Читать книгу Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House - Julie Myerson - Страница 8

Veronica and Doreen Ricketts, Alvin Reynolds, Gerald Sherrif, and Thomas H. Kyle 1976–1980

So take a breath, Number 34 Lillieshall Road, and brace yourself, because you’ve jumped back in time now and – whoosh! – the homely white Leyland gloss from the Pidgeon era is gone. In its place, orange peeling paint and murky dimpled glass. Next door has not yet been attacked with a sledgehammer and surrendered its parts as replacements – that’s still a few years in the future.

The hall’s lost its airy, family feel and has instead gone back to being the dark, tired, melancholy place John Pidgeon saw on that first day, with its Anaglypta walls and a biro-written notice that says: Thank You For Wiping Your Feet – even though the doormat’s worn to nothing and no one ever has or will.

Old cigarette smoke taints the air. Dirt and grit are trodden into the shag pile of the carpet. John Pidgeon was right – this house has never yet seen a hoover. The thick old stair carpet is done on a weekly basis with a brush and dustpan, a Bissell carpet sweeper used in the larger rooms. The dado is thick with grease and dust.

Look, Number 34, you’re not so beautiful any more – not so much a house to fall in love with on a breathless late summer afternoon, more a bunch of rented rooms, a place where folk mark time, grateful for a key, a roof, a place to sleep and wait for luck and life to move them on to somewhere better.

Be brave now, Number 34. Say goodbye to the expensive conversions, the sun terrace overlooking the back garden and the terracotta tiles in the kitchen. All those loving improvements – the big glass doors into the yard, the pistachio bathroom with its great big mirror, the louvred cupboards in the bedroom and the giant, low built-in bed – are in the future. The rag-rolling and sponging and the ice-cream colours are gone, the holiday-bought kilims and the halogen lights. In fact, the latter aren’t even invented yet.

But the big brick fireplace is back – oh no, sorry, it’s not. Not yet. Waiting to be discovered by the Pidgeons, it’s currently boarded up, suffocating under brown painted chipboard, a small gas fire with a row of weedy mauve flames lodged in its centre. A flimsy door separates this room from the draughty one behind that contains an old iron bath with a brown stain under the taps, a tumble, twist bathmat that could itself do with a wash.

The water takes ages to heat up but that’s not your fault, Number 34: the Ascot boiler’s on its last legs. A copy of the News of the World from a fortnight ago – its edges frazzled with damp – sits on the old washstand and the door in the corner leads to an old outdoor toilet with rolls of hard, shiny Jeyes Izal paper and a chain you have to pull hard to give a proper flush.

The brightly painted top back bedroom, Lucy Pidgeon’s room, with its views over Battersea to the Power Station and beyond – that’s dark and gloomy again, floored in lino. There’s a narrow bed with nylon sheets, beside it a mahogany bedside table that’s seen better days. On it, a bottle of pills, a pack of Rennies, a dusty copy of Archbold on Evidence.

Next door, no one’s even thought about Spurs wallpaper. The grey speckled pattern on the lino can’t really disguise the peppered scorch-marks of a hundred dropped or stubbed-out cigarettes. There’s no central heating, just a paraffin heater or two – Andy’s Gas delivers the canisters every Tuesday, though sometimes, if it runs out early, a teenage girl struggles back home with one from the petrol station at the end of Orlando Road.

It’s a house of discomforts, a house of extremes. In winter ice coats the inside of the bedroom panes. In summer bluebottles fuss at the shabby wood frames. The curtains are grubby white net. What’s the point in washing them when every other tenant is a smoker?

Sitting room, you’re not sponge-effect apricot and lemon with matching curtains. You’re just a dingy, dark room with a maroon-and-gold zigzag paper on the walls, a brown Dralon three-piece suite taking most of the space, the light draining as another crushing November dusk descends. Your antique stripped pine doors are clothed again – panelled over and painted sludge brown. Your carpet is purple with big orange swirls – cheery, someone thought at the time. On the marble mantelpiece, a lace doily or two, a row of Afro hair products, a wooden notice that reads: ‘When God Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade’. But there’s not much sign of lemonade being made in here. In fact, let’s be blunt. You’re not going to be a sitting room for several years yet: right now, you’re a lounge.

The tiny room on the first-floor landing – the room where John Pidgeon wrote his lyrics for Island Records and his book about Slade, and where I sit now writing this – serves as both kitchen and bathroom for the upstairs lodgers. It’s been like this for thirty years. A bath along the left-hand wall has a wooden counter, which, when pulled down, can take a camping stove and pans.

There’s a sink in the corner just big enough to wash up in, but mostly the gentleman lodger from upstairs doesn’t bother much with cooking. Instead he just keeps a bottle of milk and some Crackerbarrel cheese in the fridge, a loaf of Slimcea in the bread bin. He’ll stand in there, eating his lonely sandwich. Then he’ll take a mug of tea back up to his rooms on the top floor.

Garden, get ready to lose your mature magnolia, your yellow climbing rose, your tangle of honeysuckle and jasmine and scented lilac, and your curvy, lovingly dug figure-of-eight lawn. That’s still many summers, hours of labour, and eight dozen rolls of turf away. The cat sitting washing itself on the garden shed isn’t born yet and the shed’s still flat packed in a warehouse somewhere.

It’s still some years before bees will hover and sip from your lilies, red admirals tip their wings on your lilac, and little kids will shriek and splash in a blue Early Learning Centre paddling pool while their mothers discuss local primary schools on a canopied swing seat. Sorry, but right now you’re back to being exactly what you always knew you were: a scrubby, muddy dumping ground with a concrete path down the left-hand side, an apology for a lawn, and a few straggling clumps of dandelions and groundsel – and the charred remains of a bonfire down at the bottom.

So here you are, Number 34, on a dull Sunday morning in October 1978. Callaghan’s Winter of Discontent looms. Downstairs someone is frying a watery slab of gammon. A radio is on – hymns playing, someone singing along. A tall man with greying hair is walking down the stairs, very slow, very erect. From upstairs comes the fizz and crackle of someone’s television.

