The Handmade House Read online

  We got two, Joyce Owens and Ferhan Azman. One was American, the other Turkish, they were both women, and beyond that we knew nothing about them except that they’d done our friend Hugo’s kitchen and Hugo was almost certainly the most stylish person we knew. He was also a food writer, so presumably wouldn’t entrust his kitchen to just anyone. (We later found out he’d chosen them mainly because he and Joyce had a mutual friend.)

  Hugo and his wife Sue, who worked in the film industry, had children who were the same ages as our two younger ones, and we shared a school run. They lived a few streets away and we very much liked going round to their house because, apart from all the usual reasons – gossip – the food was simple but delectable, and the house itself was appealing: light, airy, invitingly spacious. There was a bench along the wall of the kitchen that more or less required you to sit down, and once you were sat, you didn’t want to get up. The back of the house seemed open to the garden and, more abstractly, to possibilities (not least that if you hung around for long enough you might be offered some of Hugo’s food).

  This may be indicative of shallowness on my part, but when I think of people I know, when I summon up friends, they invariably arrive in my imagination against a backdrop of their houses. Without meaning to, I see them in kitchens, in front of fireplaces. I have one friend I always envisage against a background of lugubrious walls and dark carpets, of cabinets and fireplaces and not enough light, although I know that in reality he collects furniture and owns several pieces that are intensely covetable. (And he is, in all sorts of ways, a person who sees the grain of things, the detail, with powerful close-up vision, but as if he were somehow shortsighted when it comes to the whole. This means he is always interesting to talk to. But it also means he lives in a dark house.)

  Another friend doesn’t have a single stick of furniture that I could identify, were it to appear in front of me in a furniture identity parade. But I always think of him in a room on his ground floor, a room he has extended into the garden, where the experience of sinking on to his kitchen sofa and looking out at his plants is entirely consoling.

  This can’t be as eccentric as all that, or how else to explain the success of Hello!? and OK!, in which the main character is often the sofa? I am, for example, quite interested in the former EastEnders star Danniella Westbrook, because I’ve interviewed her and liked her, and because anyone who has destroyed their nose with cocaine is interesting. But I am very interested in Danniella Westbrook in her lovely home; it’s fascinating to me that her small son has a fridge in his bedroom and that she (Danniella and I come, originally, from the same place) favours footballer’s wife-meets-Birds of a Feather Essex-style. And this, of course, is snobbery, which goes some way towards explaining the whole thing. It no longer matters how you speak (my children, brought up comfortably in the ring-fenced stratum of Hackney middle-classness, speak variations of mockney; whereas I, brought up in the heartland of Estuary English, sound rather posh, although I increasingly try not to, because, like bad teeth, it dates one so. No one under twenty-five is posh.) What your parents did doesn’t matter any more, either; these days you are supposed to be able to make your own life. But where you choose to live and how you opt to decorate your house is a symbol of – not class, exactly, but something like it; what matters to you.

  So, assuming that Hugo knew what he was doing, we invited Joyce and Ferhan to come round, explained the problem of having too many children, and let them wander about. Joyce, the American one, was plump and funny, easy-going and open; Ferhan was small and dark and fierce, with a spitfire delivery. I trailed behind them, registering properly for the first time in a while the not-very-good Persian carpets, the chaos of furniture, some of it Arts and Crafts, some vaguely Far Eastern, picked up when I lived abroad, some from Heal’s and Habitat, in mahogany, old oak, limed oak, or, occasionally, cherry; the hectically patterned red and gold sofa (much later, Joyce would scathingly dismiss a much less plump sofa to which I’d taken a fancy as ‘overstuffed’), the other sofa, striped in a manner reminiscent of Edwardian seasides, jolly awnings and cheery deckchairs; the boxes of toys in plain view because there was no cupboard space for them; the wardrobe doors with bits of dowelling tacked on to them to resemble, in theory, panelling; the paint-effected bathroom walls into which we’d been talked in a moment of exhaustion by a decorator who’d just caught up with the rag-rolling and sponging fads of the 1980s, sadly only a decade too late. Clearly, we hadn’t got a clue. ‘I like the lamp,’ Ferhan said eventually.

  That was it: the lamp was OK. The rest of it was a mess of stuff dragged in from my former life, Charlie’s previous bachelor existence or, more rarely but no less eclectically, bought together. We had, it occurred to me, an awful lot of stuff, and none of it went with any of the rest. It was all jostling for attention, cluttering up the view and scrambling our brains. Perhaps, I thought hopefully, when Henrietta had said she couldn’t bring her friends round because there were too many little children, what she really meant was that there were too many patterns and clashing colours.

  Joyce and Ferhan saw what we should do immediately: put the offices underneath the garden. As they explained it, you’d come out of the back of the semi-basement into a courtyard, and instead of coming face to face with a brick wall and steep steps up to the pavement-level garden, you’d see glass doors leading to our offices (I could have an office too!) which would also be lit from slots above, in the garden. Essentially, they were proposing digging the garden down to basement level, building a couple of offices, and putting the plants back on top.

