawn going on forever, punctuated with the pink, red, and yellow blobs of roses.

He agreed. ‘It’s a lovely road too. Beautiful houses. But look at the price. There’s no point even thinking about it.’

I agreed with him. He threw the details in the bin.

An hour later, I retrieved them.

We rang the estate agent. He said the house had been on the market for a year. The owner had moved to the country. It had been standing empty all that time.

‘If no one wants it,’ I pointed out to Jonathan, ‘maybe we can get the price down?’

He laughed.

‘I’m just going to look,’ I told him, ‘just on my own. Just in case.’

‘In case of what?’

‘Just to put my mind at rest, OK?’

Number 34 Lillieshall Road. Even the street name sounded like flowers. Lilies and shawls. Armfuls of scented lilies and, yes, baby shawls. We’d been to Mothercare and bought several satisfying cellophaned packs of white cellular baby blankets. Just to have in the cupboard. They looked impossibly small. They looked like they were made for a doll’s cot. I couldn’t believe we’d ever use them.

Lilies and shawls. Flowers and babies.

It was a hot afternoon in May. The young man from the estate agents – sweating in his shirt and suit – unlocked the door and said he’d leave me to wander round on my own. A fatal thing to let me do. Like leaving a pair of Victorian lovers unchaperoned. Maybe he knew it. Maybe he knew how hard my heart was pumping. Don’t ever go house-hunting when you’re pregnant. As bad as doing the weekly food shop just before lunch. Too hungry, you’ll buy too much.

I was hungry.

I fell in love immediately, as expectant, first-time mothers do with houses that are beautiful, empty (unloved!) and streaming with sudden late afternoon sunshine after rain. I paced those rooms, the dusty air lit with magic, and knew that it was mine already. It was waiting for me to fill it with children. I could have had my babies right there and then, on the wide, dusty floor of the bedroom.

In fact, I could already hear the furious laughter of toddlers echoing round the terracotta-tiled kitchen. I could see the small Wellington boots lined up in the hall, the school blazers hanging – torn and stained – from the pegs by the stairs. I could even, if I strained hard enough, hear the dull thud of teenage music from an upper room, the slam of an adolescent bedroom door. The house wasn’t empty at all. It was full of my life, my future.

‘Like it?’ asked the young man who stubbed out a cigarette as I reemerged into the sitting room.

‘It’s just perfect!’ I said. Then I worried. Was I supposed to sound cooler?

But how could I? It was quite simply the most perfect house I’d ever walked into.

The rooms were large, light, the walls rag-rolled. Apricot and gold in the sitting room, lavender and hyacinth in the first-floor bedroom. In fact it was a house full of decorative surprises. The loo on the first-floor landing was papered in black and white striped felt, exactly like a zebra, with a silken tassel (a tail!) to flush the loo itself. The top (second-floor) bedroom was described in the details as having ‘wallpaper with matching hand-painted blinds’. What it neglected to add was that the wallpaper was Tottenham Hotspur wallpaper – blue and white shields repeated so many times that it sent you dizzy – and the blinds had ‘The Spurs! The Spurs!’ hand-stencilled on them.

‘I know,’ said the estate agent with an apologetic laugh. ‘We weren’t sure whether or not to come clean about that. I mean, it could be offputting – unless you’re a fan?’

‘My husband’s a cricket man,’ I told him, ‘but we’ve got a baby on the way.’

‘Oh, well then. You never know.’

He left me alone again and I went and stood in the garden, which was eighty feet long and clearly cherished. The magnolia had just finished flowering – huge waxy teardrop petals flushed with pink and still damp from the recent shower. Grass springy and damp underfoot – scent of lilac, honeysuckle, and the strange deliciousness of parched soil after rain. A blackbird called down the lawn.

I had to live here. The baby in me wouldn’t be born till the following January, but I’d recently felt it move for the first time – a fluttery zigzag I could just feel if I lay on my stomach and shut my eyes. Now I knew for certain that this child would live here in this house. It would be his or her house – the place where he or she cried and laughed and took his or her first steps. I went back and told Jonathan.

He put his head in his hands and then he said what he always says in these situations: ‘We’ll just have to find the money somehow then.’

We only met John Pidgeon once, at the house, to talk through fixtures and fittings. He was living out in Kent and should, we reckoned, have been relieved – grateful even – finally to be done with his bridging loan. But if he was, he didn’t show us. He played it so very cool. Years later, all I remembered about him was that he had brown hair and a beard, was a little older than us, and was in rock music journalism. Also – as he told us then – that his wife was an interior designer. This explained the rag-rolling.

We stood with him on the lawn and talked about the big white marble fireplaces in the sitting room. They’d been stolen while the house was standing empty but Val across the road had seen the burglars in action and they’d been caught red-handed. So the fireplaces had been returned and reinstalled, but badly. You could see all the joins between the marble slabs and the mantel of the one at the front wasn’t quite straight.

John Pidgeon agreed to sell us the huge mirror that was screwed to the bathroom wall (I really wanted the house exactly as I’d seen it that first afternoon) and then he announced that he wanted to dig up some plants. The yellow rose, for instance – it had been planted for a child who died. And the magnolia, too, was of sentimental value.

‘He can’t take the magnolia!’ I told Jonathan, horrified.

I’d dreamed about that magnolia several times by now – vague, happily disorganized dreams in which our nameless, faceless baby also featured. The magnolia, with its generous green arms lifted to the sky, was already a part of my life. Trees are owned by places, not by people. They belong to the ground. That magnolia wasn’t going anywhere.

I did feel for him about the dead child, but a meaner part of me wondered whether he was actually telling the truth. But then could a person make that kind of thing up? The fact that this thought crossed my mind shows that I might have been going to be a mother, but I really knew nothing yet of the ferocity of birth and death, of everything that parenthood makes you stand to lose. If I had, would I have begged him to take the rose away? ‘Have it – please, I understand.’ I’d like to think so.

All of this is on my mind as I write to John Pidgeon at the forwarding address he left with us in 1988. The letter comes back a week later, scuffed and creased and marked ‘Not known at this address’.

Meanwhile, I go to the Minet Archives Library in Knatchbull Road – the same library where I first glimpsed Henry and Charlotte on the juddering microfiche – and ask the librarian whether there’s any way of finding out the names of people who lived in our house. She has thick black hair and a frowny face and is drinking coffee from a mug with a picture of the Teletubbies on it.

‘I suppose you could look in Kelly’s,’ she says.

Kelly’s?

She leads me over to a shelf of volumes and tells me I can just look up our address, year by year, and the names should all be there. It’s a kind of phone book from before there were phones; the first half is more like the Yellow Pages, listing shops and tradesmen, and then there’s a long list of ‘householders’, street by street, house by house. It’s that easy.

‘It’ll only be the adults,’ she says, ‘but it should give you a list of names, if that’s what you’re looking for.’

I go through the volumes – experiencing a small jolt each time I see 34 Lillieshall Road printed on the page. I’m surprised at how just an address can feel like a part of you. In a way, it’s hard to believe that those words existed before we lived here. More than a hundred years of letters plopping through the letter box with that precise number and those words on. Crowds of different people who’d write ‘34 Lillieshall Road’ each time they had to fill in a form or begin a letter.

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 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.’

I sigh. ‘But what if they don’t ever fax back?’

‘I’m sorry, madam, that’s not for me to say.’

‘But you work for the Bank of Scotland!’

‘I’m not in the deeds department.’

I try to work this one out. ‘But – so there’s no way of chasing them other than by sending another fax?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

I try another tack. ‘Do you think it’s likely they got it?’

‘I really couldn’t say. If you sent it through then I dare say they have it.’

‘So – how long do you think I should wait to hear?’

He takes a breath. ‘They won’t have prioritized it, madam,’ he says at last.

Eventually and grudgingly he gives me the name of the deeds manager. I say I’ll send yet another fax to him, a personal one.

‘That might be an idea,’ he says.

I put down the phone. A tabby cat lands with a thump on the desk, walks her muddy rainpaws all over my Post-it notes.

I’m driving to Kent to see John and Julia Pidgeon. I’m nervous. Ridiculously so. It’s just the idea of seeing John again, of meeting the mysterious Julia – of asking them a whole lot of personal questions about their lives in this house that I’d never dreamed I’d have to ask.

How will they react? Won’t they mind? Is it any of my business anyway? All I can think of is the beautiful garden we didn’t maintain, the fireplaces we eventually ripped out, and the sentimental rose I didn’t let him take.

‘Bear in mind it’s far worse for them,’ Jonathan tells me before I leave. ‘The one thing you can usually rely on when you sell your house is that you’ll never have to see the person who bought it ever again.’

He’s right, of course. You stand on a lawn somewhere between exchange and completion and have a brief altercation about a bathroom mirror (I think we handed over £50 cash), a magnolia tree, a rose bush – but at least you think there’s nothing to lose. You’ll never see each other ever again. And when the new owner discovers that painted-over damp or the collapsing ceiling, you’ll be long gone.