Jonathan has decided that the only way he can help me track down the still-living residents (whether that’s Thomas Kyle or Gerald Sherrif or Stanley and Louisa Heron) is to send out massive, optimistic mailshots to all the people of that name in Britain. He’s bought something called an Info Disk, the entire country’s electoral register on CD-Rom.

‘You see, if the name’s rare enough, it’s worth a shot. I can’t try Mavis Jones or even Vera Palmer – but Veronica Ricketts or Vincent Dias, no sweat.’

‘But there must be hundreds.’

‘Twenty, thirty of each. We’ll get them.’

‘So many letters?’

‘You give up so easily. I’m telling you, we have the technology. I’ve spent the last two hours mastering the program,’ he says, looking faintly annoyed when I glaze over. ‘I think I can export the names and addresses from the Info Disk and then print them straight onto labels. All we have to do is stuff and stick.’

34 Lillieshall Road

Clapham Old Town

London SW4 OLP

ARE YOU THE LOUISA HERON WHO LIVED IN CLAPHAM IN 1961?

DO YOU KNOW OR ARE YOU RELATED TO A STANLEY OR LOUISA HERON?

25th April 2003

Dear Louisa,

Please forgive this letter coming totally out of the blue but I wonder if you can help me. I’m trying to trace a Louisa Heron who lived in our house (with Stanley Heron) in Clapham during 1960 and 1961.

I should explain: I’m writing a book which is a biography of our house (34 Lillieshall Road) in Clapham, South London and 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!

If you are not the Louisa Heron who lived here, then I’m sorry to have bothered you and there’s no need to get back in touch. But if you are the Louisa Heron (or if you know Stanley or Louisa Heron) who lived here, then I would love to talk to you – I could obviously travel to see you. I would love to show you the house now and also hear your memories of what it was like to live in then. It may seem like an odd request but anything at all that I can find out will be helpful (and fascinating!) to me. Even better, if you had any photos from that time then that would be wonderful … needless to say, you’ll get a copy of the book which will be published in 2004.

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

With very best wishes and hoping to hear from you,

Julie Myerson

The kids help him stuff and stamp envelopes. Raph does his batch in front of the Test Match on television, sitting slumped backwards on the pink telly-end sofa, a bunch of envelopes and labels on his dirty knee, drained banana milkshake glass by his side.

Chloë takes a bundle of envelopes in a Sainsbury’s bag and marches up to the High Street to catch the 5.30 collection. Betty goes with her, bouncy with excitement, holding her end of the lead in her mouth. ‘Leave it!’ Chloë orders and the dog immediately lets go of the lead and then, two seconds later, grabs it again.

The letter we send out is carefully worded. It makes it clear that there’s absolutely no need to reply if you’re not the one we’re looking for. All the same, I come home next day to find thirteen messages on the answer-phone from people apologizing for not being the ‘right Stanley Heron’ or the ‘right Thomas Kyle’ and wishing me luck with the project.

And then the letters. From a Thomas Kyle:

Regrettably I cannot help you in your search. My father was also called Thomas Kyle (Scottish like myself), as far as I know never left Scotland and Has Been Dead these 33–34 years …

A Gerald Sherrif says:

I’m sorry but I have never lived anywhere else but Carlisle and don’t expect to as I am now eighty-seven, but I do hope you find the gentleman you are looking for in the near future.

A Stanley Heron goes still further:

About myself: I was born in Coxhoe and have lived here all my life. I am 78 years of age and would have returned your call but am not very clear on the phone and so I apologise for not replying sooner. I am NOT the person you are looking for and I have never been to Clapham ever. I am a retired chartered chemist and the only Louisa Heron I know is my granddaughter. I am sorry I haven’t been of much help to you but please understand that I have AT LEAST made this effort to write to you today. If I HAD been the person you are seeking I would have been happy to supply you with any information I possessed but I am afraid I am NOT HE.

I wish you luck in your endeavours to find the RIGHT Stanley Heron …

Yours sincerely

Stan Heron

These letters and phone messages are peculiarly and unexpectedly touching. I realize that actually they’re a part of what I’m trying to explore: the fact that all of us badly want to be part of a story, to be the Right Person, the One someone’s looking for. Don’t we all, at the end of the day, just want to connect our lives with the lives of others and experience that satisfying symmetry of time and place that comes from being notified, written to, called to account?

It’s touching, but I’m no further on. I wait for the Right Gerald Sherrif or Thomas Kyle or Aston McNish to ring.

A warm evening. Supper over, Jake’s loading the dishwasher – ‘Do I have to?’ – and Betty’s rounding up the two younger kids in the hall.

She runs fast at one, then another, three short sharp barks as if she means business, though of course she doesn’t. She has no idea what she means. She just likes the chase, the noise, the sense of cause and effect. Like when she rounds up the ducks on the pond in Battersea Park – swimming round and round in a circle, ears flat, until she has a flock of mallards clustered in the centre and then realizes she doesn’t know what to do next. It’s no good being a Border Collie in central London. Like being a trained heart specialist forced to clean bedpans in A & E.

I pour a glass of wine and wait till nine-thirty to phone a woman in Jamaica called Veronica Ricketts. When there were no Veronica Ricketts on the Info Disk, I remembered that John Pidgeon had mentioned he thought he bought the house from a West Indian. Jonathan looked up the Jamaican phone book on the web and handed me a piece of paper with the name Veronica Ricketts and a number circled in red.

‘OK,’ I yell down to kids and dog, ‘you have to be quiet now!’ I dial the number, wait.

The bleep of the phone. One. Two. Three.

‘Yeah?’

‘Excuse me, is this Veronica Ricketts?’

‘Yeah.’

The line’s crackly and there’s an echo. I explain what I’m doing and ask if she’s ever lived in London.

A pause. ‘Don’t think so, no.’

‘In Clapham, London? I mean in England?’

‘Nah.’

‘You definitely never lived here?’

‘Don’t believe I did.’

‘You mean never?’

‘Uh – never, don’t think so, nah.’

I apologize for disturbing her and she puts the phone down with a click.

‘Well?’ says Jonathan.

‘She said she’d never lived in London.’

‘Damn.’

‘But she sounded –’

‘What?’

‘Kind of – like she was lying.’

