The day I realised our home isn’t ours at all…
When an old resident came knocking, Justin Webb could never have known how it would change the house he’d lived in for years
It began in a way things don’t normally begin in the modern age: with a handwritten letter. It was carefully crafted, as if the author had paused and gathered herself before setting off. “Forgive the intrusion,” it started, “but I understand that you live in the house where I was brought up.”
My house in Southwark in South London isn’t grand, but it is old – built in the late 18th century. I knew all of this before I met Carolyn, my correspondent, some weeks later. However, what I hadn’t realised until we met was that the house that I called home, the place where I have lived in with my family for more than 20 years isn’t ours at all. In fact, it never would be. And it is the most joyous feeling possible.
Carolyn had written that she left the house when she married in 1968 and had fond memories of living there as a child. She had, she said, become reflective after her husband died a couple of years ago and wanted a chance to see the place again before, as she put it, “my time is up”.
And so, on a miserably wet day earlier this month, not a day for estate agent’s patter or kerb appeal, Carolyn, now aged 71, came to visit. My teenage son called up the stairs to tell me that she was here, because he could see a woman, standing motionless on the other side of the road, as if lost in thought, or time.
But she wasn’t lost for long. Within minutes of opening the door and making our tentative greetings (“the oddest circumstances” she said, when she realised she was meeting someone who she’d watched on television from around the world and had listened to every morning in recent times), she was catapulted with one glance into that magical place where childhood belongs.
It was the banisters that did it. While taking coats, I could see Carolyn and her sister-in-law (who was accompanying her and also knew the house well) were immediately transported back in time by the sight of the banisters at the bottom of the stairs. The original banisters. Banisters we had neither got around to changing, painting, or even French polishing for that matter. The banisters they both remembered swinging on as children. Climbing over. The day they came loose and had to be fixed. The orange paint they once sported. The fact that you could swing round and go through… wait, a door was there. It’s gone. But the banisters have survived all cycles of doing-up and dilapidation. They have kept faith. They were waiting to say hello again.
Time, as we know, is not as simple a concept. It feels like we have owned this house forever. In our time here we have come and gone, lived abroad, brought back children, watched them grow into teenagers and got to know neighbours. We have done it up: changed walls, doors and floors. Put our own imprint on the place. But, as I begin our tour, I realise, it was only ever an imprint. The essence was not ours to change.
It took some time to go from room to room, floor to floor. And to grasp fully that this was a house that belonged to the both of us. Her bedroom – our study – and the door is the thing that fills her eyes. The same door. That she pushed so easily and thoughtlessly when she was young. The connecting door between now and then.
Carolyn’s parents bought our house after the war, having lived here as tenants. There was another family upstairs – their kitchen now reshaped into our en suite bathroom. Carolyn said she remembered it being cold. I wondered what they would have made of the underfloor heating we installed. Both families in those days shared the stairs. And the one loo, with a rota to use it (now there are four). There was also a cleaning rota. And for the kids a bomb site, at the end of the row, to play in. There was a tin bath in the garden. Only in the mid-sixties did a boiler arrive, and hot water. I think of my own children’s complaints on days when the Wi-fi is dodgy.
But Carolyn is not interested in comparing and contrasting. She is remembering and loving it. If you were crafty, she tells me, you could smoke a cigarette in the loo and remembers one of her two brothers telling her mum in the garden to look at the window where smoke was rising. She remembers the coal hole as a place of mystery and menace. The day her brother found someone trying to break in. The neighbours who arrived from the West Indies and played music so loud that it would, to the delight of the children, come through the walls. How wonderful – how absolutely life affirming – to hear of all the fun had here so many years ago. A reminder, as John Ruskin put it, “There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration.”
But life has a context, a place where it is lived. And in a world of constant movement how instructive to see first-hand the role that the place has played cementing the life, the love and the joy, and doubtless the sadness and regret.
We live in an age of narcissism and rage. We also live in an age of isolation – ironic given how easy it is for us to be connected online. In an area like the one around my home, the process of gentrification seems to have brought with it a deadening sense of sadness. Or perhaps a defensiveness: we have so much to protect.
Society is more organic than restless, angry, wealthy people realise. The great British philosopher of conservatism, the LSE professor Michael Oakeshott devoted his life to reminding us of this fact: “As civilised human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves.”
Crucially, we could add, it is a conversation that goes on in a place, in places, where we are born and grow and flourish and die. Carolyn has gone back to the place she now calls home. And we are left, lawful owners (with the mortgage company) of her childhood memories. And one day we too will be gone. We will leave some underfloor heating, a stainless steel kitchen, which will one day be considered terribly old fashioned, and walls covered with on-trend paint that isn’t quite one colour or the other. And the echo down the years of the pulse of life. The day this happened. The day that news came.
Meanwhile, though, I am more determined than ever to enjoy the privilege of staying here for a few years, benefiting from that thing we call “ownership”.
And I promised Carolyn, whatever else we do to the house, the banisters will be preserved.
How life-affirming to hear of all the fun had here so many years ago