John had said ‘deepest Kent’, and that’s just what this is: soft, sweet, English butter-wrapper countryside, rolling fields, sudden canopies of trees that turn the light an underwater green as the car dips beneath. Even though John sent me meticulous directions, I still manage to drive right past the house and all the way up to the end of the lane where it peters out into a rough track. And then nothing, no space to move forward. I have to back out and turn around in a clearing, branches and brambles scratching against the roof of the car. I rumble all the way back down the track and eventually find the house, a long low cottage set back from the road. Quiet and tranquil and utterly rural. As different as it could be from Lillieshall Road.

As I crunch across the gravel, a nervy, noticeably beautiful woman with reddish hair and a plum-coloured shirt comes striding out. Julia is slim, wide-mouthed, bright-eyed – younger than I’d expected. She holds out a hand. I tell her it’s so good finally to meet the person whose walls and curtains we lived with for so many years.

She laughs quickly. ‘Ha! The sponging, yes!’

And we always thought it was rag-rolling.

She calls to John, who’s doing something in the hedge. He steps down the bank, some kind of pruner in his hand and holds out the other one. He is just exactly as I remember him – solid, gruff, bearded, and slightly on edge. But then so am I.

We go in the kitchen – a little farmhousey kitchen whose long low window is filled up with a view of smooth country lawn. Julia makes coffee and John clears stuff off the table, spreads a load of photos out, and straightaway starts to tell me how he was in the process of buying the house – in 1980 – when he met Julia.

‘My wife and I lived at No. 61, but we’d decided the marriage wasn’t going anywhere. And she went to stay in her parents’ place in Kensington – a mews, I think they still have it. Anyway I think the sign went up at No. 34 on the Saturday morning – and I went straight round to the estate agent and the house was hideous, dreadful decor and all that, but I remember still thinking it was under-priced. I bought it immediately. For – guess how much?’

I shake my head and bite my lip. I can’t guess.

‘£32,000.’

He smiles and straightaway so does Julia. They both know we paid £217,500 for it just eight years later.

Julia pours coffee, pushes the sugar and milk across the table.

I ask him if he can remember who the seller was, but he can’t. He vaguely thinks that when he was first shown round the house there was a large black woman living there.

‘Was she called Kyle maybe? Or Ricketts?’

‘I don’t know. The name Ricketts rings a bell, like I said in the e-mail.’

Suddenly Julia takes a bottle from the fridge, pours herself a glass of water, and stands and tips her head back and drinks it all in one. We both watch her.

‘It was hideous,’ John says again as if he realizes this spectacle has been distracting. ‘The house.’

‘But you could see its potential?’ Julia prompts.

John tells me exactly what it was like. ‘The front door was orange and hardboarded over with a rectangular panel of fluted glass –’

‘I thought it was bobbly?’ Julia says, pouring more water.

‘Or bobbly. Bobbly or fluted anyway – down the middle. All the internal doors were hardboarded over too and the banisters. I pulled the hardboard off and there were no – what do you call them? – actual banisters, the verticals.’

I’m surprised. ‘None?’

‘I had to put them in – the ones you have there aren’t the originals, far from it. I got them from a squat on Clapham Park Road. They were pulling this squat down – I knew some people there – and so I whipped out the banisters.’

I laugh. Because it’s surprising and funny, the idea that the banisters in our house – which we’ve painted and repainted reverently and have always assumed were original – actually came from a Brixton squat.

‘They were pulling it down anyway. So you didn’t actually do anything wrong,’ Julia interjects quickly.

John ignores this. ‘They don’t match at all,’ he points out. ‘Some of them are completely different. Haven’t you noticed?’

I tell him I haven’t but then I am famous in our family for not noticing that sort of thing (and besides I always make an excuse when it comes to tedious banister painting), but I know that Jonathan, who misses nothing, will have noticed.

John tells me that there was an outdoor loo which they later turned into a pantry.

‘But it never felt right,’ Julia adds quickly. ‘We never quite liked the idea of it, did we? You know, a loo being a pantry.’ She wrinkles her nose.

‘There was also a bath right under the kitchen window,’ John says. ‘That was the only bathroom, you know.’

‘What?’ I ask. ‘You mean a horrid sixties one?’

‘No, no, not at all. A really nice cast-iron one. I had it outside the back door for ages and then eventually a rag-and-bone man came by and I said he could take it away. But I got something in return. Come and see.’

He takes me through into the low-beamed sitting room. Julia follows close behind. There on the wall are two brass candelabra-style light fittings, with flowers and bows. ‘I asked for those – they were on his cart – so he gave them to me in exchange.’

Julia says it was funny but in those days you still had this man with a cart and a bell – ‘a real rag-and-bone man’ – and as she says it, a dim memory slides back into view.

‘I remember him too!’ I say. ‘He still used to come when we first moved in.’ I realize he was one of those things you took for granted and then didn’t notice when he’d gone. The area comes up in price, times change, people too … the man with the cart goes.

I ask John how the house was arranged. Was it split up like flats for instance?

‘Oh no, not at all. No actual partitioning. But there were certainly different people living separately in different rooms.’ The little room at the back on the first landing (this is now my study but it’s also been a baby’s nursery and Raph’s room) was the kitchen. He says that in the (real downstairs) kitchen, the brick fireplace was plastered over with a nasty gas fire in it.

‘We pulled it all off and discovered this glorious original brick chimney breast behind.’

I apologize and tell them that in fact we finally got rid of it – ‘There was no light, we couldn’t see each other when we were cooking.’

John doesn’t react to this but says there used to be a door to the left of the fireplace – so those were originally two separate rooms. And the slab of York stone in the hearth came from Lassco Reclamation Yard. And we thought this was original as well. When we extended the kitchen out over the yard, we put the slab of stone in the garden, beneath the swing seat to stop feet scuffing the grass.

Julia asks if we kept the floor in the kitchen.

I hesitate. ‘The terracotta tiles? No, I’m afraid not. It wasn’t that we didn’t like them – in fact, we did, we loved them – but when we extended the kitchen they had to go.’

Julia gives John a private look and sighs.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, putting down my pen.

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘but they were so special.’

He smiles uneasily. ‘They took a while to find.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say again and I mean it. I realize I don’t especially want to mess with their memories. If the house was such a special and happy place for them, if they invested so much care in its decoration, do they really want to hear how we trashed so much of it?

But Julia’s face brightens. ‘Don’t be silly! We have practically the same here,’ she says, and I look at the floor and it’s true, they do. The earthy warmth of terracotta with little blue and white china patterned tiles at the corners, just like the ones that used to be in our kitchen. John asks me if I remember the zebra print wallpaper in the upstairs loo?

‘With the tassel tail you pulled to flush it?’

We all laugh. I tell them that for years we used to send guests upstairs to check out two things: the zebra loo and the Tottenham Hotspur Room.

‘Ah,’ says John and his face relaxes into a smile, ‘that was Leon.’ He shows me a photo of Leon in bed in the corner of Jake’s room. There’s the famous wallpaper with its blue and white Tottenham Hotspur logo repeated over and over. Leon is about Raph’s age – maybe nine or ten – and he has a Tottenham Hotspur duvet and a television and most of the rest of the room is taken up with a snooker table. Jake would be so jealous.

We kept the wallpaper for the first few months and then, that first Christmas in the house, with the baby due in late January, I began my maternity leave. The first thing I did was paint that room. It took me a week: Radio 4, the cool white light of mid-winter, and the sudden luxury of waking in the morning with no office to go to.

The Sanderson colour I chose was called Bisque – a pale, almost beigey, antique doll pink. It took a maddening number of coats to cover the Tottenham Hotspur shields. I wore a brown striped woollen dress and an old green apron and I stood awkwardly halfway up the ladder, holding on tight, an unborn pair of feet sporadically pounding me in the ribs. My body felt full and absurd, as if this baby should already be out.

By the time the last coat was dry, the baby’s head was engaged. The cellular blankets had come out of their cellophane and were waiting – neatly and satisfyingly stacked – in the small room on the first landing, where there was also a tiny Moses basket, a medium-sized changing table and a pine Mothercare cot which looked large enough to take a Great Dane.

John shows me another photo of Leon, in our garden this time. Our garden before he made it beautiful – a flat, barren, and barely recognizable expanse of scrubby lawn with a concrete path down the left-hand side. Leon is scowling at the camera and wearing a different football strip.

‘That was before he switched allegiance,’ John explains. ‘That room was almost a Chelsea room.’

I ask him how he and Julia met and he says it was in the Bowyer Arms on Clapham Manor Street. I tell him this is now the Bread and Roses, a Workers Beer Company pub – Jonathan goes there for Labour Party meetings in the upstairs room.

‘She was living in Iveley Road and trying to set up her own painted textiles business. But she came to help work on the house, with the decorating and so on, and when I moved in I had a kind of house-warming party and I invited her.’

‘And you went for my tight jeans!’ she says.

‘That’s when it started,’ he agrees soberly.

Julia tells me that she helped him take all the horrible old lino and rubbish out of the two top rooms that were going to be Leon and Lucy’s rooms.

‘And you chucked the stuff out of the second-floor window down into the yard below, and then you had a huge bonfire on the lawn, and there was this moment when you put your arm around me and we both looked back at the house and that was when you declared your love for me!’

