Doorway to another world

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Oct 20, 2006 

I grew up in Nottingham, England, but when I was 18, I flew to Florence to be an au pair. I knew only what I'd read in Henry James. I imagined cerulean skies, palazzi and pensioni, jasmine and wisteria, shuttered views of sunlit streets. Instead I found myself in a cramped modern apartment 10 floors up above a dry cleaner's on the edge of the city. The day I arrived there were fresh bullet holes in the glass of the main entrance. "The communists, " the doorman said with a sinister shrug.

The people I went to work for were friends of friends, psychiatrists - a profession that (wrongly as it turned out) seemed to reassure my mother. They picked me up from Pisa airport and drove me into Florence, explaining on the way that the reason they'd employed me was so they wouldn't have to see or hear their three small girls, aged six, five and three. They worked from home. They needed total silence for their consultations. The girls could be naughty, noisy. I was to control them. If I couldn't control them I was to put them to bed.

"What, in the day? "

"Of course in the day. Our work is very important, " Signora S informed me coldly. "It is delicate. Our patients must not be disturbed. "

Signora S showed me the camp bed in a cupboard where I would sleep. I noticed there were two beds. The other one was for the maid, Signora S explained. There wasn't room to open my suitcase to unpack it, so I kept it vertical and just slid my hand in to take things out.

There was also a manservant from the Philippines but fortunately he lived out or else I think he might have slept with us too. The maid cleaned and dusted and got shouted at by Signora S. She cried a lot. She was always crying. I did everything for the children and refused to cry, though I wanted to. The manservant never spoke. At lunchtime I cooked the spaghetti and then he served it silently at table in a silver dish wearing white gloves. I didn't know if it was normal for such a tiny apartment to boast three servants but this one did.

Signore and Signora spent their day in their glass-fronted consulting rooms at the front of the apartment. All day long the lift swished up and down and the bell rang. I don't know what they talked about but you could see the patients sitting in miserable silence while Signora S gesticulated at them.

I sat on the bed with the children and watched endless Mickey Mouse cartoons. For some illogical reason we were not allowed out very much. When I suggested a bike ride in the park (The Sound of Music was my favourite film) I was accused of trying to wangle time off. In the end it became clear why Signora S didn't let me out very often. She was worried I would run away and by then she was right. I was unhappy, homesick; my suitcase had never been properly unpacked. But when I summoned the courage to tell her I wanted to go home, she threatened to confiscate my passport.

So I did what any sensible Nottingham girl would do: went straight to the British embassy and told them I needed a job. The lady behind the desk wore plaid. Her name was Margaret and her calm kindness made me want to burst into tears.

"As a matter of fact, " she said, "a lady came in just this afternoon. They need a nanny for their little grandson. It's a lovely location, right next to Palazzo Pitti. I could telephone her and see if it's convenient for you to go over there right now if you like. "

The rest of that day was like a dream, entirely different in texture and shape from any day I'd spent in Italy so far. I walked across the Ponte Vecchio clutching the little map the lady had drawn me. I walked past cafés and handbag shops and jewellery shops and came at last to an enormous wooden door. In it was a smaller door. I knocked. A tiny old lady dressed in black opened it and grinned at me and ushered me into another world.

I stood in a large courtyard garden that backed on to a 15th-century palazzo. Oranges and jasmine grew up the high walls, fountains played, stone cherubs grinned and spat water, lizards darted. On the path a tiny girl was teasing a white cat with a piece of string.

I walked up a flight of cool, shallow stone steps, knocked on the door of the first-floor apartment and found myself in a long, elegant room with parquet floors, heavy rugs, oil paintings, clouded mirrors and a grand piano. A handsome lady in a heavy amber necklace sat pouring tea.

"It's Earl Grey, " she said in perfect but heavily accented English. "We drink nothing but. I hope you'll join us? "

I stayed for tea and then I stayed for nine months. The job wasn't always easy but they were good people and for a teenager from Nottingham it was an indescribable new way of living, a doorway into another world.

I learnt a lot. Best of all I learnt how it felt to wake every morning under cerulean skies in a palazzo with jasmine curling under the window and shuttered views of sunlit streets. Pretty much the full Henry James experience in other words.

When you know you don't belong

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Sep 29, 2006 

It is a bright, hot, sunshiny September day, warmer than many of the August days we just had, and I am in Elsa's garden. Her two kids are bouncing on a trampoline, the church clock has just chimed four and bees are working their way over the lilies - hovering, alighting, crawling in and out of the mauve waxen bells, which strain and bounce under their weight.

I don't know Elsa well. She is a new friend. We are still at the careful, exploratory stage where half the conversation is frank and intimate and enticing, the other half simply small talk, comfortably dull. We've discussed schools and food additives and trampoline accidents and now Elsa is telling me about the house she rented after she split up from her husband.

