WALKING into Town last week, the Princess and I were looking at all the different houses along the way. Being a princess and her mother’s daughter, she typically liked the big ones. She turned round to me and asked: ‘How many houses have you lived in, Daddy?’
I had to think. I counted them on my hands. ‘Nineteen,’ I said.
‘Nineteen?’ she said. ‘Wow, that’s a lot.’
It occurred to me that she had only ever lived in one.
‘Would you like to hear about some of them?’ ‘Ye-ah,’ she said.
If there’s one thing the Princess likes more than a cheese or ham sandwich, it’s a story (with all the embellishments, flights of fancy and wild tangents that her old man can muster).
The first house was my gran and grandad’s bungalow at the Frie Baton. Built just after the war and pebble-dashed, it shared a couple of acres of land with five wood-framed greenhouses, a packing shed and a hut.
In the lounge there was a screen in front of the fire with ducks on, a painting of a water mill on the wall, a red-and-cream pouffe stuffed with horsehair and all the plugs were bakelite.
It was freezing in the winter because it had no central heating (my mother said that when I was born, I’d lie in my cot with a red nose) and at one time nine of us lived there (though the Waltons it was not).
In the morning in summer I’d wake up to the sound of wood pigeons in the trees across the road and on Saturday nights, the sound of gran and granddad returning from White Woods or the Wayside three sheets to the wind.
The first house I lived in when we moved to England was a terrace called 43, Carlby Grove. It had no trees outside but it did have a huge field with allotments on two sides, a beck with an abandoned street down one side of its banks and, at the end, a scrapyard piled high with cars. The Elysium Playing Fields it should have been called, because this was manna from heaven for kids.
I had the attic room and it was haunted. At night in the eaves I could hear the ghosts of twin brothers flipping a marble to one another.
I imagined them dressed in Edwardian suits with short trousers and their eyes hollow. Good job I had my Starsky and Hutch posters to protect me.
After that my mum and dad made a mistake and we moved to a posh housing estate called Harewood Crescent. Except it wasn’t that posh because most of the people who lived there were from terrace houses who had made a mistake.
I didn’t much like the place. It looked out over a valley that cradled Bracken Bank, a huge council estate. A lot of my mates lived down there and it was as if our crescent was looking down on it, all superior like.
The best two things about the place were that it had a garage underneath where we formed our first group, Eddie’s Garage Band, and at the back a network of gardens.
I remember hanging out of the window one winter with my headphones on, listening to Led Zep’s ‘No Quarter’ while the gardens filled up with snow.
It always seemed to be winter at that house.
Then, as if realising their mistake, mum and dad decided we would move back down to a terrace house only five minutes walk from Carlby Grove.
It was the best address I’ve ever had – Nashville Terrace (I often called it Nashville Terra-cee).
It was while living here that I got my first serious girlfriend. We’d often sneak home from the Lower Sixth for cups of tea and snogs (though I didn’t tell the Princess that).
It was also the home I left when I left home.
After leaving school, me and a couple of mates signed on and lived in a cottage in Stanbury, a small farming village on the top of the moors.
My bedroom was the living room and it was the coldest place in the world.
The cellar would get snowdrifts under the door and when the electric and gas meters ran out, it was truly lights out Vienna.
Then I started seeing a girl down the street and moved in with her. That house was in even worse repair than the last. You could see the stars twinkling through the rafters and roof slates at night and in the morning there would be a snowdrift at the end of the duvet.
Then we moved to Haworth, that steep, twisty, cobbled village beloved of travel shows and now twinned – bizarrely – with Machu Picchu.
Penistone Cottage had a cellar full of firewood and home-brewed brown ale and a name that everyone laughed at. But we eventually went our separate ways.
The next house was the wildest.
Number 11, Bridgehouse Lane was a rooming house above a rocking horse shop. Every day was a tale of hedonism mixed with squalour: Withnail and I crossed with Last of the Summer Fortified Wine.
People on the run from the law hid there. Items from skips found their way there. Musicians, bikers, stoneheads and fallen accountants gathered there.
After a trip to Guernsey, I slept on a single mattress in a half-attic bedroom in a two-up, two-down. The wallpaper had what looked like a recurring coffin motif and the only decoration was a chest expander hanging from the window that looked out on the bricks of the house across the alley.
On Sunday mornings I could hear the kid in the half-attic bedroom next door singing along to Michael Jackson.
I imagined her with a brush for a microphone and I always wonder if she ever became a singer. I hope so.
Then I started going out with the woman who would become my wife.
Our first home was a potting shed on the moors next to Ponden Hall, which was the model for Thrushcross Grange in Wuthering Heights.
Then a depressing hole called Holker Street.
From there we moved to Guernsey and a bedsit in Cliff Terrace complete with views of the islands and Castle Cornet and the migraine of the hill climb on Sundays.
Later we moved from Town to the bucolic idyll of King’s Mills, where we lived at the almost mystical sounding Rue du Douit – the street of the ditch, the water lane. Then La Maison du Pauvre – the poor house – where we slept downstairs and entered the house upstairs. And then off to Clapham and to trendy Abbeville Road, a place we never a felt part of because we were broke and unknown.
This was made even more apparent when my wife received a letter addressed to Mrs Shuttleworth.
So we moved to a flat in Balham which was more up our street. It had a railway line at the end of the garden, collapsing wooden steps at the back door and a cellar flat full of Irish gays and stone heads. Which is what London is all about.
Now, we have our little place just out of Town.
Your first home, Princess.
If I hadn’t listened to your mother, who in 1997 said, ‘Let’s buy it’, we would still be living up Hauteville with a cooker in our living room.
It is small, love, but enjoy it because it’s ours.
You probably won’t be able to buy your own when you grow up.
Article posted on 18th October, 2008 - 9.00am
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