John frowns. ‘I thought it was when you were varnishing floor-boards in the house.’

‘OK, but I remember it was the first time for something big, I know it was, the first snog or something.’

‘But we were already going out together by then, so it couldn’t possibly have been the first snog –’

‘Oh well, but you said something like you were glad to have me there or something.’ Julia turns to me and throws her hands up. ‘There you are, you see, Julie. Something significant happened to us on that lawn and we can’t even agree on what it was!’

I laugh and tell her it’s exactly what I’m trying to explore. The experiences people had when they were standing in certain parts of the house or garden. And also how they remember or feel about it now – or maybe even how they don’t. Because it’s true – more and more I’m realizing that entire moments dissolve and fall off the edge of memory. Sometimes you’re too late to pull them back, however much you’d like to. Or worse, perhaps, you reach out and pull them back in the nick of time, only to find that no one else remembers. You’re alone with the shreds of that moment that once mattered so much to you.

Think of Julia on the lawn that day – the same lawn where I stood under the magnolia less than a decade later and found myself falling under the spell of the house.

Autumn – a smoky, sharp day, trees bending, a little chilly when the wind gusts, smoke billowing sideways into the gardens of 36 and 38. Is she wearing her jeans, an old, third-best pair perhaps, maybe a plaid shirt or a denim one, some kind of a waistcoat over it all? Are her cheeks smeared with dust and smoke, eye-liner smudged, eyes shining with the physical effort of it all? And does she know that John was watching earlier as she bent to gather up the mouldering underlay and chuck it out through the sash window and into the yard below? Rubber and old lino and dust falling through the air – decades of feet treading those boards, now worn to jetsam. Does she love him already? Does she know he loves her? And does he put his arm around her and turn with her to look back up at the wide, unblinking eyes of the house – the upstairs windows where so many other faces have appeared and disappeared over the years?

John and Julia tie the knot on a bright, freezing day in February 1984 at Brixton Registry office.

Ian MacLaglan, who toured with the Stones in 1978, comes over with his wife and they all get wrecked together the night before and then have a champagne breakfast before heading down to the Town Hall in Brixton. They queue for almost an hour to get married, but they’re so plastered and happy they can barely remember any of it. Afterwards they take over the Tim Bobbin, the pub at the end of Lillieshall Road, and the day after that they go to some wine bar in Abbeville Road for lunch. By the time they stagger back across the frozen Common to Lillieshall Road it’s almost dark, so they just fall into bed and stay there until about the same time next day.

Their bed. John designed and made it – just a simple, low, wooden plinth and above it small white carved wooden cupboards with mirrors in them and a shelf running between them, all of it backed by a panel of white cotton that Julia has lovingly painted with pale blue and pink and yellow stripes. Ice cream colours. She’s also done a matching flounce on the central ceiling light, and the walls are sponged lavender and blue. It’s a bit of a woman’s space, but John doesn’t mind that. In fact it gives him a little burst of pleasure – the way she’s already put her mark on the house in this fatally feminine way.

‘I love it,’ he tells her. ‘Everything you do, I love. I love you.’

‘I want a baby,’ she says, one morning in March.

‘OK,’ he goes and he’s surprised to find he means it.

They do the house up gradually, as and when the money allows. A songwriting deal with Virgin pays for the carpets – deep hyacinth in the bedroom and a sensible grey pattern for the landings and stairs. Cream for the sitting room – the sort of nubbly carpet that will go with the apricot walls. The house feels completely different with carpet – it makes the place look new and smell clean. That lino was vile.

Once, in a flush moment, they toy briefly with putting a sauna on the roof terrace – until they realize what it would cost. Thank God, they both agree a year later, that they didn’t.

Meanwhile they dig the garden over. At first John cuts the path down the left-hand side – just a straight path that will lead him and his barrow down to the compost heap, but he feels it doesn’t look right. So he scraps that and starts again, deciding finally on a plump figure-of-eight, with the lawn snaking in and out to create half-moon-shaped beds that he plants with shrubs, roses, hydrangeas, California poppies, lilies, and large saucer-shaped daisies.

When he first cuts the lawn to that shape, it looks too bald and forced. But he knows that once the plants have expanded, it will be fine. At first Leon helps him, lifting the discarded clumps of turf into a bucket. But soon the boy forgets what he’s supposed to be doing and ends up kicking a ball around instead.

John’s work is going well. He has quite a few projects on the boil. He does some songwriting for Island Music – lyrics and stuff – and he produces a huge documentary series for Capital Radio on the music of the seventies. Meanwhile he writes a book about the pop group Slade and it becomes a bit of a cult book – people write to him from all over the world trying to get hold of a copy. He starts up a rock magazine called Let It Rock with his friends Simon Frith, the rock music journalist, and Charlie Gillett, who lives down the road.

In between all of this they get on with the house – their project, their thing. If Julia chooses the colours and paints an atmosphere, then John’s forte is foraging for stuff and getting it cheap, or sometimes even for nothing. He frequently finds things on skips. He has an eye for pieces he can transform, and he really gets off on the idea that the house is made up of so many items discarded by other people but which still have life left in them, if only you can see it.

The stained-glass doors on the kitchen cupboards, for instance, are found in an antique shop on the Wandsworth Road – he happens to be passing and he knows they’re right and he persuades the man to part with them for about half of what he was originally asking.

Meanwhile, best of all, he’s still wondering what to do about the hideous orange front door with its crinkly glass panel, when Number 36 – where Frances and Chris Caiman live – is broken into, the whole door bashed in with a sledgehammer. He can’t believe his luck when he sees a brand new door being delivered.

He asks Chris if he wants the old one and Chris, baffled, replies that they were on the verge of ringing the council to get it taken away. So John rips out the untouched middle panel of the Caimans’ discarded door and uses it to replace the glass in his own door. It fits perfectly – these doors are standard. A lick of white gloss and it looks just fine – a proper Victorian front door, born from the scraps of two neighbouring front doors, the joins indiscernible. Just like the banisters.

Julia remarks that the place is fast turning into a Frankenstein’s monster of a house. John laughs. You could say the same of Lillieshall Road itself, which begins with eight tiny two-up-two-down cottages, some of them paint-peeling and short-life squatted since the fifties, others with their new pointing and Laura Ashley curtains in the windows.

After the cottages come the slightly larger, two-storey houses, two on each side of the road, then come the three storeys, like Number 34. On the even-numbered side there are five of these, only two on the opposite side.

And then as you walk further up the street, the even bigger houses begin – ending with Number 61 where Bubbles still lives with Leon and Lucy, who trot more or less happily back and forwards across the road. These have steps up to the front door and grand basement kitchens, big pine tables visible as you pass by on the pavement.

Quite a contrast to the tiny cottages with their buddleia-cracked walls and side entrances straight into the main living room. For many years the pop band the Thompson Twins reside in one of these but the landlord of the Tim Bobbin doesn’t like squatters and bans them from the pub. When their music career suddenly and dramatically takes off, they carry on squatting. But one evening they pull up at the Tim Bobbin in a limo. Out comes the landlord, furious-eyed, hands on hips, and says, I don’t care what fucking car you fucking well drive, I don’t want no fucking squatters in here.’

Meanwhile Julia discovers she’s pregnant. They work out that it must have happened almost immediately after the wedding in February which is weird because they’ve been very laid back about contraception all this time, so why suddenly now? A honeymoon baby! Except they didn’t really have a honeymoon, Julia reminds him. Well, OK, a love baby anyway.

Julia feels fine and looks great, a little pale and tired in the mornings but otherwise the pregnancy suits her, she’s so happy and excited. But long before she’s reached full term, she wakes one night, clearly in labour. They rush her to St Thomas’s Hospital and the baby – an impossible shred of a thing – is born in the early hours of the next morning. A boy. They both hold him, stroke the fragile curve of his small head, the doll hands, fingers tight-curled – feel the barely-there weight of him in their hands.

For a day and a half, they actually think he might live. They sit and hug and kiss and convince each other that this really is a possibility. He looks quite perfect after all – the shape of his face, the stretch of his small limbs. And premature babies can survive, can’t they? The hospital walls are covered in the photographic evidence: shiny polaroids of the ones who made it – little scraps with huge eyes and cotton hats on their bald heads, who grew up to be loud, bouncy toddlers in dungarees. But the doctors know better than to get their hopes up. They talk quietly, kindly. There’s a noticeable sense of calm around the baby. No one’s rushing. They’re just waiting. He dies in their arms at lunchtime on the second day.

The nurses bring a cup of tea, touch them on the shoulder, say very little except ‘Sorry’ – then leave them to hold onto him a little while longer. When the moment comes to let go, they just do it, they find they can do it – they help each other.

There’s a funeral at Streatham Crematorium. A wavy blue August day. Mr Whippy vans tinkling in the streets. Just John, Julia, Leon, Lucy, and this tiny tiny coffin. It feels odd and wrong and terrible. It’s far too soon after the wedding to be gathering again, around something barely bigger than a shoe box.