He laughs. ‘What? Why would anyone lie about a thing like that?’

‘I don’t know. She just – I don’t know – I wasn’t exactly convinced.’

‘But, sweetie, you can’t make a person say they lived here if they didn’t.’

‘I don’t mean that. I just mean – what if she’s the right one but she just couldn’t be bothered, didn’t want to talk to me, just didn’t want to play?’

He leans in the doorway and folds his arms and thinks about this. ‘Personally I think it’s very unlikely. But anyway, even if you were right, what on earth could you do about it?’

I tip back in my chair. ‘Offer them money?’

‘Oh yeah? And then everyone you phoned would be rushing to agree that they’d lived here.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

‘You know, I keep on thinking about that man Leon in Jake’s room,’ Raph says a week or so after his visit.

‘And?’

‘I can’t get him out of my head. I even see the wallpaper in my mind.’

I smile. ‘Is this because you’d like some Spurs wallpaper yourself?’

Straightaway he shoots me an injured look. ‘No, it’s not that – except I would like some actually – it’s just, um, I don’t know what it is.’

‘You’d rather you didn’t know about him?’

‘Kind of, yes. It’s like he won’t go away now. Even though I liked him a lot.’

I wonder whether to feel bad about this. I know what I’ve done. In some small way, by bringing the grown-up Leon back to the house, I’ve messed with the normal order of things and created a ghost: for my own kids anyway. The grown-up Leon may have been and gone, popping in for a beer and a chat – but the ghost of the child Leon is firmly back here now, sitting up under his duvet, kicking a ball around the garden, haunting us, reminding us. That room is one that Raph’s taken for granted as his, as ours, since his earliest days, his babyhood. Have I done something terrible?

And is this just the beginning? Is the same thing going to happen with other – maybe less friendly or benign – people from the house? It’s true that we stop ourselves thinking about the ones who’ve gone before. We have to, otherwise how would we ever be able to make our own lives fit those spaces? How would you sleep, cough, be ill, or even (or maybe especially?) make a baby in a room where you could feel all those other people down the years doing it, being it, making it?

‘My only worry about if you let me get Spurs wallpaper,’ says Raph, warming to the much more important subject now, ‘is, I mean, can I trust myself? What if I suddenly switch teams again?’

A Liberal Democrat Councillor has suddenly resigned so there’s a by-election down the road in Stockwell Ward. It matters deeply to the local Labour Party, desperate to regain control in Lambeth. Jake has been sent out to deliver leaflets and Jonathan is sitting in the kitchen, phone canvassing, working through each name on the electoral register.

‘It may be a silly question,’ he says, feet on table and phone to ear, as I come in, ‘but I just thought of something. You have checked the electoral registers, haven’t you?’

‘I don’t know. What do you mean?’

‘Your big list of names of people who lived here, where did you get it from, originally I mean?’

‘It’s from Kelly’s.’

‘And what’s Kelly’s?’

‘It’s a kind of old directory of the area, like a telephone directory, I suppose.’

‘But you should definitely check the electoral registers too. It might be more accurate for one thing.’

‘I think Kelly’s is pretty accurate.’

‘OK, but you’d get middle names and so on.’

‘Do I really need middle names?’

‘I think you need every single bit of help you can possibly get, don’t you?’

I’m not sure he’s right. I’m not sure the electoral registers will tell me anything that isn’t in Kelly’s – and anyway I’ve no reason to suppose Kelly’s isn’t perfectly accurate.

Feeling slightly annoyed at the way he always has to know better, but also knowing that I can’t possibly afford to miss a single trick, I go to the London Metropolitan Archives – conveniently just round the corner from the Family Records Centre – which is where you can look at old electoral registers.

But each year’s register has to be ordered separately and you can only order five documents each twenty minutes and then wait another twenty minutes for them to be delivered up from the vaults below. I look at my watch. Ten to three. I haven’t left myself enough time. I came here straight from my exercise class and I have to rush back and collect Raph from a school trip at four.

I decide to work backwards from the Pidgeons and just see if I learn anything at all when, suddenly, there in 1980, as well as Veronica Ricketts, is Doreen Ricketts. And next to her name: ‘Allowed to vote from July 10’.

Now this is worth knowing. July 10 has to be her eighteenth birthday – which automatically gives me a birth date. Doreen is a year younger than me. I almost run back past the scrubby stretch of park with its Sport for All tennis court, past Exmouth Market and back into the Family Records Centre.

A man moves his bag out of the way and tuts because I’m apparently moving too fast. I don’t care. Straightaway I find her birth in 1961. Doreen Josephine Ricketts, daughter of Veronica Ricketts formerly Shirley. Straight to the green marriage registers and after only a few years there’s a Doreen J. Ricketts marrying a Mr Webley in August 1984. I order both certificates, pay cash, and run to the tube, making it to school just as the coach pulls into The Chase.

Back at home, I type Doreen J. Webley into the Info Disk and up she comes, an address in Carshalton, though no phone number. Next day I send her a letter, recorded delivery.

4.20 p.m. A power cut. Jonathan and I are looking up random Hinkleys on the Internet – there seems to be an Australian darts player called Peter Hinkley though he lost 3–0 to T. Hankey of England in the 2001 World Darts Championship at Frimley Green. We’re just wondering if he might be Isabella and Walter’s great-great-something, when there’s a huge electrical sigh and everything in the house switches off – pfling. Jonathan goes down to the cellar to check the fuses, but it’s not us.

It’s 6.30 p.m. and the power is still off. Jonathan cooks quiche and sweetcorn in the gas oven and serves it to the kids in the fast-descending gloom. They’re dismayed – no Playstation, no TV.

‘Oh God, what are we going to do?’ moans Jacob.

‘Gameboy,’ Raph whispers urgently to his friend Seb who came over this afternoon. ‘Phone your Dad and tell him to bring that and some batteries.’

Seb has just decided he’s staying the night. Raph gets him the phone. I sit on the kitchen sofa, pushing aside school rucksacks, old socks and a tartan blanket covered in dog hair (this even though the dog is not allowed on the sofas).

‘Dad, this is Seb. Can you bring my PJs?’

