The Handmade House Read online

  The other irritating thing about Elaine’s house was its pristine quality. I would go over and look at her Poggenpohl kitchen with self-closing drawers, at her bedroom that stretched the length of one wing of the house, with Christopher Alexander-approved windows on two sides, and I’d have to fight down my feelings of envy. Then I’d go back across the road and stare vengefully at our stained sofa, where people had dripped yogurt on the arms, and our garden that was a mess because for three years we’d been thinking about moving and no one had paid it any attention.

  I was reminded of my mother, who had also, for some years, lived opposite her best friend, my ‘Auntie Grace’, who had had painted nails and didn’t really believe in housework. When she’d lived in Leicester for a time, she’d recklessly driven down the M1 every week to have her hair done at her usual place in Woodford. Yet despite this diva-ish demeanour, her house was always immaculate. My mum would try to console herself with the thought that if you looked carefully, there was dust on the ornaments, but it didn’t really help. Auntie Grace had a tidy husband and son, and my mum had an untidy husband and two messy daughters and was not a diva. She never stopped doing housework, but it was a war of attrition in which the mess was always perilously close to winning.

  As a child, I couldn’t understand why the pristine quality of Auntie Grace’s interiors bothered my mum so much, because it seemed to me self-evident that our house was preferable. But now, visiting Elaine’s, I experienced what I think was probably an identical sense of personal failure, a deep disappointment that my domestic management looked, by comparison, so inept.

  One of the things that had been most satisfying about the house project up to this point was its joint nature. It wasn’t my little hobby or Charlie’s pet project. Betty Friedan identified the house as a domestic trap, but for my generation of women, with rich lives of jobs and children and partners who want to be fathers and are not ashamed to cook, it doesn’t have to feel like that. Houses now seem much more like androgynous meeting places for people in relationships of equality. In 1879, Joseph van Falke wrote in Art in the House:

  The husband’s occupations necessitate his absence from the house, and call him far away from it. During the day his mind is absorbed in many good and useful ways, in making and acquiring money, for instance; and even after the hours of business have passed, they occupy his thoughts. When he returns home tired of work and in need of recreation, he longs for quiet enjoyment and takes pleasure in the home which his wife has made comfortable and attractive. She is the mistress of the house in which she rules, and which she orders like a queen. Should it not be then specially her business to add beauty to the order which she has created?

  Home used to be the place men went out from, to find out who they really were, to be manly. You couldn’t be Odysseus or Jack Kerouac in the kitchen. Now Charlie works from home and regards the house as his preoccupation and project as much as mine. But even though there’s no longer anything wrong with men being domestic, with not merely caring about their surroundings but also taking responsibility for them, I suspect a sense of Domestic Standards still hangs more heavily over women. We feel more acutely any lapse; we unreconstructedly assume anything squalid or disorganized to be fundamentally our fault. Charlie didn’t think he was a failure because there were piles of newspapers behind the sofa or unsorted bills and letters from school piled up in the corner of the kitchen. He might have felt vaguely irritated by the kitchen drawer that kept sticking, but he didn’t think it was supplying some sort of moral commentary on him. The notion that the house is somehow an expression of the self can be rather burdensome for working women, because there simply isn’t time to do everything properly.

  And my house was definitely out of control. I could make the excuse that I’d neglected it to focus on the new one. But I didn’t see how things could possibly be much better after we moved – not, anyway, unless I could somehow get rid of approximately 90 per cent of my family’s possessions.

  10

  Once we were well into the building process and it was too late, Joyce and Ferhan admitted that, months earlier, they had been approached by Grand Designs and had turned them down on the grounds that people pointing cameras would have been ‘too much of a distraction’.

  This was obviously very disappointing: I could have been having all those conversations about the size of the slug garden with Kevin in person, in his own words. But it did give me an idea. I formed a Kevin Backup Plan.