They ask politely if they can have the ashes and the man says he’s sorry but, frankly, there won’t be any: they just get blown up the chimney. He apologizes for his bluntness, but John and Julia agree later that there’s something reassuring about this. The idea that what’s left of their baby boy is just flying up and away into the sky. They can live with that. It’s OK.

People are good. A few days before the funeral, Ronnie Lane, bass player from the Small Faces and an old friend of John’s, sits there in the kitchen at Lillieshall Road with his scuffed DMs on a chair and rolls a joint and says something that John will always hold onto.

‘The thing is, mate,’ he says, ‘when you see a poor dead baby bird lying on the street, it’s kind of reassuring to look up because there are always more eggs up there in the nest.’

The idea stays in John’s head. He wonders about it – wonders why he can handle the idea, why it at least doesn’t make him feel any worse. It’s not that it unwrites the death – how the hell can you ever do that? – but it’s that thing of looking up.

Yes, he likes that. If you don’t believe in God or an afterlife, and he certainly doesn’t, then isn’t that all you can do, look up? Once you’ve held your own small child in your arms and felt his tiny volume of blood stop, then isn’t that all that’s left? You can still raise your head. You can still look up.

He asks Ron if they can say that at the funeral, the bit about the baby bird, and Ron nods and yawns, leans back, shuts his eyes, and says, ‘Of course, mate, of course.’ Years later, John reminds him of it – of that great and touching thing he said and how very comforting they found it, especially at the funeral – and Ron looks blank. Did he really say that? But he’s not well himself by then. A few years later he too is dead, of multiple sclerosis. He’s had it for ages.

Meanwhile Frances Caiman, next door at Number 36, is a great help too. She’s a consultant radiologist, married to a GP and mother of Tom and Barney, two small, loud boys – a warm, strong, upbeat woman.

‘What you’ve got to bear in mind,’ she tells them in her down-to-earth voice, ‘is you get all these stories about how a miracle 2 lb baby survives … but you hardly ever get any stories eighteen years later saying “Miracle baby gets three A levels and goes to Oxford”.’

The baby would never have got to university. The baby blew away in the wind. They call the baby who blew away Jamie. Jamie Jess.

John and Julia support each other, dig the garden, plant a yellow climbing rose in his memory. By next summer it will be halfway up the metal arch, a cluster of tight-curled lemony sunshine buds. John will feed it with manure, spray it for blackfly. And half a decade after that, it will be a full-blown mature rose and another young pregnant woman, who has just fallen in love with the house, will stand in the garden and breathe in its scent and take its existence entirely for granted in a way that only the still childless can.

Meanwhile the magnolia that they planted blossoms for the first time – white waxy blooms poised like birds on the edge of flight. A year later, their daughter Collette is born, followed a couple of years after that by their son Barney.

‘Here they are.’ John shows me a colour snap of a small girl and boy running at the bottom of our garden. ‘And this one’s Collette’ – a red-haired child in a sticky-out dress stands on the terrace outside my study and squints into the sun. I recognize her as the lanky auburn girl in jeans who skulked in the kitchen when I first arrived today in Kent.

John tells me that at first he used that room – the small room at the top of the first flight of stairs – as a bathroom because it already had plumbing. And he used the larger room next to the master bedroom as a study. But then he found he hated working in the larger room – he could never settle in it for some reason – so he switched and worked in that smaller room and converted the big one into a bathroom.

I tell him that little room has been my study on and off for ages and I too like its smallness, its view over the garden, the evening sunshine that floods in. Sometimes I take a cushion and a glass of wine and camp down on the terrace outside to read. Especially in the evenings when the house is empty of kids, dog, man. If you get down low enough, all you can see is the sky, the tops of the trees, the birds going to bed.

I ask John about his older daughter Lucy. I realize I know which Leon’s room was but not hers.

‘Was she in the other room at the top?’ I ask him. ‘The one next to Leon’s? Because that’s our daughter Chloë’s room now.’

‘Yes,’ he says, and starts telling me why he eventually left the area – that he just felt it changing. That Lucy and Leon used to be able to walk to school – the primary school on Wix’s Lane – or else go up to the Common with their bikes without worrying. But the gap between the rich and the poor seemed to be growing and he was uncomfortable with it.

‘There were more BMWs in the street,’ he says, ‘and house prices were becoming unreal.’

He gathers all the photos off the table and tells me Julia says it’s fine for me to borrow them.

‘You’re sure?’

‘It’s fine. There’s lots of the house and garden in there.’

‘Is Jonathan a photographer?’ he asks me as he walks me out to my car.

I tell him no, he’s a lot of other things though: writer and director, even a local Labour Councillor now.

He looks puzzled. ‘Oh. Only I could have sworn I saw him taking pictures at a party a little while after you bought the house. And I was feeling so guilty about the price you paid that I avoided him.’

I laugh.

‘We didn’t think we paid too much,’ I say.

‘Oh, didn’t you? Oh good.’

We say a warm goodbye and I drive off down the lane in the Saturday March sunshine, brambles snapping at my windscreen. Now I want to hear Leon’s story. And Lucy’s.

Back home in the little room that was once John Pidgeon’s study and is now mine, I open my notebooks.

So many names, so many families to discover and unearth. Some of these people must surely still be alive – Ricketts and Kyle and Sherrif from the late seventies, perhaps? And the Reynolds and McNishes and Duncans from the sixties? Maybe even the Bartolos and Costellos and Blaines from the fifties. And I realize that my list includes only adults – how many children are lurking under those grown-up-only lists?

And then as I go further back, I’m definitely not going to be looking for ex-residents but descendants: children and grandchildren of the Askews and Hinkleys and Spawtons and Haywards. Maybe I’m tired but the task suddenly seems impossibly daunting. Where do you start? With one name or several? With a year or a whole decade?

More for something to do than anything else, I’ve typed the names into a chart, so I can see who was here with whom, who was here for longest, whose stay coincided with whose. But staring at all the names, repeated and re-listed, almost feels worse. A tidal wave of names and dates, about to knock me right over.

I must simplify this somehow.

Right, Lucy Spawton lived in the house from 1895 to 1944; no one has ever lived here longer. So if I can just find her children or, if they’re gone, her grandchildren, they should be able to tell me all about her. Shouldn’t they?

The Family Records Centre in Islington is a daunting place – a big, modern, purpose-built building with lots of wide, automatic glass doors and wheelchair ramps, nylon staticky carpets and metal warehouse shelving.

It’s full of the retired and the semi-retired – the Bettys and the Kenneths and the Rosemarys, the ex-teachers and the ex-accountants from Surrey and Pinner, who bowl up here with massive energy and enthusiasm, to investigate their ancestors and research their family trees. They’re here for the day, they bring sandwiches, they have ring-binder files.

Relishing the sudden novelty of so much free time, they’ve come to find out where they came from, what the dead who gave them life were called. They want names, dates, places. The notes they make are meticulously legible – geography essay handwriting, purposeful and clear.

‘I’ve gone back as far as 1764,’ a man in a bottle-green sweatshirt with a picture of a golf club on the front tells a grey-haired woman as they wait for the lift. ‘My wife’s gone back further on her side.’

You might expect it to be a quiet or reflective place, but it’s not. It’s frenzied, hectic. There’s the constant sound of volumes being pulled off the shelves for a start – opened, flicked through, snapped shut, banged back. Handbags are shifted cagily along the carpet, books and biros gathered up, but coats and shopping bags must be deposited in the lockers downstairs. You need free hands in this place, if you mean business.

I decide to look in the registers of death certificates for Lucy Spawton, starting with the year when her name leaves Kelly’s Directory, when she’s no longer resident at our house. I’m going to assume – rightly, wrongly? – that she died in 1944.

I pull out a heavy black register – black for Death – and slam it down on the sloping counter. There are four registers for each year, each labelled MAR, JUNE, SEPT and DEC, and inside long lists of hand-typed names. The paper is greasy and brown with a million thumbings. Flick to the right page, then down the list: SPAVINS, SPAWFIELD, SPAWSON, and then SPAWTON. But no Lucy in March 1944. Hoist the volume – metal-cornered and about as big as a church bible – back into the shelf and take out the next. No SPAWTON, LUCY. Hoist it back, slam the next down.

And there she is. SPAWTON, LUCY. She was seventy-seven years old when she died and her death was registered in July 1944.

I know what to do next. I’ve seen other people doing it. I reach for the purple form, ‘Application for DEATH Certificate – For use in the PUBLIC SEARCH ROOM only’. I write Lucy’s details into the form, write my own name and address, and sign it. Then I queue at the cash counter, wait for the airport-announcement ding-dong to call me to the next window, pay seven pounds, and then the man behind the glass says, ‘It’ll be posted out to you on Friday.’

This is fun.

Flushed with success, I go straight over to the red birth registers, find the reference to Lucy’s birth (easy once you have her age at death) and order her birth certificate as well.

I’m on my way.

The Pidgeon photographic archives – the thirty-odd photos that Julia let me borrow – move and fascinate me far more than I ever thought they could or should.