‘Can you bring my PJs?’ mocks Chloë from the floor where – on Jonathan’s orders – she’s sitting cleaning everyone’s school shoes.

‘Shush!’ says Raph.

‘And, Dad, there’s a power cut so can you bring my Gameboy as well as my cricket stuff, oh, and the Tony Hawks PS2 game just in case the power comes on –’

‘Thank you,’ Jonathan prompts him. ‘Thank you beautiful kind Daddy best person in the world …’

‘Thank you,’ says Seb, ‘beautiful kind wonderful …’

‘I really seriously can’t see to do this any more,’ says Chloë.

‘OK. You’ll have to leave it and finish later.’

‘What if the lights never come back on?’ she asks hopefully.

Jake sighs. ‘There’s nothing to do. This is a terrible day.’

‘Oh for goodness’ sake, you kids are so spoilt!’

‘We’re not spoilt, we just need a certain amount of electricity to function.’

‘But you’re children, not …’

‘Electrical appliances,’ says Chloë.

I get up and call the LEB. They tell me it should be back on by eight.

‘Ah,’ says Jake, brightening, ‘in time for Big Brother’

It’s not getting dark but it’s not getting lighter either. Jonathan lights six old pink candles he found in the drawer and the kids gaze at them as if they’ve never seen flames before. The room looks suddenly wonderful – their cross faces suddenly cross in a more intriguing and timeless way. Even the younger boys’ nylon football shirts look almost attractive by candlelight.

I snatch the quiche crust on the edge of Jake’s plate, and stuff it in my mouth.

By eight, there’s still no power. I wander down the road to see whether the men can tell me what time it will be fixed – seems easier than ringing the helpline, which is frankly not that helpful.

It’s a warm evening, not as dark when you go out into it – the sky still lavender grey, not quite drained of light.

‘10.30,’ says the black guy with the grease all over his hands. ‘We’re hoping 10.30. Don’t worry – we’ll get it back on for you in time for the Premiership.’

Why does everyone always assume you want to watch football? I look at my watch.

‘Two hours?’

‘We’re doing your end of the road next,’ says the blond one with the thin face and an earring.

I thank them and walk back down the road as slowly as I can, suddenly relishing the dark. The street is hushed, just the faint glimmer of a candle in some windows. It looks as though everyone is out even though they aren’t. At the Tim Bobbin, long rows of different height candles line the windows. Beyond them, faces move in and out of shadow, laughing, drinking, talking.

Was this how it looked and felt in Henry Hayward’s day? I suppose not quite, because they’d at least have had the gas lamps lit. Maybe it’s more like the Blitz: total liquid darkness.

Ann at Number 28 seems to be sitting alone in a dark room, so I knock on her door to ask if she’d like to come round for a drink.

Ann has lived here in the road for years, since well before us. She used to work for a religious publisher and is retired now – tall, slender, white-haired, drives a pale blue car and always seems to have heard the whole week’s output of Radio 4. She says she’ll be with us in five minutes.

Meanwhile the burglar alarm at Number 30 goes off, its peculiar wail puncturing the darkness. The Caimans come out into the street, all dressed up.

‘Oh dear.’ Frances looks around to see where the alarm’s coming from. ‘If ours goes off, we’re just at the Stepping Stone. Taking our boys out to dinner.’

Ann knocks on our door. Steps carefully into our hall and picks her way round Jonathan’s bike in the darkness.

‘All I’ve brought are my hanky, my torch, and my keys,’ she announces cheerfully.

‘That’s all you need.’ I hand her a large glass of red wine.

We talk about our house and the road and whether she remembers the people who were here before us – she doesn’t. I ask her whether she knows how the road came to be called Lillieshall and she says she did once hear a story that there used to be a farm here and the farmer’s wife was called Lily so they named it after her: Lily’s Hall. Jonathan points out that there’s a place called Lillieshall in Shropshire – isn’t it more likely to be named after that?

‘I prefer Ann’s story,’ I tell him.

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I thought you would.’

I’m on the trail of Lucy Spawton’s will. I go to First Avenue House, the Principal Registry of the Family Division, High Court of Justice. A nondescript, government building on the north side of Holborn, just opposite Chancery Lane.

I put my bag through the X-ray tunnel and go past the lockers, where a woman is taking clingfilmed sandwiches out of a briefcase, and into the Probate Search Room – one large yet somehow terminally dingy room with shelves and shelves of hefty maroon volumes. Most people walk past, along to the lifts, to the rooms where divorces are fought and settled, though probably never truly settled.

The girl behind the counter in the Probate Search Room is plump with big earrings. She’s talking to a man with food stains down his trousers. I smell the sour unwashedness as he shuffles past me. She eyes me suspiciously. I smile winningly and tell her I’m researching a book and ask her if there’s any way you can look up a name alphabetically if you want to discover the year of death – or probate. She rolls her eyes and laughs. ‘No way, lady.’

‘I just have to go through every volume?’

‘Yeah. Well, except on the computer. You know how to use a computer?’

‘Of course.’

She rolls her eyes again. ‘Plenty of them that comes in here don’t.’

She tells me that probates after 1996 are on the computer – you just type in the name. But anything before that, it’s a question of going through the volumes. She laughs to herself and retires into a back room, shaking her head.

There are no women in the room, only men, the food-stained one and another who must work here because he has some kind of an identity tag round his neck and fluffed-out white hair, and a couple of improbable-looking young ones in denim. One is chewing gum. ‘Please Do Not Bring Refreshments into This Room’ says a sign above his head.

I find the volume S-T 1944 and straightaway there she is:

SPAWTON Lucy of 34 Lillieshall Road Clapham Common London died 15 July 1944 Probate Llandudno 29 September to Barclays Bank Limited and Thomas Harlock Beesley Spawton bank clerk. Effects £4289. 3s 3.d.

Again, it’s unsettling to see our address printed there. When, I wonder, will it lose its power to shock me? Also the 3s. 3d. It seems sort of futile and unlikely, to see each penny written down like that. I wonder how much £4,000 was worth in those days.

But, armed with this entry, I know what I have to do next. I have to find Thomas Harlock Beesley Spawton, who must be a nephew or brother. It seems pretty straightforward. Assuming he was alive and well in 1944, assuming that Lucy might even have left him the house, all I have to do is go through the S volumes from 1944 onwards, till I find Thomas’s death – and see who he names.