"It was a horrible house, " she says, "really horrible. I don't know how we lived there. It was only about six months but it felt more like a million years. "

"Horrible? " I'm assuming she means it was dirty or ugly or cold or else staring out on to a loud grey main road.

"No, what I mean is we weren't wanted. There was something going on. Someone didn't want us there. "

"What kind of thing? " I ask her. "I mean who? Who didn't want you? "

Elsa shivers and pours more tea. A glass wasp-catcher hangs from the apple tree, three or four dead wasps inside it.

"Just - I don't know - bad things happened to us there, all the time. Jessie got ill, I got ill. One time I was carrying Lou - she was just a baby, nine or 10 months - down the stairs and I slipped and fell, for no reason, you know? "

I turn and watch Lou, now six and blonde as an angel, flying up and down on the trampoline.

"My God, " I say. "Were you OK? "

Elsa rubs at an insect bite on her arm. "Oh yeah. I kind of saved us with my body, you know how you do if you're carrying a baby? "

I nod but I'm thinking, "Well, anyone can fall. " Every time I carried one of our babies down our stairs I used to watch my feet and think of it. As if just the thinking of it might keep us safe.

"But after that, " Elsa says, "well, for instance, Jessie's room. One night she woke up screaming and refused to go back in there. She always came in and slept with me after that. And even in the day she never wanted to play in there and wouldn't even keep her toys there or anything and when I asked her why she said an old woman had told her to get out. "

I take a breath. "You mean she actually saw someone? "

Elsa glances towards the kids.

"She kept going on about this old woman, how the old woman had told her she wasn't allowed in the room. She was three years old at the time. Three-year-olds just don't make these things up. "

I think about this. I don't know Elsa well enough to say it but I remember being three and seeing things happen that, now I think of it, could not possibly have happened. For instance the day my little drummer dog on wheels crossed the lino nursery floor all on his own. I remember how his tin wheels just whirred into motion without anyone touching him and next thing you knew he was on the other side of the room. I think I clapped my hands in pleasure. But I knew better than to tell anyone.

"Oh I know how it sounds, " Elsa says. "I mean there I was, alone with two kids, a toddler and a baby, with Colin off with some woman on the other side of the world. It was a stressful time, I guess. "

"It's hard to know, " I agree. "How much of it comes from inside you . . . "

We both stop and look at the kids. Jessie has got down off the trampoline and is showing Lou something on the back of her hand. Lou giggles as whatever it is crawls up Jess's elbow. She glances back at us.

"A ladybird, " she mouths to her mum and Elsa nods encouragement and then she sighs.

"So when you left, " I ask her, "did you leave because of all that? "

Elsa puts her head on one side and dips her finger in her tea to remove a tiny bug that has fallen in.

"I really don't know. That's what's strangest of all in a way. I've kind of blotted out a lot of that house. Jessie's room, for instance, when I try and think of it, I can't picture it. I know it had this little window but - well I can't see myself in it or any of us in it. It's as if it never existed, as if we were never really there at all. "

We're both silent while we think of this. The sun is hot on our heads. A wasp alights on the edge of my tea cup and gropes around in the wet for a moment before changing his mind and taking jerky flight, moving off into the bright afternoon air.

Perfect partner for a love affair

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Sep 22, 2006 

Houses are like people. You can fall in love with them - wham! - at first sight. But will it last? So much hope, so many dreams, are pinned on that first glimpse, that first divining of who and what they might be, how it might feel to live in them, how they might just alter you for ever.

The first time I saw our house in Clapham, south London - a warm May evening in 1988 - I was newly pregnant, slowly filling up with our first baby. The house, on the other hand, had stood empty for a year - unbought, unloved, waiting for someone (me?) to see it for what it was: ideal, adorable.

Actually, the conditions that evening were ideal too - perfectly contrived for romance. I saw it alone that first time, without any companion to interrupt my gaze. The rooms were lofty and bare, sunshine streamed in through dusty windows, the scent of lilac was overpowering, birds called on the lawn.

And the estate agent even had the tact to leave us alone together, so I wandered in dreamy silence over its wooden boards, hesitated on the sunlit stair, fingered the curve of the banister. I leaned against the back door, imagining it was mine. And as I moved from room to room the house seemed to relax and my heart turned over. I didn't know what I felt. Recognition? Or hunger? All I knew was that this house wanted me and I wanted this house. I could think of nothing else until our offer was accepted, the mortgage sorted out. And so our affair began.

I'll never forget our first night together. We drank warm champagne and ate an Indian takeaway among the packing cases, the house growing more solid around us by the minute. For a long time afterwards the grey lacquer coffee table (the only smart thing we owned back then) had a bright saffron stain where sauce was spilled. But it didn't matter. Nothing mattered. I was in love. Every breath I took in that house was a good one, every night of sleep perfect. I remember that summer as an extended holiday: good weather, long days, warm nights, a shiny new life unfurling.