I sit at the kitchen table and shuffle them, unsure of what exactly I’m looking for, and unable to understand why they touch me so deeply. They’re just ordinary snaps, the sort you’d find in any normal family album. Some are good, some indifferent, some sharp, some fuzzy, some taken on ordinary days, some on birthdays. The subjects seem sometimes to be willing, sometimes not, sometimes – in the best ones – oblivious.

But this is the recent past. There’s nothing especially noticeable or exotic about the 1980s. If I can find photos of Henry and Charlotte Hayward – the 1880s – now that will be exciting.

So why, then? Why do these pictures shake me up? Is it just that they show me something I know about, but would never normally get to see: another family living and talking and having birthdays and Christmases and babies in a home that is, quite recognizably, ours? Our house. Julia’s sponge-effect walls survived enough years to appear again and again in our own family albums, yet here they are – somehow preposterously! – in theirs.

There are whole pieces of the past that lie just around the last corner, closer perhaps than we’d like to think. We may choose to forget this, but the house doesn’t. The house has seen it, done it, felt it all before.

So there’s Julia, grinning widely and pushing a pushchair up the front path just as I’ve done, another baby in a sling (just like I used to have) – our familiar green-yellow privet hedge lit by the sun, the old wooden white gate (which eventually fell apart, never to be replaced). And here she is again, photographed from above, sitting cross-legged and tender-faced, on the lawn with a child in her arms. The garden is new-laid and freshly dug around her – strangely clean and young, yet recognizably our garden.

‘here she is again … cross-legged and tender faced’

Here’s Collette, about five years old, standing squinting in the garden, red hair lit by sunlight. And Leon – also red-haired – kicking a football, scowling at the camera. Maybe he resents that he has to stop for even one second for the shot. He wants to keep on moving, he doesn’t want the camera to freeze his life for the sake of posterity, to curtail the urgent swing of his foot. Here he is again, looking happier – winter. He’s just built a snowman. This time he doesn’t mind being photo-graphed. He knows the snowman will melt and the photo will be his only lasting proof.

‘he knows the snowman will melt’

And here’s Leon yet again, sitting in the kitchen – our kitchen! – patting a dog, a birthday cake on the table. How many birthday cakes of ours have we had in that kitchen? Just counting our own three children, I make it thirty-seven! So how many birthday cakes has the house seen in that kitchen? Hundreds? How many lit candles? Thousands, maybe?

‘What’s the matter? What are you thinking?’ Jonathan asks me, finding me almost in tears over the Pidgeons’ photos.

‘That we’re just the latest layer,’ I tell him, ‘that we’ll go and there’ll be others.’

‘Mmm … so?’

‘It’s just kind of shocking to realize it, that’s all.’

He smiles and touches my shoulder. ‘You’ve only just realized it?’

I shuffle the photos. ‘Only just seen photographic proof, I suppose.’

‘But they’re really nice photos.’

‘I know, I love them. They seem like a nice family. Nicer than I used to imagine actually.’

‘So … that’s a good thing.’

‘It’s good but – it’s so sad. It seems like nothing, no time at all – but these babies, these kids are all grown up, just as ours will be any minute. It all goes so fast. I can’t bear it.’

‘Funny girl,’ he says. ‘If you hadn’t seen the photos, then you’d never have given it any thought.’

‘you’d never in a zillion years let me have wallpaper like that’

I show the children the one of Leon in his bed in the Tottenham Hotspur Room. The duvet matches the wallpaper.

‘How come he had that wallpaper?’ Raphael immediately asks. ‘You’d never in a zillion years let me have wallpaper like that.’

‘You don’t support Spurs,’ Chloë points out with acid speed.

‘No – shut up, Chloë – I mean Liverpool wallpaper. And anyway I’m thinking of changing teams. Daddy says I ought to support a London club and Alex supports Tottenham.’

‘I painted that wallpaper over when I was pregnant with Jake,’ I tell them wistfully.

‘I wish you hadn’t,’ says Raph, ‘I might have supported Spurs right from the start if you hadn’t.’

Jake looks at the photo and shrugs.

‘Guess how old he is now.’ I say.

‘Dunno. My age?’

‘He’s thirty.’

Raphael takes a breath. ‘Thirty years old! A whole man! But that photo doesn’t look like the olden days.’

‘It’s not, it’s about twenty years ago.’

‘Were you alive then?’

‘Come on, Raph, you know I was. Twenty years ago isn’t that long. I was at university.’

‘It’s funny,’ says Chloë, ‘to think that you were at university when that boy was sleeping in Jake’s room.’

‘Except it wasn’t Jake’s room then,’ I remind her, ‘it was That Boy’s room.’

‘Hmm. I don’t like him,’ Raph says.

‘You don’t know anything about him.’

‘I do! He supports Spurs.’

‘Yes, OK, you do know that about him. But he may not support them any more.’

‘Maybe now he’s switched to Liverpool,’ Jake suggests.

‘Or maybe he’s gone off football altogether.’

Chloë laughs, a cackle designed to get at Raph.

‘You don’t go off it,’ Raph says firmly. ‘Not if you love it when you are a child.’

In an attempt to switch this gruesomely one-track conversation, I show the kids the other photos but they’re less impressed. It’s the wallpaper that gets to them. The hard physical evidence of another child getting to inflict his taste, his interests, on the walls of the house that, as far as they’re concerned, is theirs and always has been and always will be.

But it won’t. Everything changes, everything goes. The fireplaces are gone, the walls are repainted, the cake eaten, the snow melted, the babies grown. Theirs and ours. And others after us.

From: Leon Pidgeon

To: Julie Myerson

Sent: Monday, March 27, 2003 11:53 AM

Subject: 34 Lillieshall Road

Hi Julie

I am the son of John Pidgeon, who you interviewed last weekend about living at 34 Lillieshall Road. He mentioned to me that you may be interested in getting in touch with me.

If this is the case then you can email me back at this address.

Leon

My first conscious memory of being alive and somewhere. Sitting in bright warm light. Under me is softness, above is warmth, dazzling warmth.

My bottom is on the ground but my arms are moving. In my hands is something light and easy, something very interesting to me – there are colours in it, maybe the curves and dots of a smile. I lift it up higher, higher, then let it come jerking down. When it moves, the rest of me moves. I am so alert to that thing in my hands and I am squeaky, I am exhilarated. I am a baby on a sunlit patch of carpet, holding a toy.

‘Olive Oyl!’ my Mum said recently when I mentioned this memory. ‘You had an Olive Oyl doll at Gresham Gardens. A bendy rubber thing. But we left that house when you were a year old, darling. You can’t possibly remember anything about being there.’

But I can.

In my family, I am the funny one – the one who remembers things she can’t possibly remember, has sudden thoughts that go nowhere, asks too many questions, worries unnecessarily. Funny old Julie – the jumpy, difficult, strange one.

‘you can’t possibly remember anything about being there’

After Gresham Gardens, we move to another house just around the corner – The Chalet, 2 Middlebeck Avenue, Mapperley Plains, Nottingham. Now I am two years old and I have short fair hair with a red gingham ribbon tied in a bow but I am not sweet, I am sitting crossly on the little landing halfway up the stairs – behind me a window, with black metal and white paintwork – new and clean and glossy.

My tights are black and they itch me. I spend most of the time on my knees, though sometimes I come downstairs on my bottom as it feels safer. Don’t want to fall. I am an anxious child.

The hall down below me has black and white lino tiles, which Mummy polishes with a strange whirring machine called a Goblin that has an actual goblin on the front. I like to sit and run my fingers over the little red creature, enjoying its raised-up feel, the hard plastic still buzzy and warm from being used.

I follow Mummy around as she does the housework. She says I am like a little dog. When my baby sister Mandy’s awake, she’s screaming or feeding and Mummy’s busy, but when she goes down for a rest Mummy and I are pals in those afternoons of furniture polish and doll’s clothes and prickly roses and the wet exciting smell of the paddling pool on the concrete patio, filled by a dark green hose on a hot day.

I have ideas. Sometimes these ideas make me tremble with excitement. I am four now and I sit in my place on the landing and make a Big Girl Box for Mandy who’s getting bigger, even though she can’t talk or do anything yet. In the shoebox, there will be: a crayon (not a wax one, which is only for babies), a rubber to rub things out, some paper, and one of Mummy’s old pinkish lipsticks with its sugary, big-lady smell.

I rub a bit of it on Mandy and she laughs and I see that her nappy has got so fat that wet is coming down her leg. I show her how to scribble all over the paper like a grown-up. She won’t so I try to make her but in the end she gets tired and crawls away and I shout at her to come back right now! – but she won’t. It’s tempting to hit her but I know that if I do she’ll scream and then I’ll have a smack bottom.

‘she can’t talk or do anything yet’

The dress I am wearing has no front or back fastenings and every time Mummy pulls it on or off me, I almost suffocate. If you can’t breathe, then you die. Every morning our goldfish, Tish and Tosh, throw themselves out of the bowl and Daddy nearly steps on them when he goes down to make the tea. But he always puts them back in and they gasp back to life and swim off. Until one day he puts them back in and they just float. ‘Too late,’ he says. ‘Sorry Tish, sorry Tosh, you’ve had it this time.’ He sounds sad but you can tell from his face that he thinks it’s funny.