  You could tell it would look fabulous. I could envisage it immediately, all clean lines and cool spaces, how restful it would be and how dedicated to work. This, clearly, was what you employed architects for: they had an ability to reconfigure space in their heads, not to get stuck on what is, or see earth as immoveable, or live with those inconveniences around which we had bent ourselves until we were ossified in contortion.

  There was only one problem with Joyce and Ferhan’s inspired scheme: it would make the rest of the house look rubbish. You wouldn’t want to emerge from those sleekly beautiful offices into our battered kitchen and higgledy-piggledy dining room/den/playroom. Joyce and Ferhan thought we needed more glass at the back of the basement – all the way across instead of French windows – and then you’d want to put the dining table in front of it, which would mean moving the kitchen to the front… It was like aesthetic skittles. And it was going to cost a lot of money.

  I loved that house, for all sorts of reasons. It was the first house that Charlie and I had owned together. Henrietta and Freddie had effectively grown up there. Their father had married a politician, and they’d divided their time between the constituency and various houses in London. The children had shuttled about with them, exhilarated by the changes of scene, but coming to rely more and more on the house in Hackney as their fixed point. Their best friends, a brother and sister, the girl Henrietta’s age and the boy Freddie’s, lived across the road.

  Charlie and I had had two more children there; I’d been in labour on sunny mornings with the light streaming through the long, east-facing bedroom windows and the cat at attention beside me, concerned, on the bed. My sister lived across the road, following an established East End tradition of families all living in the same street and for ever being in and out of one another’s houses (to which Elaine and I weren’t in reality in the least attached, having grown up in the suburbs). Harry and his cousin Flo had been born only ten days apart, had grown up together and were still each other’s default playmates. But when, as tended to happen more and more, they got fed up with each other, it was easy to come home in a huff.

  All the same, I wasn’t sure it was worth spending the sort of money that Joyce and Ferhan’s scheme would entail on this particular house. In Britain, or at least the owner-occupier part of it, houses have a dual, sometimes contradictory function. On the one hand, they are the investment in which the majority of family capi
tal is tied up: a store of wealth and a means of creating it; a status symbol, to be traded up. On the other, they represent stability and security, places of retreat in an increasingly hostile and precarious world. (Sales of cushion covers and scented candles reportedly quadrupled in America after September 11th.) And so maybe it’s not entirely fanciful to imagine that the vogue for house and garden television makeovers is at least partly a response to the uncertainties brought on by globalization, the feeling that decisions are made far away, that El Nino-style forces are at work on our lives. The only place we’re in control is at home. But it’s a lot to ask of houses, to be a bulwark against insecurity, if we’re always looking to trade them up, move on, acquire a shinier new one.

  In the end it was the cars that decided me. It would have been sensible to spend the money if we’d been prepared to stay in the house for another decade or more, to decide that this really was our home, was where we belonged, how we wished, finally, to be defined.

  But there was too much wrong with it. The house was on a corner. The street we were in was quiet; the one that ran along the side of the house and garden, to which in many ways we were more exposed, was getting busier all the time. Officially, this side road was classified by the council as residential, but it was also an emergency services route, which posed problems whenever traffic calming measures were proposed (especially the one we favoured, of closing the road altogether). One of the councillors who took a particular interest in traffic lived a few blocks up, in the street that was classified as the main east–west route through the district. But this road had had so many traffic-calming measures imposed on it, including being mysteriously closed for months, that our road had taken the weight of the extra traffic and never lost it. And there was, unfortunately, no shortage of extra traffic. By the time we were debating whether to move or stay, the M11 extension had just opened, meaning that more and more traffic was pouring into London from the east all the time. Hackney Council had published no strategy to deal with the extra vehicles heading through towards the City and it gradually became clear that the Town Hall didn’t have one. Or not officially, anyway. Unofficially, it seemed to be to send the traffic down our road.

  By that stage, we had been campaigning about the traffic for several years (some people vigorously, but I’d tried to turn up) and we were getting pretty despondent. The council had put humps in the road, but they were the kind that you can get your wheels either side of and, since all the cars tended to be going in one direction – into town in the morning, out in the evening – this had zero effect on slowing them down. We couldn’t interest the neighbours in the roads running parallel in our campaign because they worried that any restriction for us would just shift the traffic on to them.

  I started counting cars. I’d stand at the bedroom window at rush hour, when I was supposed to be getting ready to take the children to school, muttering madly, ‘That’s one every five seconds.’ I’d prowl up and down the long sitting room in the middle of the day, trying to find a minute when there was not some vehicle passing. I made notes and showed them to Charlie, who looked concerned (for me, not about the traffic). I started shouting at drivers (who couldn’t hear, since they were in cars and I was in the house. But the point was, I could hear them). The state of the traffic became a persistent topic of conversation for me. I faced the possibility of soon having no friends because of being so boring. I considered a future of summer afternoons in the garden frothing at the mouth because of White Van Man rattling past my clematis. The more I thought about staying where we were, the closer I got to being hospitalized.

  We went back to looking for houses.