Our relationship was long and happy. The house and I stayed together as I left my 20s and grew into my 30s, then my 40s. Seventeen years, three babies born, half a dozen books written, a lot of life lived. So when I woke up one winter morning and realised it was time to move on, I felt uneasy.

It wasn't that I didn't still care for the house - but something had changed. I'd fallen out of love with it, or with the idea of it. It was a hard thing to face but our relationship was static, tired, going nowhere.

"It's not you, " I told the house as I paced its familiar creaky floors and realised just how much the view of the houses opposite suffocated me. "It's me. I need something else, something different. "

But how do you tell a house it's over? It would have been too cruel to say I needed more space, since the poor house - extended and loft-converted to within an inch of its life - had provided as much of that as it possibly could. But it was true that we badly needed to stop sharing a bathroom with our teenage children.

Getting the estate agent round felt treacherous. As he muttered about each ceiling crack, each damp stain, each crumbling windowsill, I wanted to put my hands on those warm plaster walls, press my cheek on those battered pine doors and tell him to forget it. It was what we'd been through together that counted. If the house was slowly falling apart then some days, frankly, so was I.

The details the agent put together made the house look bright, vivid and new. Tarted up. Embarrassing. Already it looked like someone else's house. The day we left, after all the furniture and family and life had been emptied out, I walked around one last time and was shocked to find that without us in it, without the chaotic detail of our lives, it was a quite different space. Or it was just a space. Maybe we had little in common after all, the house and I.

I found our new house on the internet. (Well, times change.) The picture didn't do it justice - dark and blurry, straight out of The Amityville Horror. But the description - old rectory, enormous garden, central London - made my heart zing. We had to meet. Two days later, on a hot August afternoon, I stood outside waiting for the estate agent and phoned my husband. "It's perfect, " I told him, "I love it. I want it. I definitely want to live here. "

He asked if I'd been inside yet. I told him I hadn't but I'd looked through the letterbox, peeped through the hedge.

"The windows, " I told him, "are so elegant. And there are shutters, would you believe? And there's an amazing tree in the garden whose trunk has to be about 6ft wide. "

My husband laughed. "Okay, " he said. "We'd better buy it. "

That was a year ago. I live here now. We live here. It's us and the house. I don't know how long it will last - how can I? - but just like last time, just like every time, right now it feels like for ever. It feels like home.

Mystery and mischief at Granny's

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Nov 10, 2006 

The bungalow my granny lived in when I was six was called Saigon. She named it herself. She'd heard the word on the television news and thought it sounded exotic. Granny liked giving things exotic names. Her dogs were called Sabre and Gretchen. Gretchen seemed a slightly funny name for an elderly dachshund whose nipples almost touched the floor. But Sabre?

"It's a weapon, " our father said, as if that explained it.

Granny always moved house when we moved, and since we moved every two or three years, she moved a lot. She followed us all the way round Nottingham just to stay close to our father. She said she got nervous at night if she was more than about a mile away from him.

The bungalow she lived in when I was seven was in a brand new cul-de-sac. As she was the very first person to buy a property there, they asked if she'd like to name the whole cul-de-sac. Granny thought about it for ages and came up with The Point. So that was her address: 1, The Point.

Of all my Granny's houses, it's the bungalow at The Point that I remember best. Granny liked modern and outlandish things. So you came in the front door and immediately there was the sound of running water, a sound that always made you want to wet your knickers. And there, right in front of you, in the place where most normal people just had a table, a mirror and some keys, Granny had a real fish pond, complete with fountain. Bright orange fish lurked under waterlilies. The fish were real but the lilies were plastic (I wondered if that confused the fish). And the entire wall was paved with fake crazy paving that made your eyes go funny if you stared at it too long.

A few steps down from the hall in the lounge everything was lilac, purple, mauve: purple carpet, lilac sofa, purple cushions with grey piping, purple glass dishes and an assortment of swirly glass ornaments. There was a pouffe on wheels that we liked to ride on. If Granny was in the room we just wheeled it around sensibly but if she went to get something from the kitchen, we quickly hoisted it up the hall steps and flung ourselves down so it crashed.

On the table in the lounge were some things our grandfather had brought back from his travels before he died: a wooden elephant, a box of cocktail sticks, three carved men's faces on corks that smelled of Dubonnet if you shoved them against your nose, an old creased postcard with the flag of Canada on and, best of all, a white frosted glass ashtray that was actually a lady with no clothes on, sitting, head flung back and bosoms sticking up, ready to have ash tipped in her lap. Although the lady was totally bare, you couldn't see too much lower body detail because at that point her body just dissolved into the glass. We giggled at it until Granny put it away in the sideboard.

Granny's dining room was pretty normal - just a long dark table with a bowl of spotty fruit on it. But if you went through to her kitchen, you gasped because the walls were covered entirely in gold blistery paper. If it was sunny the glare almost blinded you. We liked to shut our eyes and run our fingers over it and imagine a million shiny scabs.