Another day – by now I have two sisters – we are sitting in our wicker chairs in the playroom watching Robin Hood on TV and smoke snakes silently in through the door behind us. I begin to scream.

‘The house is burning down!’

Mandy stamps and wails. Only Debbie dares run and find Mummy, who is chatting on the phone. She puts the fire out quickly – a whoosh under the cold tap. It’s not much of a fire – just a thing she was melting down in a pan for Daddy, something to do with his work.

Mummy takes us upstairs where you can’t smell the smoke and we have warm Ribena on the edge of our beds. I don’t dare watch Robin Hood on television again for about ten years, in case it gives me the house-burning-down feeling.

Our bedroom is a safe place. On summer nights when I am in bed and it’s still light, I like the sound of Daddy wheeling our tricycles in from the lawn, the slump of water as the paddling pool empties. Sometimes I kneel up at the window and watch. Something about the way he holds the cigarette between his lips, as he bends and uses both hands to tip the water onto the grass, makes me feel loved.

Next door are the Smiths. Luke is two and Jack is the same age as me, five. He’s my best friend. We have our polio boosters together, a sugar lump on our tongues – same taste, same moment.

Luke is always lying on the bed having his nappy changed and he is ill. So in fact is Jack, even though they don’t look poorly. We are not to mention it, Mummy says, and I don’t, though Jack has already told me and we’ve laughed about it secretly.

Then one morning Luke is in his Mummy’s arms waving to us from the bathroom window and the next day he’s died. I decide I’ll never wave to anyone again, in case I stop breathing.

Mummy is crying. I don’t cry but I walk very slowly and quietly on tiptoes to show that I know something bad has happened. We hold hands and go round in a circle and sing ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. Each little flower that opens, each little bird that sings. I ask Mummy where Luke is right now this minute and she says it’s all right, he’s in Heaven.

Jack and I are in the sandpit. He says it’s for the best that Luke is gone.

‘Is he in Heaven?’ I ask, testing him.

He shrugs, lets the sand run through his fingers into a blue cup. ‘At peace,’ he says.

I laugh and so does he and then we wriggle around together in the sand and then he takes me inside and shows me a glass door in their house and says, ‘Lean against it,’ and I do but the glass isn’t there and I fall through and bang my head and cry.

Dear Resident of 2 Middlebeck Drive

Please forgive this letter coming totally out of the blue but I’m a writer writing a biography of our Victorian house in Clapham, South London. I’m trying to find out as much as I can about every single person who has lived in this house from the day it was built in 1872, through to the present.

Because the book is about the idea of home and how we feel about the people who have inhabited our spaces before us, I’m really keen to go back and revisit my own childhood homes. I lived in your house in Nottingham as a baby, until I was five years old. I wondered whether you’d mind if I called in for a quick look around?

You can reach me by writing to this address – or else phone me on the above number and I will of course phone you straight back …

After more than two hours at the Family Records Centre, I can find nothing – no birth or marriage date or anything – for Charles Edwin Hinkley. Kelly’s Directory tells me that there was Isabella Hinkley, Walter Hinkley, and Charles Hinkley. I’ve decided to look for a son but I remind myself that was always just a hunch. Maybe Charles is a father and I should have started with the older books. It’s just so hard to know how far back to go. Hinkley is a fairly unusual name (Thank You, God) but the truth is I’m getting nowhere.

I give up, bored with Charles Edwin, and decide to try Isabella Bloomfield Hinkley. It’s an imposing, rather glamorously Victorian name – a name that would fit inside a cameo brooch. She leaves the Kelly’s Directory list in 1948, so, assuming she died in that year, I check deaths for 1948. And find her almost immediately, in the July to September volume: HINKLEY Isabella B 90 Hackney.

I flush with excitement and satisfaction. I’ve got her! But can it really be this simple – can this be her? Well, surely it’s got to be – even if for some strange reason she did die in Hackney.

The truly unsettling thing is, if she lived to be ninety, then I must revise my whole picture of her. It means she was much older than I imagined – quite a late-middle-aged lady when she came to our house in 1918, just as the First World War ended.

I cross over to the other side of the room and check the births for 1859 – birth records for the 1850s are on satisfyingly thick, yellowed paper, curly handwritten. And there, in January to March 1859, I find her: Isabella Bloomfield, born and registered in the district of Billericay. This time, I feel a surge of real delight. That is definitely my Isabella.

Stunned and suddenly exhausted, I go to the room downstairs and sit and eat an apple, though an espresso is what I really crave. A white-haired woman, her hair zig-zagged with kirby grips, fidgets at a locker. She can’t get the key in – ‘I can’t get the key in, Brian’ – and various elderly men walk slowly up and down the room with loose change, ordered by their wives to fetch a bag of Quavers.

Isabella. Oh, Isabella. When I started my research this morning I had a firm picture of you lodged in my head. You were a slightly haughty, youthful, black-haired woman, a woman in your prime. Now in the space of an hour or so, I’ve uncovered an entirely different Isabella. A very old lady, living in Clapham, dying in Hackney. And an Essex baby.

An Essex baby with whom I have nothing at all in common – except that she grew up to inhabit the very same rooms, gaze out of the very same windows, in the very same house, year in year out.

From: John Pidgeon

To: Julie Myerson

Sent: Wednesday, April 7, 2003 9:17AM

Subject: 34 Lillieshall Road

Dear Julie

Leon is a lovely person. Ask him if he remembers playing snooker after school listening to Prince’s ‘Raspberry Beret’. I do. And the ceiling falling down.

Best

John P

I go up to Leon’s old room. Jake’s bed is unmade and there are used cereal bowls and half-full glasses of water all around it. On the floor are old discarded boxer shorts, school books with their covers half torn off, the silver discs of CDs, Warhammer magazines, cat fluff. School clothes are falling out of the open drawers. Kitty, Jake’s cat, black and somehow angry, lies in one of the other open drawers among the socks, one open eye gazing at me. And the green eye of the Playstation glares at me from the opposite corner.

I pick as much as I can up off the floor and ask Aga, our Polish cleaner, to hoover the room thoroughly.

I’m in Nottingham, driving towards The Chalet, where I lived from the age of one to five. Whoever lives here now hasn’t replied to my letter but we decide to call in anyway, hoping they’ll be sympathetic.

We turn off Mapperley Plains – all of it unfamiliar – and drive slowly down the steep slope of Middlebeck Drive. This junction is where I first learned to tell left from right, in the back of Mum’s pale blue Mini. Whenever I think of left or right now, this road is what I see in my head.

Middlebeck Avenue is exactly as I remember it – though it can’t be quite because one or two of the houses look brand new. Dark purplish brick, clipped hedges, dwarf conifers, hanging baskets spilling with pink and scarlet Bizzie Lizzies. The kind of cul-de-sac where men wash their cars on Sundays, local radio on, soapy water spilling in the gutter. I recognize the house immediately, only it doesn’t seem to be called The Chalet any more. Just plain 2 Middlebeck Avenue.

‘You think anyone in this day and age would actually want to live in a place called The Chalet?’ Jonathan says.

‘No, but what I mean is, I think I wrote to the wrong person. I’ve got this awful feeling I wrote to 2 Middlebeck Drive, not Avenue.’

We ring the chiming bell and a tall, quite elderly and rather gentle-looking man opens the door and gazes at us, baffled.

Before I can begin apologizing for disturbing him and telling him who I am, I realize what I’m looking at. Just over his shoulder is the small first landing where I made my Big Girl Box. The same white banisters with their curly metalwork. I smile politely and explain that I am a writer (but inside I feel four – the itch of the tights on my legs, the sweet smell of Mum’s old lipstick).

No, he says, he hasn’t had any letter. I pretend to be mildly surprised.

He looks at me carefully, his lip trembles. He says he would love to show me round but his wife is very ill at the moment. He grips the doorframe and shakes his head. ‘I’m grappling with so many problems right now, you see.’

I tell him I’m so sorry and that we’ll of course leave him in peace. But he keeps us there, somehow unwilling to close the door. Scratches his head, tells me he’s been here twelve years but he always thought that before that it had been owned by the same people – right from since it was built in 1959.

‘Mac someone – the editor of the Guardian, do you know him?’

‘The Guardian?’

‘The Nottingham Guardian – I’m sure he was – oh my goodness, what was his name?’

I tell him my parents were called Pike.

‘Ah. Yes, that rings a bell, yes.’ He says he thinks he has heard of them. ‘Pike. Yes. They must have been the first people then?’

I tell him I think we arrived in 1960 or ‘61. He’s warming up now.

‘The Smiths,’ he says, gesturing at the house next door.

‘Brenda? And John? You knew them?’

He nods. ‘Oh yes, they’re still there.’

‘But – after all this time! – I can’t believe it.’

‘Oh yes, nearly forty years it must be.’

‘And Luke?’ I ask him suddenly. ‘Their son? He was my age. Do you know how Jack is?’