  Grand Designs was about to start its third series. I decided to interview Kevin, and I decided to do it at the site. It would be like my very own edition of Grand Designs, without producers butting in (‘I think that’s quite enough on the size of Freddie’s bedroom now, darling’) or girls wanting to powder Kevin’s nose just as the discussion of modernism was getting interesting.

  Kevin was agreeable, so we set a date. Unfortunately, I had omitted to plan for rain. Since one whole side of the house was exposed, and it wasn’t a large building, this meant that being inside was really like being outside. Also, there was nowhere for us to sit. And even if there had been, we’d have been in the way. Added to which I almost certainly wouldn’t be able to hear Kevin’s voice in the tape recorder over the noise of the Asian radio station.

  Only after I’d arrived at the site did I realize that, given the drizzle and these attendant difficulties, we’d have to do the interview in the car. I hoped Kevin wasn’t too starry: plenty of television presenters might object to being dragged over to see you, rather than the normal thing of you politely coming to them, especially if they were then interviewed in a car.

  I arrived first. The lane and the site, now that I came to look at them through Kevin’s eyes, seemed rather unprepossessing. There were a lot of strips of blue plastic tape snaking across the ground. The whole area was strewn with lumps of concrete, blocks of wood, bundles of wire, empty cement bags and rubbish: an empty Lucozade bottle, a trail of KP Nuts wrappers and a bewildering quantity of peach-coloured tissue.

  Still, I was excited by the prospect of Kevin’s reactions. I was hoping he would reassure me that such daring walls and radical design made running out of money seem unimportant.

  Kevin duly tramped down the lane, only a little bit late, as tall, handsome and muscularly articulate in the flesh as he appeared on television. We shook hands, then I said self-consciously: ‘Right, so, er, this is my house,’ leading him on to the slab, aware all of a sudden that it didn’t look like a house at all, but one of those half-finished buildings you see in Croatia or Turkey with chickens running around in the rubble.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said.

  ‘And this is the concrete,’ I added unnecessarily.

  ‘Why concrete? Why not timber? Why not brick?’

  I began to explain the history of my relationship with the concrete – how the architects had wanted it initially, how I’d been afraid that it would look ugly and brutalist and multi-storey car park …

  ‘But presumably you’re putting internal finishes on it?’ Kevin said, in much the tone of voice that Harry had asked about wallpaper.

  ‘Well, um…’

  But he’d moved off. My practised little spiel about how tactile and sensual I found the concrete seemed to have been undermined somewhat by his evident impression that the idea of living with raw concrete was deranged.

  ‘I’m worried it’s too small,’ I told him instead.

  He said consolingly that buildings appear to be different sizes at different stages of their construction. ‘It’ll look bigger once it’s painted.’

  ‘But it’s not being fucking painted!’ I wanted to shout. ‘It’s a concrete house! The whole point of it is to look concrete-coloured!’

  ‘Hmm,’ Kevin said again, having covered the length and breadth of the slab in a couple of minutes. ‘I’m afraid I can’t comment on its “contribution to the built environment”.’

  Why was he saying this in inverted commas? Did he think the house was funny? What precisely w
as there to be ironic about? ‘Perhaps,’ I suggested feebly, ‘since it’s, er, a bit wet in here and stuff we should go and do the interview in the car?’

  There were, after all, questions I wanted answered, issues that I believed that Kevin might be able to resolve. Why, for example, did everybody ignore the moral of Grand Designs: that a project always overruns and the money always runs out? Why, when I told people I was building a house, did they invariably say, ‘Oh, how fantastic!’ despite the fact that it wasn’t fantastic at all?

  Kevin said that was because people saw building a house as an adventure. But it was an accessible adventure, one you could have without giving up your job and taking the kids out of school, unlike, say, driving a minibus across America or paddling a canoe across the Pacific (i.e., it was an adventure for people who aren’t very adventurous).

  ‘The worst people,’ he said severely, as if I’d asked, ‘are those who want to improve the built environment, to leave something behind.’