The volumes are heavy. I don’t care, it will be worth it. Food-stain Man is breathing next to me. I ignore him and press on. Amazingly, I’ve only got to 1948 when I find him:

SPAWTON Thomas Harlock Beesley of 34 Park Hill Clapham London SW4 died 5 April 1948 Probate London 12 August to Midland Bank Executor and Trustee Company Limited and Matilda Spawton widow. Effects £5998. 19s. 3d.

That 3d. again. Feeling hugely encouraged – I now know where Thomas lived and even the name of his wife/widow – I go on to look for Matilda. Many volumes and aching shoulders later – 1962 – I have her:

SPAWTON Matilda of 34 Park Hill Clapham SW4 widow died 12 September 1962 at Chesterton Hospital Cambridge. Probate Peterborough 29 November to Thomas Hugh Henry Stearn retired civil servant. Effects £16447. 7s.

Now I’m feeling quite excited. This means I’ve tracked Lucy’s descendants as far as 1962, which isn’t bad. And Park Hill is just past Sainsbury’s, alongside Acre Lane – these people may not have lived in the house but they could well end up as part of my story, the house’s story. I drop Spawton and start looking for Stearns in the books. Don’t care about heavy volumes now – heft them hard and fast, this is worth it.

Sure enough – very soon after Matilda’s death – here’s Thomas Stearn:

STEARN Thomas Hugh Henry of 23 Hurst Park Avenue Cambridge died 16 May 1965 Administration Peterborough 18 June to Laurie Stearn widow. £5108

How did Thomas Stearn get through so much money? I wonder. On to look for Laurie.

STEARN Laurie of 9 Chaucer Rd Cambridge died 3 September 1971 Probate Ipswich 25 October £2071

But there’s no one else mentioned, no other name given. A dead end perhaps? I go and sit outside by the lockers, suddenly deflated, oppressed by all these endings. An afternoon spent in this room finally wears you down – flipping through pages and pages of the deaths of strangers.

I eat a Bounty from the vending machine and look at a copy of the Standard that someone’s left on the seat. Then I go back in and copy out Laurie Steam’s entry and show it to the girl at the counter.

‘If you want to know more about an entry,’ I ask her, ‘what can you do? I mean, is there any further information about the will that I can get access to?’

She looks at me as if I am a complete moron. ‘Well, yeah,’ she says. ‘The will.’

‘But can I see that?’

‘Yeah.’

‘How?’

‘You just have to order it.’ She hands me a form. ‘Costs a fiver. Takes an hour.’

I fill out the form and she checks it for me. Take it to the man, pay, walk out into fresh air and blue skies. I’ve no idea where I’m going, I just know I have to get out of there.

Outside, it’s a normal day. It’s reassuring to see living people – men and women in shirts and jackets, black skirts and high heels, walking furiously up and down High Holborn in the afternoon sunshine. I take deep breaths of city air and, after twenty minutes, go back in, through bag X-ray again.

The girl comes over.

‘Are you Julie Myerson? Did you pay?’

‘Yes.’ I show her my form.

She tuts. ‘But you’re supposed to give that to me!’

I apologize profusely and she tells me the hour starts now. The man with identity tag and fluffed-out hair comes over to me, grinning. I smell his armpits as he moves closer.

‘If you don’t mind my saying,’ he offers, ‘the light’s very bad in here.’

They shout your name when the will you’ve ordered is ready.

As the girl shouts ‘Meerson!’ pain zigzags across my upper back. I’ve pulled a muscle. I knew it. Too many volumes. Clutching my spasming shoulder, I go over to the desk and collect my will. Scanning it quickly, I see names and addresses – an executor, a witness, a solicitor. Fantastic!

I take it to a table where I can sit and read it properly. The will names Laurie Steam’s two daughters and three grandchildren. The daughters are Audrey Joan Clayton and Margaret Phyllis Askew, the grandchildren Robert Askew, Michael Askew, and Diane Askew.

I sit there and try to decide what’s funny about that Margaret Phyllis name. Margaret Phyllis Askew … suddenly I know where I’ve read it before. I’ve been staring at it on a chart on my wall – it’s on the list, the list of names from Kelly’s. Margaret Phyllis Askew lived in the house! She lived at 34 Lillieshall Road sometime in the forties, with her husband Peter.

I realize I’ve just uncovered a fact I could never have guessed at – that the Spawtons and the Askews were related, by marriage anyway. Which means that if I can find a living descendant of one, then I probably have the other.

Back home, with a bag of frozen peas clutched to my shoulder, I show Laurie Stearn’s will to Jonathan, who expresses mild-to-moderate excitement at my Spawton-Askew discovery. He immediately starts looking up Askews on his Info Disk.

‘There!’ He prints off a list of Diane Askews. The one at the top gives an address in Brighton and there’s also a phone number. ‘Got to go out to an Environment Scrutiny Sub-Committee,’ he says, glancing at his watch and finishing his cold tea. ‘If I were you, I’d ring that number now.’

‘Now?’

‘Yes, now, what’s stopping you?’

‘But it’s seven o’clock on a Thursday evening.’

‘Best time to get people. Why do you think all those irritating sales people always ring at this time?’

He gives me a bossy look as he leaves the room.

I sit at the desk and stare out at the hot blue evening sky and bite the ends of my fingers.

If I ring Diane and it’s really her, a real Askew relative, then what on earth do I say? I try scribbling a script for myself but it only makes me more apprehensive. I suppose the worst she can do is put the phone down on me. Which would be awful.

I fetch a large glass of wine and gaze at the will. I have to find Laurie Steam’s living relatives, that’s certain. And call them. There’s no way round it: if I can’t do that, then I might as well give up on this whole idea.

Downstairs the children are shouting in the garden and the dog is barking. I shut the window and, coming back to the desk, I see something that even Jonathan hasn’t noticed. The will was witnessed back then by two people in Cambridge – E. G. Harrison, housewife and H. P. Harrison, clerical assistant. And in 1971 they were living at 36 Godwin Close, Cambridge. Could they possibly still be there?