I last saw Jack in 1971 when we were eleven. We decided to start an ornithology club. ‘I like birds,’ he said, quickly adding, ‘the feathered kind.’ I felt shy and couldn’t look him in the eye. I had just started to notice boys and I saw now that he was quite good-looking in his slim blond way. We made badges out of cardboard with safety-pins stuck on, we had a meeting. Then we forgot to write to each other and that was that.

The man’s face falls.

‘Oh … both of their sons died,’ he says. ‘One died as a baby, the other was about sixteen, I think. Cystic fibrosis, wasn’t it? I think they adopted a child – another boy – after that.’

The sky is getting greyer, heavy with morning rain. He apologizes again for not being able to show us round – another time perhaps? I say I’d love to call again – maybe I’ll write to him. He says that would be good. He gives me his phone number too. I look very hard at those stairs and that little landing once more before he shuts the door. As we leave I show Jonathan the space at the side of the house, where in my day there was a white painted door with a black metal keyhole.

‘Jack and I used to look through that keyhole and see things. There was a huge lake, with people in bright coloured boats, canoeing. We’d watch them for hours.’

‘But – they weren’t there?’

‘How can they have been? I must have made them up.’

‘But you’d watch them?’

‘All the time. Jack saw them too.’

As we walk back to the car, I wonder what I’d see, if I could look through that keyhole now. Dustbins? A dull narrow yard with a black drainpipe, or a huge shimmering lake? Or just the long-ago shadows of two small kids – a blond-haired boy and a brown-haired girl, running barefoot on a smooth green lawn?

Leon is expected at six. At five-fifty I’m still trying to finish a piece of work. Chloë is standing in my doorway in knickers and T-shirt, furious because I won’t let her have her ears pierced.

‘Just one hole, I’m begging you, Mummy – right high up, here. Look.’

‘Please can we talk about this later? I’m still working and Leon Pidgeon’s about to arrive. And can you put some trousers on?’

‘Here! Look, I said! You haven’t even looked –’

She clutches her upper ear lobe and rolls her eyes dramatically skywards.

‘I Am Working,’ I tell her, eyes firmly on my screen.

‘I just don’t see what’s wrong with one little hole – one little hole in one ear, do you hear me? Oh God, I’m never allowed to do anything.’ Her voice crumbles into a wail.

I give in and look up from my screen.

‘I haven’t said No. I’ve said you’re only twelve and we’ll discuss it later. And you’re not making your case any stronger by bloody well crying.’

She tosses her long blonde hair and narrows her eyes. She looks like Jonathan when she does that.

‘I’m a baby, apparently. Too babyish to get my ears pierced. Babies are allowed to cry.’

I push my door gently shut. ‘Go away,’ I tell her as softly as I can.

As if an explosive twelve-year-old wasn’t enough, outside in the street someone seems to be letting off fireworks. Every time there is a bang, the dog (a tough, no-nonsense Border Collie who is not allowed upstairs) rushes upstairs and trembles on the landing. With each subsequent bang, she dashes one flight higher, till she finally emerges, flat-eared and with nowhere else to go, in Jonathan’s study in the loft extension.

Jake walks her downstairs again, dragging her by the collar.

‘When I leave home,’ Chloë shouts, ‘I’m getting holes everywhere – anywhere it’s possible to have a hole, I’m getting one, OK?’

‘Be my guest!’ I shout back.

‘And I’m going to draw all over my legs in biro now!’

She storms up to her room and slams the door three times and then once more.

Leon is tall and slim, with soft eyes, and a tentative yet open face. Someone you would notice in the street because he looks kind. Just like his Dad said, in fact: a lovely person.

‘Come in,’ I say but he doesn’t. He just stands there on the doorstep and stares, speechless, and it takes me a moment to realize why.

‘Is this really weird for you?’ I ask him. ‘I mean, even standing here? It must be.’

He tells me even walking down the street gave him the strangest feeling. ‘I almost didn’t recognize the house,’ he says. He stares around him, at our Dulux Sexy Pink walls.

‘Completely, totally weird,’ he says. I like him immediately.

I get him a beer and we sit shyly in the sitting room, him still staring around, me wondering how to make him more comfortable. I wish I’d thought to light the fire, put music on before he came. To do it now seems forced.

We talk about the area – the house at 61 he used to live at with his Mum, the way he came and went between the two, the way he played football in the bit of driveway in front of the garages at the end of the road (where local boys still do), the fact that he didn’t know that many kids in the area, but he knew a few.

Room by room, beer still in hand, I show him round the whole house. He’s amazed by the kitchen, the way we’ve extended it over the yard. The size of it. I remember the pictures of him sitting in their old kitchen, near the cellar door with a dog. Layers of time and space. I realize that it’s just as weird to think of his ten-year-old self in here as it is to imagine Isabella Hinkley or Henry Hayward in the same space.

The grown-up Leon smiles when he sees the cellar door – a thick wooden door without a proper handle. ‘I remember that. You have to shove it really hard to open it, yeah?’

We go upstairs. He stares around my tiny study and peers out at the terrace and swears it’s got smaller. In our bedroom – his Dad and Julia’s room – he says he remembers the louvred wardrobe doors. ‘I can’t believe it. I never thought I’d see those wardrobe doors again – what I mean is, it’s so weird that I remember them.’

The kids are all in Jake’s room – Leon’s old room. The boys are doing Playstation. Chloë is sitting on the floor with a Scrabble set, throwing the letters at the bed as if they’re darts. She scowls at me, multiple body piercings clearly still dominating her thoughts.

But they all gaze at Leon with real interest and he looks back at them.

‘Hi,’ says Raph.

‘Hi,’ says Leon.

Leon looks at the boy in his room and Raph looks back at the boy in his and it’s as if two childhoods momentarily collide. The kids can’t decide how to react – is he a grown man or a little boy?

Chloë is the first to find something to say. ‘Is it the same?’

Leon looks around, from windows to door, to mantelpiece. ‘Kind of. It’s smaller.’

‘You’re bigger.’

Leon considers this as if he’s only just thought of it. ‘It may be that, yes.’

I tell him how we used to bring friends up to see the amazing Tottenham Hotspur wallpaper.

‘How come you were allowed to have that?’ asks Raph straightaway.

Leon laughs. ‘What, the wallpaper?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I don’t know. I just was. My Dad … and then I grew out of it I suppose, as I hit fifteen. It would have become embarrassing if we hadn’t moved.’

The kids keep on playing, glancing shyly at Leon. I get him to tell me exactly how the room was, where all his stuff was. He says he had the quarter-size snooker table right in the middle, the table on the wall that you could let down and had a train track running on it – the chest of drawers just at the end of his bed.

‘If I had a friend to stay, they slept over there,’ He points to the window corner. ‘There was a Madonna poster over my bed just here.’

Jake registers this with a faint flicker of amusement.

‘Jake likes Madonna,’ says Raph.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘He doesn’t,’ agrees Chloë, ‘he likes Britney.’

‘No, he doesn’t,’ says Raph, ‘he likes Warhammer.’

‘Because he’s a nerd,’ says Chloë.

I tell them That’s Enough.

Leon smiles. I find his openness and enthusiasm very touching – the way he makes no attempt to be above any of this. In the room, he’s just another kid who remembers exactly how it felt to live and sleep and play in here.

I don’t especially want to drag him out of his old room but neither do I want him to feel he has to stand there any longer. I show him Jonathan’s study – the loft we converted – and though he glances at the view, you can see he has no interest in being in this meaningless bit of post-Pidgeon space.

We go down and finish our drinks and then I put some pizzas in the oven for the kids and he doesn’t seem to want to go so I give him another beer. He looks through the photos that John gave me – bends his head and really studies them. He seems absorbed, amazed.

‘Just totally weird to look at these pictures while actually sitting here in the house,’ he says, shaking his head.

The kids eat their pizza and show off. They all talk at once, throwing questions at him. It’s finally dawned on them, I think, that he really did live here.

‘What school did you go to?’

‘Wix’s Lane Primary.’

‘Not Macaulay?’

‘Macaulay was for the posh kids.’

‘Did you used to play on the Common?’

‘All the time, yes.’

‘What’s your sister called?’

‘Lucy.’

‘By the way, do you still support Tottenham Hotspur?’ Raph asks through a mouthful of Roasted Vegetable Pizza.

‘Kind of,’ says Leon, and Raph nods sagely.

‘I may switch from Liverpool,’ says Raph.

‘Just like that?’ says Chloë, laughing at him.

‘I’m just thinking about it,’ Raph tells her hotly.

Leon finishes his beer and gets up to go. I ask him if he’ll come again with his girlfriend perhaps? Or maybe when his Dad comes over? He says he’d love to. ‘It was really good,’ he says, ‘seeing all this. It really meant something.’

As he leaves, I notice Chloë watching him intently.

‘Wasn’t he lovely?’ I say as we load the dishwasher.

‘You never asked him about the ceiling falling in.’

Leon Pidgeon’s my first – the first person to come back to this house – and he’s been relatively easy to find. But I wonder who else I’m going to be able to discover and lure back.