  I experienced a brief moment of panic: did he think this was me? Was that the reason for the inverted commas? It had, of course, crossed my mind that the house would probably survive me. Buildings, it has been said, are a way of conducting a conversation across the generations, and that seemed to me a nice conceit. But I surely wasn’t having some overblown Ozymandias moment? I just wanted to live in a house where Charlie didn’t have to work in our bedroom.

  ‘The other worst ones are the anoraks,’ Kevin continued severely. ‘People with obsessions – for building underground, or promoting some agenda of their own.’

  I definitely didn’t think I was one of those. I was painfully short of agendas. I did what I was told. I was, arguably, mildly obsessed with concrete, but in a harmless way.

  ‘I’m amazed that people ever bother to write in,’ Kevin added. ‘You know, they’ve seen the series, they understand how people’s failings are writ large across the screen. You’d think they’d run a mile.’

  ‘But you’re very nice to them,’ I said hopefully; this was nothing like the conversations we’d had in my head. ‘You discuss it all very sympathetically.’

  ‘I do; but I’m changing slightly. I’m becoming a little more open about that. What fascinates me about these projects is the way that human nature is exposed. People write in and say, “We don’t believe how appallingly run these builds are that you film. You must have a bit of an agenda going on here, and we’re going to put the record straight.” It’s incredibly foolish: they’re revealed as just as inept, just as incapable of holding on to it as everybody else.’

  The other thing about self-builders, he went on (blimey, there was no stopping him once he got going), was their maniacal ambition. ‘Once you let ambition out of the bag it runs riot. People will have £200,000 and rather than build a £180,000 house and have £20,000 for contingency or furnishings, they spend £210,000 and have nothing to sit on, and have to remortgage and sell their car. It makes me laugh.’

  So there it was. Risible. I now knew that I was a person in need of adventure without being very adventurous, plus over-ambitious, plus mildly delusional. ‘You couldn’t find an event or project or occasion in life which is so replete with optimism. People will delude themselves to the point of bankruptcy. The builders can have left the site and the mortgage company be repossessing and they still think they’re going to live there. I’m terrified by what I see, by the power of self-persuasion.’ He sighed. ‘Self-builders invest an awful lot of emotion and ambition and hope in their projects. Somehow they displace all their hopes for the future.’

  What did he mean by that? That it wasn’t actually going to be all right for my family in this house? That this was somehow a way of avoiding the real, hard work of knitting us together? Displacement activity, a way of pretending to myself that everything would be for the best in the concrete future? Reluctantly, I was coming round to Kevin’s view that Joyce and Ferhan were probably very wise to have turned down the opportunity to feature on Grand Designs.

  After we’d finished the interview, Kevin had to dash across town to fulfil some other media commitment. Since we were already in the car, it would have seemed churlish not to give him a lift some of the way. ‘If that whole wall is going to be glass,’ he said thoughtfully as we queued to get down Upper Street, ‘you should make sure your contractors have already ordered it. K Glass is currently taking sixteen weeks to come from Germany.’

  Were we having K Glass? What was K Glass? I felt, as I told him, rather inadequate next to his Grand Designs people, many of whom were building their houses in an altogether more literal sense, spending their weekends moving breezeblocks or designing composting toilets. I said sheepishly: ‘My main role in the process seems to be to look at it.’

  Kevin was actually very nice about this. ‘You shouldn’t underestimate the importance of looking at it,’ he said. ‘Where you live now, maybe it’s an older house, total chaos – and here you will have lots of storage, throw things out, be a modern girl, live in the twenty-first century – and that’s a major change.’

  He could tell! Just by looking at me he could tell I was dyspraxic and lived in a mess and that to move here I’d have to throw away most of my possessions. He could tell that my modernist fantasy was fraudulently unsustainable.

  Still, he had liked something. He had lingered in the sitting room over a pile of yellow foamy board stacked high on the floor. ‘This is very good insulation,’ he said approvingly. ‘It slots together.’