In Granny's kitchen there were biscuits wrapped in foil. Every time you took a bite, bits of chocolate fell off and Gretchen rushed to eat them up. In a kitchen drawer were golf balls that had been punctured in many places by her teeth. We were allowed to take these chewed up golf balls and play with them outside but Granny told us not to lick them because dog spit was dirty.

Granny's bathroom was pale yellow and cold and on the wall were three brown china geese flying towards the toilet. The bath had a soap on a rope and a special lacy waterproof pillow for Granny to put her head on.

But it was the soap for washing your hands with that fascinated me. This was called a "guest soap " and it had a picture of a lilac rose on it. I was fascinated by how the picture managed to stay on even when you washed your hands and wondered how much washing it would take for it to come off.

One day I could bear it no longer and started picking at the rose with my fingernails. Once I'd started I couldn't stop and soon it came off - in bits. Quickly, I tried to stick the bits back on but they wouldn't stay. In the end I left the mess on the side of the basin and went to play.

Later, Granny came into the room with cold angry eyes. "Who vandalised my guest soap? "

No one said a word.

"Julie? "

I shook my head and blushed horribly.

Granny walked away. She said nothing. The guest soap just disappeared and in its place next time there was a yellow one that looked like a lemon.

For years after that, soaps with transfers gave me a bad feeling, reminded me of being a vandal and a liar. I used to prefer not to wash my hands at all, rather than risk touching one.

Power of a fleeting memory

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Oct 06, 2007 

Back in August, I opened a newspaper to see the face of a woman I didn't know - a striking face, amused, intelligent, ever so slightly uncompromising but probably kind, fiftyish, with an unruly cloud of hair, a string of pearls. I liked her straight away. And I felt I knew her, even though it was impossible. I didn't recognise the name and didn't know the face. I just felt myself respond to it. More curious than moved, I read on. It was an obituary.

Magdalen Nabb was English - born in Lancashire - but for much of her life had lived and worked in Florence. Best known for writing a series of successful crime novels set in the city, she moved to Italy in the 1970s and at first worked as a potter, before starting to write. She lived in the pensionewhere EM Forster had written A Room with A View and for several years in the late 1970s and early 1980s had been the curator of Casa Guidi, the poet Robert Browning's house. Though paralysed down her left side by a stroke 12 years previously, she'd refused to give up riding or ballet. She died aged 60, after suffering another stroke.

I read all of this quickly and then my heart jumped. Casa Guidi. I'd never have remembered the name had I not just read it in the paper. But I'd never forgotten that dark, hot afternoon in 1979.

I am sitting in Florence in a tiny, sweaty kitchen with just one murky skylight, stoning cherries for jam. On the radio is Mahler's First Symphony. I sit on a high stool while Anna, the elderly maid who looks after the family for which I'm an au pair, stirs a sauce on the stove. Now and then she mutters something to me, something I don't understand. We communicate with smiles. When I first came here, she barely looked at me. Now she's decided la ragazza inglese is all right.

I sit on my stool and stone the cherries, popping them into a bowl. My fingers are purple, blue, nails rimmed with black. It is late June and already the city is half asleep. In 10 days everyone, us as well, will abandon the city for la spiaggia - the beach, the sea, two months of sun, sand and shady pines. Our bags are packed.

The kitchen sweats sugar. When the cherries are done, I yawn. Anna looks at me. "Go on," she says, "take a break. Come back at four." She means a siesta. But I don't want to sleep. I am 19 and I don't yet know how people sleep in the day. Instead, I walk past the grey-trousered man at the gatehouse - mouth open, eyes closed, head flung back in his chair - and find myself out there in the piazza.

The sky is sour with the threat of thunder. It's so hot you could take handfuls of air in your fingers. The man at the newspaper kiosk who normally stays open has shut up shop. The sky's getting darker every second.

The strange thing is I can't tell you much more. Memory does funny things. I was 19 years old. I was in love with life, with love, with poetry and yet I'd barely read the Brownings. So I crept up into Casa Guidi. Why? Who'd told me it was there, just around the corner from our apartment? Did I have to knock? Did I buy a ticket?

All I know is I crept up what I remember as a flight of grey stone stairs, dim and hushed, and into rooms that I recall as brown, musty, barely lit. Or was it just that as I stepped through those rooms the sky outside was so drained of light that it was like walking into night?

I don't know. Maybe I was the only visitor to Casa Guidi that late June afternoon. It's quite likely. But the oddest thing of all is that now, sitting here and screwing my memory into knots trying to recall, I remember no one else there - not a single soul, no curator, just the sensation of being completely alone in that brown dark house where two poets whose work I barely knew had lived, and then the crash of thunder, the zig zag of lightning, and then the rain: relief.