I phone directory enquiries and give that name and address. I hold my breath and wait to be rebuffed. ‘Here’s your number,’ goes the voice.

Feet thundering up the stairs. Chloë bursts in without knocking. Her long blonde hair is plastered to her face with sweat and little bits of grass are also stuck in it. Her eyes are dark with fury.

‘Can you please tell those boys to stop kicking their football in my garden?’

I put down the receiver and explain that I’ve got difficult phone calls to make and must have peace – ‘And anyway, are they really doing anything bad?’

She glares at me. ‘Well! They’ve knocked a branch of blackcurrants off my bush and now they’re starting on the rocket. So what do you think, is that bad enough for you?’ Her eyes widen. ‘And they’re using a real football by the way, not the foam one you told them to use – just thought you might like to know that.’

I sigh. ‘They shouldn’t be using a hard ball.’

‘You tell them that!’

‘Can you tell them? Say I said so. Are they doing the stuff to your garden on purpose?’

She gives me a sulphuric look. ‘What do you think?’

‘Guess what,’ I say. ‘I think I’ve just found a phone number for someone who may know someone who once lived in this house! It’s my first real breakthrough to one of the long-ago people.’

She folds her arms sarcastically. ‘Well, how fantastically exciting.’

‘It is actually – it’s really exciting. But I need some peace to ring these people now.’

‘Great.’ Chloë regards me for a second. ‘Thanks for caring about your only daughter’s garden! I’ll probably have a nervous breakdown when I’m older but at least you’ll have got your fucking book written!’

She kicks the door once, before slamming it shut. She’s not allowed to say that word. I should call her back. I shut my eyes and wait. She stomps downstairs as loudly as possible. I wait to check she’s really gone and soon all I can hear are the boys’ shouty-laughs and the small sigh as the house settles.

Before I can think of another reason not to, I dial the number.

‘Yes?’ It’s a female voice, oldish.

‘Mrs Harrison?’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m so sorry to bother you, you don’t know me. I’m a writer and I’m researching a book about a house in London – my house – and I found your name on a will, as a witness, and wondered if you used to know someone called Laurie Stearn?’

‘Stearn?’ The woman sounds nonplussed and a little bit wary.

‘Yes, I know this sounds odd but it was her will and I’m trying to trace her granddaughter, Diane Askew.’

‘I don’t know anything about any wills,’ says the woman even more warily, ‘and I don’t know any Stearns, no, I’m not sure I can help you.’

It’s the wrong person or the wrong Harrison or something. Could it be a daughter?

‘But you know what,’ she says more brightly, ‘it’s really funny because my next-door neighbour has a niece called Diane Askew. I know she does. Isn’t that peculiar?’

‘But that’s her!’ I almost shout. ‘That’s who I’m trying to contact.’

‘What a coincidence,’ continues the woman blandly, ‘that she should have the same name

I want to reach down the phone and hug her. ‘No,’ I try to explain, desperate that she shouldn’t hang up on me, ‘it’s not a coincidence at all. That’s who I’m looking for – that’s the person, that’s her!’

The woman pauses. ‘Well … Clayton is her name.’

‘Audrey Joan Clayton?’

‘Yes actually … how on earth did you know?’

‘Well, it’s complicated, but I’m looking for her too.’

‘Come to think of it,’ Mrs Harrison says, ‘I think I might have witnessed Audrey’s mother’s will a very long time ago.’

‘Laurie Stearn?’

‘It might have been Stearn. Yes, oh yes, I think so.’

The room’s suddenly hot, I’m sweating, my heart is banging crazily.

‘Look,’ I tell her, ‘I’m so sorry to be disturbing you like this, but could you possibly give me a phone number for Mrs Clayton?’

Mrs Harrison hesitates. ‘Well, she’s not in right now, so you won’t get her.’

‘Oh, but –’

‘But I know where she is.’

I wait. She’s going to say she’s out of the country or something.

‘In fact, I can see her right now,’ Mrs Harrison tells me. ‘She’s just out there in the street chatting to a neighbour. Do you want me to get her for you?’

I wait for what feels like ages but is in fact a moment or two. A sound of rustling and crunching as the neighbour comes to the phone.

‘Mrs Clayton?’

‘Ye-es?’

I say my bit again. Try to keep it simple. Explain that I’m writing a history of my house which is in Clapham and –

‘Lillieshall Road?’ asks Mrs Clayton, totally unprompted. ‘I went there!’

‘You did?’

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

‘Lucy Spawton?’

‘That’s right, I knew her.’

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

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

‘You knew the Hinkleys?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Park Hill?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘So we have a baddie?’

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

At about nine-thirty the phone rings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She laughs.

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

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

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

An hour later, Diane rings back.

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

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

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

I sit down. ‘Yes.’

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

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

‘So, do you see how weird that is? She’s been in your house but without having any idea that her father once owned it. Anyway she’s very intrigued about the whole thing and would love to talk to you – do you want her number?’

‘Funny,’ says Jonathan when I tell him, ‘I knew there was something odd about that name Povah. I knew I’d heard it somewhere.’

‘But what about the coincidence – of her coming here and having no idea about all of this? Isn’t it just totally amazing?’

‘It’s the kind of thing you would say means something,’ he points out, maddening in his refusal to be amazed, ‘but that I would say is just one of those coincidences.’

‘But this very house – of all the houses in Clapham? Of all the houses in just this one particular road?’

He shrugs. He hasn’t got an answer to that.

Chloë’s response is much sharper. She sits in the bath, pale, blonde, tired, turning the bar of soap round and round in her hands and then dipping it in the water to watch the suds float off.

‘Maybe,’ she says, frowning down at her wet body, ‘maybe it’s this: maybe buildings can draw people back to them. Maybe all the buildings we ever go in, our ancestors have been in before us and we just don’t know it because we never find out those things.’

She looks up to see what I make of that. I tell her I like it as a possible explanation.

A hot afternoon. I put the dog in the back of the car and go to the Westminster Archives bookshop in Queen Anne Street. I have learned the lesson of the Probate Search Room and the electoral registers: there could be a whole lot more out there, I have to know where to look, how to look.