A Costello or a Blaine or a Spawton descendant perhaps? Will I ever track down Vincent Dias or Veronica Ricketts, whoever they are? And if I do, then will they even want to come back? People are unpredictable about that kind of thing. Some do and some don’t want to go back and, especially now I’ve tried it myself, it’s something I can understand. The past can be an unexploded bomb best left untouched.

I’ve been lucky with Leon – he seems to have only good memories of the house; and anyway, if you’re only thirty, then childhood is perhaps still close enough not to be too much of a leap. But are the others going to have the same interest in going back into their adult pasts? I suppose it will all depend on what those pasts were like.

There are two Pidgeon photos I return to again and again.

‘hair all slept-on, reading a story to an absorbed toddler’

John, unshaven and sleepy, sitting by the old brick kitchen fireplace and cradling a very small newborn baby against his shoulder. And John again, lying back in bed this time, hair all slept-on, reading a story to an absorbed toddler in a yellow babygro.

We have photos of Jonathan doing exactly the same things. Shattered and unshaven, holding a day-old Jacob in a chair next to the same fireplace. The sleepy-ecstatic time after the birth of a baby. And lying back in bed in the same lilac and blue bedroom – a small baby sprawled on his chest.

‘the sleepy-ecstatic time after the birth of a baby’

Different men, different babies, different lives perhaps but eerily identical experiences played out again and again against the same backdrop. And only the house knows.

You think your life is the first – of course you do, you have to – but it’s not, it’s all been done before. We all go through the same motions, in the same way, in the same spaces.

You walk a baby up and down the room in the middle of the night, knees caving in with exhaustion as you desperately try to soothe it back to sleep. Someone else has done the same, felt the same, in the same room, years back. You light the candles on a pink and white birthday cake and kiss your child’s sweet musty-blond head and dim the lights. It’s happened before in this same room – a dozen or fifty or seventy years ago. Happy Birthday to You. And you, and you, and you.

‘someone else has done the same, felt the same’

Every little gesture or whispered word, every burst of laughter or ragged sob, every tooth lost, every promise kept or broken, every sulky, door-slamming teenager, every baby’s burp, every name tape sewn on, every brief, shuddery orgasm, every broken heart – life just repeats itself over and over. Past, present, and future colliding in a single house.

Lucy Spawton’s birth and death certificates arrive in the post. Her parents were Elizabeth Spawton and Thomas Harlock Spawton and it says that he was a master draper and that Lucy was born in 1867.

It seems like a huge step forward, to suddenly have this information right here in front of me on the kitchen table, but I’m still not sure how to use it. How is it going to get me any nearer to finding her grandchildren or great-grandchildren who, let’s face it, may not even be called Spawton any more?

The trouble is, I’m not like all those people at the Family Records Centre, launching their massed attacks on posterity. They’re ploughing steadily backwards through time, trying to find out who their eighteenth or even seventeenth-century ancestors were. But it’s descendants I want, not ancestors. I just have this single name, marooned in the 1880s, and I need to move forwards, not backwards.

‘She was a drapery buyer,’ I tell Jonathan. ‘Look, isn’t that amazing? It gives her profession on the death certificate.’

‘Oh, but look at this.’ He snatches it up and looks more closely. ‘This isn’t good news, is it?’

‘What?’

‘That she died a spinster.’

I hadn’t even seen that. I’d been so absorbed in her profession, her age at death and her illness that I hadn’t noticed that small word on the death certificate that changes everything. Lucy Spawton – who lived here in this house for so very long and who has to be so very important in my story – never married and, presumably, never had kids.

‘Well, that’s it then,’ I sigh. ‘I just don’t know where I go from here. How am I ever going to find a single person who even knew her?’

I’m silent for a long moment as I stare at that horrid little word, handwritten in black ink. Spinster.

‘Don’t panic,’ says Jonathan. ‘You always give up too early. How about a will? If she didn’t marry and she could afford to own this house.’

‘We don’t know for certain that she actually owned it.’

‘OK, but she clearly had the means to live here. And she was a working woman. So she must have left either the house or her money to someone.’

‘And you really think it’s possible to find it? After all this time?’

‘Definitely. Or, at least, all wills are in the public domain. Once they’ve been through probate, I know that.’

I look at Jonathan with interest. His father was a barrister and he himself is a JP so he tends to know about legal things. Actually, it’s nothing to do with any of that. He just tends to know things.

‘That’s brilliant,’ I tell him, ‘because if I really can find her will, then it will tell me who her closest descendants are and that’s what I most need to know. As long as they’re alive, of course.’

‘And if they’re not,’ says Jonathan, warming to his own scheme, ‘then all you have to do is find their wills …’

‘And so on! You know, I think we’ve cracked it. Why did we never think of this before?’

‘Well, I just did actually.’

March 1980, a sunny Saturday morning.

John has just picked a grumpy Leon up from his mother’s to take him to football practice, and he can’t believe it when, heading off down the road, he sees a ‘For Sale’ sign going up at Number 34. Well, about to go up anyway. He stops the car – ‘We’re gonna be late, Dad,’ moans Leon, but he ignores him.

He gets out and looks up at the house, dirty windows even dirtier in the shrill spring sunshine. It’s not in a good state. The brick is drab and stained, the paintwork’s peeling and the front door’s hideous, with some kind of bobbly glass in the centre. Is it flats?

‘Da-ad!’

‘Just hang on a minute, boy, I’m coming.’

Squinting through the letter box, he can only see a dingy brown hallway, monstrous dark carpet with a swirly pattern, an orange door, nasty with hardboard panels over it. No signs of partitioning, though. He goes over to the bay window, overgrown with nettles and weeds, and peers into the front room. Ugly purple carpet in there, some kind of zigzag embossed wallpaper, a couple of threadbare armchairs, dark brown three-piece suite, a rubber plant that looks almost dead. Original fireplaces, though – pale marble, ruined by gas fires. And a pair of huge double doors dividing the room from the next. He bets they’re the original pine underneath.

The guy hasn’t even got the For Sale sign up yet. He’s hammering in the post.

‘Who’s it on the market with?’ asks John.

‘ABC

‘Where are they?’

‘Acre Lane. Just past the traffic lights on the left.’

‘You’re not going to buy that house, Dad?’ Leon is frowning and chewing his fingers.

‘Don’t know, I might. Take your hands out of your mouth.’

‘It’s awful. I hate it.’

‘You haven’t even seen it. You’ve no idea. And anyway, wouldn’t you like us all to live in the same road? It means you and Luce could come round any time, whenever you felt like it.’

‘What about Mum?’

‘I don’t think Mum’s going to want to come round.’

‘Would I have my own room?’

‘You know the Spurs wallpaper we saw? You could have a whole room done in that if you wanted.’

‘Seriously?’

As soon as he’s dropped Leon off, John goes round to ABC.

He hadn’t actually thought about another house in Lillieshall Road, but then again he doesn’t imagine that Bubbles will necessarily stay around here anyway. And if she does, well, it really would be good for the kids. And he’s always loved this bit of Clapham. Why should he be the one to move away? The house needs stuff doing to it, but he can already see its potential. In fact the idea of having to start again from scratch excites him.

ABC has only just opened. John had forgotten how early it was. The radio’s on and the man’s spooning Maxwell House coffee granules into a mug.

‘Lillieshall Road?’ he says, surprised. ‘But that’s only just been listed.’

John says he knows that. He fiddles impatiently with his keys. ‘What’s it on at?’

‘Thirty-seven, I think,’ says the man, plonking down his mug and rooting through a file. ‘Yep, thirty-seven thou.’

John looks at his watch. Football ends in ninety minutes. ‘Can I see it today?’

‘You can see it right now if you like.’

‘Anyone home?’ The man from ABC gives a half-hearted shout as he inserts his key and pushes open the front door of 34 Lillieshall Road.

There’s a smell of recent frying and something else, a sharp chemical smell – air freshener or cleaning fluid. John follows the man into the dark hall – stairs up ahead, two doors to the left. The carpet looks like it’s never seen a hoover. Woodchip paper on the walls.

‘Hello, there. Anyone in?’ No one answers. ‘Must be out. Do you want to just have a look around on your own?’ The man yawns. Probably thinking of his Maxwell House, undrunk and cooling on the filing cabinet back in Acre Lane.

‘Flats, is it?’

‘No, but I think they let rooms out. There are a couple of lodgers or tenants at the top, far as I know. They’ve got notice to leave.’

‘Who owns it?’

‘Someone called Reynolds. But I don’t think the owner’s in the country. Mrs Ricketts is who I’ve been dealing with.’

‘What do you think he’d accept for it?’

‘She. You’re thinking of offering?’

‘I’ll make an offer today.’

The man blinks his eyes as if he thinks John’s sending him up. ‘You haven’t even seen upstairs.’

‘Thirty-two? Do you think they’d accept thirty-two?’

A plump West Indian woman comes creaking down the stairs. She’s wearing slippers, a low-cut top, gold earrings, and she’s carrying a pile of dirty towels that she chucks into a corner of the hall. Behind her a teenage girl is standing in the shadows with a metal dustpan in her hand.

‘My God, I did not hear the door, I am so sorry.’

‘I think we have someone interested in the property, Mrs Ricketts.’