And yet another flash of memory comes back to me. Waiting on some dark and twisty stairs for the rain to stop, I sense someone else with me. Who? But my mind's gone dark and however hard I strain, I still can't quite see that person.

I look again at Magdalen Nabb. Did we meet, even only for one minute? Did she say something to me? Why does her face bother me so much? Did our lives collide on that afternoon?

After the rain stops - or when it has at least eased - I run back to the apartment and help Anna make the jam. We boil the black liquid until it coats the back of a wooden spoon. The kitchen, the whole apartment, fills up with the smell of sugar and black cherries. There is sweat on my face, in my hair, poetry in my mouth. Back then, 19 and just back from the poets' house, I decide - I assume - that I'll always make cherry jam in June from now on. Just like that I'll become that kind of person. And, of course, I didn't. I never have again.

Mum's laundry heaven, my student hell

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: May 18, 2007 

Iwas still away on my gap year in Italy when the forms about my place at Bristol University arrived. It was hard for my mother to get hold of me - our only communications back then consisted of fortnightly telephone conversations that I queued for at the main post office in Florence - so she filled them in herself.

Faced with the choice of five or six different halls of residence and having no idea of the geography of Bristol (or indeed of university life), she did what any self-respecting mother would do and went for the one with the most washing machines. By the time I got back, it was all decided. I was going to be living in the middle of nowhere, a couple of unsociable miles out of the centre of Bristol, in a place with exceptional laundry facilities.

My mother and stepfather drove me and my trunk there on a blowy grey day at the beginning of October. I still remember the exact taste and smell and texture of that day. I know that the trees were blazing green and gold, that the air smelt cold and crunchy, and that I was wearing a knitted plum wool pencil skirt and a pair of leather Italian mules with wooden heels. My legs were bare. I was probably shivering but I felt incredibly sophisticated. It was so dismaying to see all these greasy teenagers shuffling around in tattered jeans and waterproofs.

A cream-and-grey 1960s block in the middle of Stoke Bishop, Badock Hall did have wonderful views and easy access to the rolling downs. It also - as my mother eagerly pointed out - had its own tennis courts. She had always believed that sport was the best way to meet boys - as though there was something inherently wholesome about a boy who understood the nature of good old physical exertion. But at 19, in my Italian mules and with my fast-fading Italian tan, tennis and healthy boys who exerted themselves were the last thing on my mind. I wanted dark rooms and clever, complicated people. I wanted to talk until the small hours about life and death and John Keats.

But maybe what I was really suffering from was gap-year-itis. For a whole year I'd mingled with Italian counts and countesses, developed a taste for strong espressos and learned to take for granted Brunelleschi's soaring spires against a perfect blue sky. I'd cloaked myself in a different language (conveniently masking all sorts of inexperience and awkward-ness) and I'd been called bella enough times to begin to feel it.

Suddenly here I was, surrounded by chemistry and geography students in a place where you queued up in a clattery dining hall for pale salad and queasy chips, a place where if you wanted coffee it was hot brown water from a machine, a place where if you wanted a bath you had to provide your own plug.

What on Earth had I done?

My stepfather told me to make sure I read the fire regulations on the notice board downstairs and my mum ran the hot tap in my basin-in-a-cupboard to check it really was hot. Then - a little teary - they kissed me and left.

It was 1979, almost 30 years ago, but I still remember exactly what happened next. I sat for a few moments on my single bed, picked away at the nail varnish on my (still Italian-looking) toes and thought about crying but decided not to. Then there was a knock on the door and a girl with long permed brown hair and a guitar stood there and asked if I wanted to come and have coffee and "Christian fellowship " in a room along the corridor.

"It's not only miles from anywhere, " I wrote to my best friend, who was at university in Manchester, "but somehow I've managed to end up in the one hall that's full of Christians. "

A few weeks passed and I remember that I did play some tennis on those courts with some boys. I also lost my tan; I ate too many chips; I looked in the mirror one day and realised I didn't look a lot different from the people around me who were eagerly sticking posters of Average White Band to their brown cell walls. Could it be that this really was my fate?

And then I made two proper friends. The first had long blonde hair, a chain-smoking habit and madness in her eyes - and told me she would definitely have a nervous breakdown if she didn't get out of that place. The second I first saw sitting on the floor of the student union wearing a pin-striped jacket she'd bought in a thrift store as she bummed around the US. She looked like she was just waiting for something real to happen. She looked like me.

And that was it. We found a big old house in Redlands with five bedrooms and got some other disaffected students (all boys - hurray) to move in with us. By the end of that first year, we were living life with a filthy kitchen, a ghost and no washing machine, juggling rent cheques and washing-up rotas when we could have been (as my mother kept pointing out) eating nice hot meals in Badock Hall and playing tennis.

But that's another story I'll tell you next week.

A shivery skeleton of a home

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Sep 29, 2007 

When my parents were still together, our kitchen was a homely place. Small but not too small, it had a U-shaped Formica cooking area and an oil-fired boiler that hummed in the corner where I kept my mice in their pungent, sawdust-filled cage.