I buy six different pamphlets about researching family and homes – genealogy, how to use the newspaper library at Colindale, researching your family history on the web.

‘Plenty of serious reading for you there, eh?’ says the man with very thin white hands who rings them up on the till.

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘Not that it’s any guarantee that you’ll find anything,’ he laughs.

I get home and try to read the pamphlets but don’t understand any of them, so I ask Jonathan if he can make any sense of them.

He gives me a beady look. ‘What do you mean, make sense?’ he says.

I show him the bit about newspapers on the Internet. Where does it say whether you can look at newspapers on the Internet?

‘It says it here,’ he says, ‘and you can’t.’

‘Oh.’

The phone rings in my study. I rush upstairs and it’s someone called Doreen Webley. ‘I used to be Doreen Ricketts,’ she says. ‘Veronica was my Mum. I lived in that house in 1978 for a couple of years and, well …’

She sounds as if she’s about to go on. I wait. She laughs softly.

‘I remember that house,’ she says.

I ask her if her Mum’s still in this country.

‘She passed away in May,’ she says, ‘in Canada. She had cancer.’

I tell her I’m sorry.

‘I came over from Jamaica when I was sixteen,’ she says, ‘to live with her. Or that was the idea anyway. I was born over here, you see, but I only lived here about a year as a baby before I was taken back to Jamaica. So living in Lillieshall Road when I was sixteen was really my first memory of England.’

I ask her if these memories were happy and she hesitates.

‘Ye-es. But I wasn’t there very long. My Mum sold the house and moved to Canada because she was getting married to the owner of the house, you see.’

I take a breath. ‘Alvin Reynolds?’

‘I never met him though. She married him over there in Canada but, well, the marriage didn’t work out.’

This is amazing. Weeks before, Jonathan had, jokingly, wondered whether the mysterious Veronica Ricketts was an Alvin girlfriend and I’d told him not to be silly. Alvin Reynolds was clearly married to Merciline Reynolds, as she appeared in Kelly’s, though it was true that, after a few years, Merciline disappears. I ask Doreen whether she’d be interested in coming round for a chat.

‘I’d be very interested to see the house again, yes, I’d love to do that actually.’

I ask her if she has any photos of her and her Mum from that time. ‘No, none of us together, no.’

‘Nothing?’

‘I’m afraid not, no. I have nothing of myself at all. I might have one of my Mum somewhere. I’ll have a look.’

Jonathan’s mailshots – to all the Thomas Kyles and all the Gerald Sherrifs and all the John Costellos – are not producing the desired results. In fact, they have yet to elicit a single response. Jonathan, never one to admit that maybe he has wasted his time, has decided to crank things up a gear. He spends idle afternoons ringing all those who have numbers listed alongside their addresses.

‘Hello, can I speak to Thomas Kyle, please?… Right, well, I’m sorry to bother you, this is rather a strange call, but I’m trying to trace a Thomas Kyle who once lived in Clapham in South London … No, the name Lillieshall Road doesn’t ring any bells?… Right, OK, thanks, sorry to have bothered you.’

He does this again and again. He tells me that if he finds the right one, he’ll immediately arrange for me to ring them back.

But the Info Disk throws up only the one Alvin Reynolds, and he’s in Wolverhampton. He’s the only Alvin Reynolds in the whole country so unless Alvin stayed in Canada – and, let’s face, it he may have done – there’s a good chance that this is the Right Alvin Reynolds. Which means I have to dial this one.

‘Is that Alvin Reynolds?’

‘Yeah?’

‘You don’t know me, I’m so sorry to bother you … it’s just that I’m writing a book about our house in Clapham and I think you used to live here.’

‘Not interested, sorry.’

He puts the phone down.

The weather has broken, much cooler, rain all night. Walk down the wet pavements to see Jo Bowyer, my osteopath, who’s been treating my spinal scoliosis for years. Jo is not only a fencing champion, but also a member of the Bowyer family who owned most of this patch of Clapham for centuries.

Jo grew up in the Pink House – it seems to have no other address, marooned as it is right in the middle of our back-to-back gardens – but now she lives out in the country with her small daughter, husband, and a pack of hunting hounds.

Jo – who has frizzy blonde hair, an intriguingly aristocratic manner, and wears a leather biker’s jacket over her whites – is the only person I know who can say ‘hot bitch’ with a completely straight face. It always feels somehow exotic to lie on her white towelling table in Clapham and hear tales of dead livestock and kennel maids, country schools and fetes.

Today Jo says that my back feels different from usual.

‘I can feel a lot of old, deep stuff from long ago.’

‘How do you mean? How long ago?’

She hesitates, her hands under me. ‘I would say, the late sixties. Mid to late sixties.’

‘You can really pinpoint it to within a few years like that?’

If anyone else tried to tell me this, I’d laugh. But Jo isn’t like that. She’s honest, no-nonsense, even abrupt at times. If she has nothing to say, she says nothing. Which means that when she does say something I believe her.

‘I’m good at putting ages on things,’ she tells me flatly. ‘I would say this is 1966/67. What was going on in your life then?’

‘You mean did I have any accidents?’

‘It can be anything – accidents, illness, emotional stress, whatever.’

I tell her – truthfully – that my childhood before my mother left my father (when I was twelve) was really very happy, very settled. They started fighting about two years before she left, so I suppose from 1970 onwards I may have had a tougher time, though I don’t especially remember it like that.

‘No,’ she says, ‘this is earlier. How old were you in 1968?’

Eight. I was eight.

I am small, skinny, nervy, wearing corduroy, reading Blyton and Nesbit, hating gym, frightened of the dark, of wolves, of the taste and texture of toothpaste. Frightened of everything, in fact. At school I am so shy I spend each playtime facing the wall in the corner of the playground, gazing at the velvety moss landscape and picking at the crumbly sandstone with my fingernails, hoping no one will speak to me.

We live close to school in a bungalow designed by my mother. There’s a swing and a tree house and fairies who live in the bluebells at the shady bottom of the garden, and something my father has always dreamed of having – an indoor swimming pool.

‘There was one thing,’ I tell Jo. ‘We had a swimming pool in our house – just a small one – but I was absolutely petrified of water.’