  And it was depressing. Since we’d come close to buying one Edwardian red-brick house, all the estate agents (we were, by now, on everyone’s books) assumed that we would buy another – any other – and never mind that the one they were showing us had been done up in a way that was both expensive and shoddy by some developer, or that some other one was dark and had a tiny concrete yard instead of a large, sunny garden and was inhabited by funereal Italians with antimacassars and packed suitcases in the parlour, presumably ready to flee somewhere more cheerful as soon as someone would give them some money.

  We were being difficult, I knew. The more we looked, the pickier we got. Even I was starting not to like us. So when Sue Reynolds from Currells called that Tuesday morning in May, she must, I think, have had another buyer in mind. After all, we had a great track record of coming second. We were probably becoming quite a useful fixture on the Islington estate agents’ scene: the people who’ll push the price up.

  ‘How,’ Sue asked, ‘would you like to buy a piece of land?’

  At any other point of my life, I’d have said, ‘No thanks, what would you do with that then?’ I was not one of those people who trail around looking at old garages, wondering if they can be knocked down and replaced with a fabulous cutting-edge contemporary dwelling of their own design, for the simple reason that I could no more envisage a fabulous cutting-edge design than I could revise Einstein’s theory of relativity. I have no visual imagination. It is questionable, in fact, whether I have any spatial awareness; I quite often bump into things. I became a journalist because it is one of only a very few careers open to someone who can’t do either numbers or pictures. As a child, I learned to read early mainly because the illustrations didn’t make that much sense to me; it was the only chance I had of working out what was going on. Even now, when my younger children ask questions about pictures in their reading books, I am bemused. Quite often I haven’t noticed that there are any.

  So I would have assumed, if I’d ever given it a moment’s thought, that building a house was something done by people with an artistic side. I didn’t have so much as an artistic pockmark.

  But this was not any other point of my life. It was the point at which I had discovered Kevin, which had changed a lot. Kevin (as I liked, familiarly, to think of him) was the tall, handsome, dark-voiced presenter of Grand Designs, a television programme that had first aired the preceding autumn, and to which I had been glued, in a heavily pregnant, unable-to-get-off-the-sofa kind of way. Grand Designs followed the thrills and vicissitudes (mainly the vicissitudes, although I didn’t register this at the time) of people as they built their own homes: barns in Oxfordshire, straw bale houses in North London, or communes of eco-houses with composting toilets on the South Coast.

  Kevin was so athletically enthusiastic, so sexily knowledgeable – outdoorsy but intellectual, sympathetic but sceptical, handsome but clever, muscularly articulate – that he made building your own house seem not only possible but really, really attractive. It is possible that I assumed that if you built your own house, you automatically got Kevin. He’d be there in my kitchen eating Hob Nobs, dropping the crumbs on my plans, admiring my taste in kitchen worktops and discussing modernism with me. And then he’d be up and away, swinging around in my rafters in his hard hat and speaking to camera like an architectural Tarzan.

  Nearly as importantly, the self-builders featured on Grand Designs all seemed quite ordinary. At least, the people who were building the house out of straw bales were a bit weird and the composting toilets lot clearly had their own way of looking at the world, but the point was that they weren’t millionaires. One of the few practical pieces of information I had managed to glean from Grand Designs was that you could build a house from scratch for less money than it would cost to buy one. Building was cheaper than refurbishing because you didn’t have to deal with the complications created by the pre-existing structure and you don’t pay VAT on new build.

  I called Joyce and asked her to come and see the land with me the following morning.

  *

  The plot was really just the scrubby end of a garden. We approached it from the house to the north, a wide 1950s villa situated in the road behind, which was privately owned, for some obscure historical reason, and policed by the owner-residents with ferocity: if you parked here for more than five minutes, you
were liable to be clamped. We parked anyway, and went in through the side gate.

  Most of the large garden belonged to the house. There was a wide terrace, with a magnolia tree, borders sprinkled with muscari and irises, a top-of-the-range children’s climbing frame, and, at the bottom, a patch of nettles and scrub.

  We stood well back from this bit of scrub, on the tended lawn, not wanting to venture on to the uneven ground with its layering of weeds, ferns, brambles and whatever might be scurrying or slithering through them. There was a straggly, self-seeded fruit tree, clover, dandelions and a rusty garden roller. The sun was shining and the air was warm enough to wear a T-shirt; it was one of those days when you realize with relief that summer has come. I stood there in the sunshine listening to birdsong and feeling obscurely happy, seized by certainty.

  The land came with planning permission for two houses – ‘developer’s houses’, was how everyone referred to them, dismissively – and Sue Reynolds’s understanding was that Islington Planning Department and the local residents would look more favourably on a single family house.

  There were mysteries. Why was Sue Reynolds offering this to us? She must have had plenty of clients with more money. We had shown ourselves incapable of following through with any purchase, or even being very sure of what we wanted. There are people who plan to build their own houses years before they even have a sniff of a site; who tour the country at weekends, peering keenly out of their cars, looking for a place to put their dream. We just wanted a house to contain our children and their vast amounts of stuff.