The sink and cooker were always clean and shiny, the cupboards full of packets of dried food and Barts spices arranged in neat rows, and there was a drawer that contained springy piles of clean tea towels. The Formica table was wiped down after each meal and the five kitchen chairs had seat pads with bright 1960s orange flowers - flower power.

In this kitchen my mother would cook mince or chops or sausages or cod in parsley sauce. Or else we would have corned beef salad with tinned Yeoman's new potatoes and salad cream. Blancmange or Bird's custard with steamed chocolate sponge pudding would follow.

We all sat around that little table to eat and, though I now remember nothing of those meals (Did we talk? Were we happy? Did we finish everything on our plates?) my sense of the kitchen at that time is of a safe, contented place.

But in the middle of August 1972, when my mother left my father and took us with her, the kitchen changed. Partly to express his fury at being left, partly to punish us and partly (I now see) to punish himself, he let the house slowly fall apart.

On that August night our mum had hired a removal van and (while he was away) taken about half of the furniture. I don't remember what she took from the kitchen - pots and pans? A potato masher? The bread bin? - but, whenever we visited, everywhere in the house items were missing. She took the soft things, the happy, homely things, the things she had chosen and bought. What remained was a sad, shivery skeleton of a home, a cold dead shadow of the life we used to live.

Our father seemed almost happy that everywhere there were reminders: sour marks on the walls where pictures had once hung; deep grooves and dents in the carpet where a particular chair or table had stood; dust gathering on shelves that had once held ornaments and bowls of flowers; the space where the dirty clothes basket in the bathroom used to be.

Actually he had no interest in replacing anything. He said that he wanted us to see exactly what our mother had done to our home, what destruction she had wrought. You could see it gave him a kind of weird pleasure to have us ask if there were any clean towels (there weren't) or where the hall hatstand had gone. Don't you remember? Is your memory so short? Your mother took it.

Our father wasn't, I don't think, an especially dirty man but like many men of the time, he didn't really know how to do the laundry or wash up. So after our mother left even the clean towels and bed linen in the airing cupboard somehow never felt quite fresh. All too quickly, the house grew unaired, unloved. All of the objects in it were functional and none was pretty. There were always too many ashtrays and not enough cushions.

I only remember a few pieces that he bought himself after the divorce: a leather chair, slick and dark and ugly, the kind of thing my mother would never have had in the house; an electric organ, and a strange, plastic picture of a naked woman, sprayed to look like it was bronze. Her long hair and her breasts and nipples stood out in relief. My father said she was tasteful and I - slightly horrified - pretended to believe him.

But of all the rooms in the house, the kitchen remained the saddest. There was never anything in the cupboards and when we stayed our father would let us choose ready meals, which we ate with relish. (We weren't allowed food like this at home). But we always finished with a feeling of emptiness inside that didn't go away no matter how many sweets we were allowed to eat.

Late afternoons on dark Sundays were especially difficult. This was when my mother and stepfather were due to come and collect us. We had to make sure to hide our relief at going home and anyway we weren't allowed to say "home". My father banned us from using that word to describe where we lived with our mother. So, once our bags were packed and in the hall and he was sitting silently smoking with an accusing look on his face, there was literally nothing left to do.

The kitchen cupboard still had a few sticky jams and spreads left over from the old days and I would go in there and, standing at the greasy kitchen counter, furtively stuff slice upon slice of white bread spread with Tate & Lyle Golden syrup into my mouth - delicious and horrible. I wasn't hungry; I didn't want it; I kept on going, swallowing down my grief, my tension and my rage.

That was then and I don't think I've ever confused food and emotion since. But recently something happened. Forced - for reasons I don't need to detail here - to revisit those times and give them some hard and painful thought, suddenly there I was, standing in our kitchen at home, eating slice upon slice of bread spread thickly with my kids' Nutella. It would be neat to say I realised what I was doing, stopped and let someone comfort me. But I didn't. I kept on eating and it was a whole week before I could either laugh or cry about it.

Poignant glimpse of a life unlived

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Jul 07, 2007 

In a lovely little town right on the very most eastern edge of England, there's a small wooden bench that looks straight out to sea. It's not like all the other benches, jostling for space along the cliff walk with their happy plaques commemorating Olive and Fred or Ken and Betty - all those countless high days and holidays, retirements and golden anniversaries, long and contented lives lived out and loved in this windy, blue-sky place.

This bench is different. It's been there a couple of years now, maybe more - I can't remember exactly when it arrived. But I do know how it felt to see it for the first time. I remember it was a shock to come across it, so stark and pale in its newness and with its heartbreaking, carved inscription. It stopped me in my tracks.