‘Oh?’

I tell her about my daily dread – that we were all supposed to have a swim after school. My sisters couldn’t wait to have their armbands blown up and jump straight in, but just the feel of the armbands inflating terrified me. I used to stand in a corner and tremble and cry.

‘I thought I would drown,’ I tell Jo. ‘I didn’t think I’d float.’

‘I didn’t think I’d float’

She asks me if they ever forced me in. I tell her 1 don’t think so, they were very patient.

‘I think it was me. I was very difficult,’ I tell her, and I laugh then because I remember other things.

‘What?’

I explain to her how, in the same bungalow, my father had a workshop full of chemicals to do with his work (he had a small, two-man plastics factory) and that he once put some polystyrene in a beaker and let it set. Later I tiptoed into his workshop and secretly licked it because it looked exactly like the froth on beer. He then mentioned to me that it was poisonous and I didn’t dare tell him I’d licked it, but I was convinced I was going to die.

‘What did you do?’ Jo asks me.

‘I went and sat in the garden with my dog and waited to die.’

After the session, I drive Chloë to tennis practice and we discuss the way fear can affect your body.

‘I used to be very scared of the shower,’ she tells me, ‘but I don’t give it any thought now.’

‘Hey, I remember that. You used to scream and scream.’

She giggles at the memory.

‘And then one day you just didn’t.’

‘Mmm, I suppose.’

‘But do you feel we helped you? Or did we make it worse? Did we used to get cross with you?’

‘I can’t remember,’ she admits happily.

I still remember every moment of the indoor swimming pool. The sunshine wavering over the bright blue water and making juddery patterns on the turquoise tiles. The ominous odour of chlorine, the white ledge you clung to, the decorative dried starfish on the wall – an emblem of terror for years afterwards.

I turn right down Nightingale Lane and ask Chloë how she got over it, the fear of the shower. Does she remember?

‘I suppose I just realized it wasn’t very rational,’ she says, inspecting a scab on her knee.

Doreen Webley is a couple of years younger than me, gentle, quiet, neatly dressed in white shirt and long denim skirt. She comes through the hall and says she doesn’t remember it being so narrow. I apologize for all the boxes piled by the door.

‘It might be that or it might just be that I’ve got that bit wider,’ she laughs.

We sit and drink tea at the kitchen table. She talks quietly, haltingly, but she offers information without my having to ask questions. I’m impressed by her directness. In the end I put my pencil down and just listen.

‘I came in the summer of seventy-eight. I was sixteen. I didn’t know my Mum at all – she’d left me in Jamaica when I was two and I hadn’t seen her since. I’d been pushed from relation to relation over there, but the aunt I was living with got fed up with me and decided it was time my Mum had me back. So I was sent over here. I’d been in the middle of O levels in Jamaica so I had to try and find somewhere to carry on. My Mum couldn’t get me into school anywhere so I enrolled at Vauxhall College and managed to get a few passes.’

I ask her what her Mum was like to live with and she gazes down at her tea. ‘To be honest, we didn’t have a very good relationship. I think she resented me being here.’

‘And your Dad?’

‘He lived nearby. But I didn’t meet him at all till I was eighteen. He was OK, his house was a bit more relaxed. I went round there a bit but my Mum got jealous if I went too much.’

‘But she didn’t really want you here?’

Doreen shakes her head.

‘To be honest, my memories of this house weren’t all that happy. I was on my own a lot. I had a lot of chores to do. My Mum used to shout at me if I didn’t get them done quick enough. She took in sewing and she spent all her time here in this kitchen we’re sitting in now. There was a window over there and she’d sit in a chair and sew. She was really just biding her time, I suppose, waiting – to sell the house and go out there to marry Mr Reynolds.’

‘And there was no question of you going to Canada with her?’

‘No.’ Doreen glances shyly up at me. ‘I did used to think, Why are you doing this? I mean I only just got to know you and you’re going off again. But, well.’

I ask who else was in the house.

‘Just my Mum and me. And Mr Kyle upstairs.’

‘What was he like?’

‘Nice. Elderly man, white, very quiet. He was a solicitor. He helped me out once actually …’ Doreen hesitates and smiles. ‘When I got into a bit of trouble.’

‘What sort of trouble?’

‘I got done for shoplifting.’

When it finally happens, her belly goes hot, soft. She feels her insides are falling out of her. She can’t believe it – that she could be so stupid. She can’t believe that ever in a million years she’d be the kind of person capable of doing something like this.

But Leia isn’t either. Or you wouldn’t think so anyway. Quiet, pretty Leia, from Mauritius, her first proper friend in this country. Leia cheers her up so much that she realizes how lonely she’s been all this time. They work at the hospital on Portland Place together, wheeling the trolleys, taking the food around the wards, chatting all the time.

Right from the first day, Leia decides they’re friends and shows her stuff – the best toilet for a quick smoke where you won’t get caught, the dodgy drinks machine that sometimes gives you back extra change – jackpot! Leia makes her laugh and Doreen far prefers this to her college life. She’s out all day so her Mum can’t pick on her. She feels like she’s turned into somebody, like she knows who she is.

She has to leave at eight to get the tube to Oxford Circus, but pretty soon she starts leaving earlier and earlier, just to get out of the house. She likes walking up to Clapham Common station in the grey mist – sometimes you can hardly see across the Common and she finds that a bit magical and mysterious. She finds it a real thrill arriving on Oxford Street before the shops are open, walking up and down in the November chill and gazing into windows, listening out for the scrapy clang of someone pulling up a grille, watching the women in their posh coats walking briskly past. Everyone seems to have somewhere to go and she likes that, likes the hurry and certainty of it.

‘Hey, you know what, let’s meet up, before work,’ Leia says, ‘have a coffee, look around the shops together.’

Their shift starts at 9.45 and Debenham’s opens at 9. As soon as the security man turns the key in the big glass door, they’re in – milling swiftly through with the other shoppers. Doreen loves the big stores – the whirr as the escalator starts up, the smells you’d never get in Jamaica: powdery wafts of perfume made sweeter by the cold air, a blueish whiff of bus exhaust from the street outside, the cleanness of plastic bags.