  One ordinary Thursday morning in August, I carried out an audit of all the items that were currently out of place in our house. I did not include that day’s newspapers, toys that were conceivably being played with or anything that was on the floor in the process of being used. This proved that there was an average of eight things in any room that didn’t belong there. Non-rooms, such as hallways, seemed particularly prone to acquire rubbish. On the landing outside our bedroom there was a pile of washing, a fishing net, a bag of Harry’s new school uniform, a sewing kit and a large plastic laser gun. In the downstairs hall there were three buggies, a skateboard, a stuffed Piglet, a dressing-gown cord and a pink plastic cricket bat. We were keeping a small plastic Goofy and half a Lego Technics model by the kitchen sink, while the kitchen floor was apparently being used to store a roll of Sellotape and one flip-flop of Hen’s. The work surfaces were cluttered with toy cars, postcards, and a plastic tray containing tiny pots of modelling paint. I couldn’t even remember what the model had been, but hadn’t been able to bring myself to throw the paints away because the colours were unusually winsome – ochres and dusky pinks.

  There were two ways of looking at this: we had too much stuff, a lot of it rubbish, or I was a slut.

  Certainly, I was lousy at throwing things away. In 1890, in an early discussion of the concept of the self, the psychologist– philosopher William James wrote, ‘It is clear that between what a man calls me and what he calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.’ I was incapable of restricting this to certain things. I told myself that Harry, or maybe Ned, would play again with the motorcyclist who had nothing to sit on, and there was bound to be an occasion when I’d be desperate for a thimble-sized pot of taupe paint.

  You also had to consider that we had now lived in our current house for ten years. They’d been pretty good years, and they’d resulted in the accumulation of all these possessions. Simply to have chucked them out would have felt like denying the significance of any one of a hundred million moments, all of which I wanted to hang on to. Looking at these Goofys and laser guns, touching them, the past seemed almost graspable. And it wasn’t as if the children wanted me to get rid of things. Quite possibly they felt that I had already shown myself too eager to slough off the past.

  Charlie said I should leave it to him because he was good at throwing things away. He once threw away some sleeper train tickets home from Italy because they looked untidy on
the villa dressing table. So that was probably an even riskier option.

  One morning he retrieved a small duck egg-blue pottery vase from the back of a cupboard and suggested getting rid of it (it had originally been his).

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘But we’ve never used it.’

  ‘All the same,’ I said worriedly, ‘we don’t have any other vases that size.’

  My grandparents, who probably acquired fewer possessions in a lifetime than I did in a year, couldn’t afford to throw things away and kept almost everything they’d ever had – old cake tins, place mats, ornamental wooden animals from the 1950s – preferably wrapped in polythene bags and elastic bands and stored at the back of a drawer. The aim of all this keeping was to hand the things on to needier people, i.e. me. Whenever I was offered them, I felt like a rampant consumerist ingrate, even though the truth was that I had quite enough tat of my own without taking on someone else’s. But you can’t tell someone who has carefully kept a biscuit tin for twenty years so that eventually they can pass it on to you that they shouldn’t have bothered. These possessions were rich with memories, and that’s what they were trying to pass on, the feeling of existence being shored up.

  I wasn’t sure that I liked the values of throw-away people anyway. If you could chuck out all this consumer junk so easily, had it been worth having in the first place?

  My sister walked around the shell of the new house and said dubiously that we could always use paper pants. What I really needed, it was pretty obvious, was two houses, in one of which sentiment was exalted over aesthetics. I felt mutinous about what was entailed in being what Kevin called a modern girl. So rather than get out my dustbin bag and scoop up the Goofy, I stomped around muttering about the perils of living in a visual culture. Soon, I muttered darkly, I supposed I wouldn’t even be able to look tatty myself. No wrinkles allowed; I’d have to get facelifted so I could look all shiny and new to go with the house. There would be no acknowledging how I got here, at what cost, with what damage.