Because, unlike the other benches, this one doesn't make you think of laughing, long-married people eating ice creams with their grandchildren. Instead, this little bench tells a tale of a loss so devastating that you can't walk past and remain unchanged. Glance at its inscription and, even if you've read it before, you are assailed, your heart is grabbed. Even thinking about it now, I am plunged into sadness, dragged off to a place where, mostly, I'd rather not go.

Sometimes, because of this, I avoid the bench. Sometimes I'm just too busy (or too happy) to face it and I turn away from the cliff path and instead head straight down the steps to the beach. Or else I remember too late that the bench is there and have to cut laboriously back across the High Street, up the hill and down to the sea that way.

Other times, though, I'm almost glad to have to walk past it. Sometimes, on black windy nights, taking the dog out along the cliff after a long day writing, thinking, struggling with life's sad, ordinary messes, I give the bench a long hard look and let some tears come. Sometimes there's comfort in doing this and sometimes, really, there isn't. Sometimes I'm not even sure who I'm crying for - them or me? I can't do it for long, anyway, because the dog soon comes trotting back, curious to see why I've stopped. And so the world starts turning again and we walk on.

And then there are the other days when I'm not really thinking about the bench at all. Then I might saunter slowly past, innocent, mindless - only to find myself plunged straight into its world. Then, the air around me goes brown with sadness and a heavy weight presses on me for the few quick seconds it takes to pass. I emerge the other side of that dull grief cloud as quickly as I can, glad just to gulp the blue air and be alive.

Some days the bench is lonely and bare. From far away it looks no different from all the other benches. But on other days there are flowers attached - small bouquets with notes on, tied with string and wrapped in cellophane. Once there were tight, yellow roses that started off fresh and pretty, only to get slowly battered by wind and rain, turning brown and sodden and sad. Other times, like last week, for instance, children's crayon drawings are tied there - energetic, vivid, protected by plastic. These small offerings flap there in the bright sea breeze, somehow unbearable because the person they're done for can't see them.

Or can he?

The man died in his early 30s. He must have known he was going to die because he had time to choose the words. He left behind two small children. We don't know how small but we know their names and we know his name. And we know that he will never, ever stop loving them, because that's what he says, here in clear carved letters for all to see, on the bench.

This tiny but potent sliver of information haunts me. Sometimes I long to fill in the gaps. How exactly did he die? Where's his wife? Is she all right? Is she coping? How are his parents managing? How old are the children now and do they remember him? And what exactly do they expect me to feel, these people, as I walk past? Do they think that I - or anyone else - can make it past this little bench without being stopped in their tracks?

And, yes, some days I do worry that, more than sympathy for these strangers, it's my own powerlessness that haunts me most. The fact that I have to read these words again and again and yet can do nothing. The fact that there's nothing I can say, no help I can offer these people, no way I can start to feel better about these strangers whose grief is so bravely catalogued here.

In winter, the bench is cold and rain-stained and people huddle on it, oblivious in their anoraks and fleeces, to eat their fish and chips. But right now, in high summer, the air up here is peppery with wild fennel and the glittery shadows sliding over the sea make you catch your breath, and I think that there could be worse places to be remembered, to leave your last words, to declare such undying love.

Treehouse dreaming

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Sep 22, 2007 

She sits in a faded deckchair in the late summer garden, eyes closed, tangle of dirty blonde hair, grubby bare feet up on the table. She is 16. She has on a new T-shirt, skull-and-cross-bones necklace. Her jeans are dirty and ripped. I don't really know what she does to get so dirty. It reminds me of when she was two and we'd spread old newspapers under her chair before she ate.

She doesn't know what I'm thinking. But she opens her eyes. "Hey Mum. How about this? You know the big tree? "

"Yes? " We have lots of trees in our garden, partly because once upon a time it was the graveyard for the church next door. Then, in 1850-something, they exhumed all the bodies (where did they go?) and it became a garden. The Monkey Park they called it, because the eccentric but philanthropic rector brought monkeys and zebras to this grimy spot of south-east London to brighten the lives of the local children.

The tree - the one she's talking about - must have been a small sapling then. Now it's enormous, ancient and sturdy, a million bright leaves - a plane tree but not a common London one, said the tree surgeon who came to quote for thinning it.

"It's a plane tree, " I tell her, "some exotic type. I wish I could remember what the tree surgeon said it was. He said it might be 150 years old. "

She screws her face up in a frown. She never asked for so much information. "Yeah well, listen, don't you think it would be just brilliant if it had a tree house in it? "

I start to laugh.

"No but listen, Mum! There's easily room for one, up there among the branches. Just a little one I mean but with enough space, yeah, for me to sit and play my guitar. "

I think about this. I think of her up in that big old tree, singing her punky songs. I smile. When she was a toddler, she was always in the garden; she loved mess and mud. At six or seven, she liked to sharpen sticks, bang them against the fence. At 10, she'd try to set fire to things using a magnifying glass. But then she turned into a teenager and the garden was ignored. It was always either too cold or wet or hot to enter. Why did we force her to eat outside in summer? "I hate it out here. It's so bright. It hurts my eyes. " What was the point of all that green space?

But this summer - only our second in this strange new-old garden - all of this changed. Quite a few times, and more and more just lately, if she sees me sitting out here with tea or a book, she'll venture out - a small animal sniffing the air, picking her way down the steps in her bare feet. "Hiya, " she'll say, flinging herself into a chair and greedily proceeding to chat.

"You really want a tree house? But you're way too old for a tree house. "

She grins. "Oh, but Mum, just think about it. It would be so cool. A little ladder up there, a place where I could be all alone! "

"I used to have one, " I tell her, "but not in a tree. It was on stilts. "

"Yeah, yeah but that's not the type I want. I want a proper one - the sort that could almost be a real house, you know? "

I shade my eyes to look at the tree, the sombre shade it casts. They say there are no bodies left here any more but I don't know. Last year, when they shaved off a little of our garden to extend the church forecourt, a grave was uncovered. A crypt containing three lead coffins - father, mother, daughter. They had lain under the lawn all that time.

"OK, just a small one then? " she tries with a sigh. "I don't see what you've got against a really tiny tree house. "

People sometimes ask me whether I mind having a former graveyard for a garden. What would I feel if there were still bodies under here? The truth is, I feel incredibly lucky to be the custodian of all this space, light and shade, old walls, ancient trees - and bones.

"Mum? " She starts to speak then gives up, yawns, picks at her toes. I think of what might lie beneath, then I think of all the bright beauty here - the crazy life of the garden. Look at my sweet peas - urgent, exploding, as if they can't grow fast enough.

"A tree house would be incredibly expensive, " I tell her now because out here in the lazy heat, it would be so easy (but too cruel) to get her hopes up.

"But you'll at least think about it? "

"Hmm. "

"No you won't. "

I look again at the plane tree, ancient and sturdy, the kind of tree that makes you feel like the smallest animal speck on the surface of this earth. And then I look at her funny, smudgy face and think how I have never loved her quite so much as now in this particular moment on a day in late summer, as she sits there picking her feet and begging to have a tree house in this garden, which we both do and don't own, and where the sweet spirits of the dead are all around us.

A particular kind of homesickness

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Jan 12, 2007 

Half past three on a raw January afternoon and the sky's already burnt around the edges. In less than an hour it will be dark. And Nina has only been here 40 minutes but already her two-year-old is squirming in her lap and demanding to go home.

"Except she doesn't mean 'home' home, " Nina tells me as she tries to control Izzy with one hand and balance a cup of Lapsang in the other. "She means our old house. "

"Really? " I say, surprised.

Nina and her boyfriend and their three girls moved a couple of months ago from a small-ish house to a much bigger one three streets away. The new house has a proper garden with a swing and it's also big enough for the eldest to have a bedroom of her own. Nina sighs.

"She was OK to start with. Hardly seemed to notice that we'd moved. But then, about a month ago, she started waking up every night. And every time I went in to her she just sobbed that she wanted to go home. "

"What did you say? "

"Well at first I didn't really say anything. I was a bit surprised but I thought perhaps it was a middle-of-the-night thing and, you know, maybe the less we actually talked about it the better. John said she was bound to forget. But when she said it again the next night and the night after that, I told her that she couldn't, that it just wasn't our home any more. I told her that other children lived there now. "

"That was brave, " I say.

Nina blinks. "It's the truth. "

"I know, but still. "

At the mention of "other children ", Izzy's thumb has slid into her mouth and she's shuffling closer to her mum.

"Well, in the end, " Nina says, "I had to go back to the old place to collect a couple of things we'd left and so I let her come with me. "

My eyes widen. I'm not sure I'd have done that.

Nina shrugs. "The moment we went in that door she didn't hesitate. Just raced straight upstairs to their old bedroom only to find, well of course, there were all these other kids playing in there and " - she flicks a glance at Izzy, who seems to have forgotten everything and is carefully pulling off her shoes and socks - "I thought she'd be devastated but she wasn't. She just got down on the floor and joined in with the game. It only got a bit tricky when we had to leave. "

Nina puts down her cup and ruffles Izzy's hair. "'I had to carry her out screaming. "

I smile. While I can't help feeling that taking a two-year-old to see her old house is a slightly dodgy thing to do, there's something about Nina. Her own childhood was nomadic. If I thought we moved house a lot, well she moved twice as much and often in and out of rented accommodation, or even from country to country. The result is someone who cares passionately about homes - and can tell you romantic stories about everywhere she's ever lived - but who still inhabits them in a casual and slightly transient way, as if she can never quite trust in her apparent stability, as if she could just up sticks and move on at any moment, which maybe she could.

When I was researching Home, my book about everyone who ever lived in our house in Clapham, and I told my daughter Chloë about the family just like ours who'd lived there more than a century before us, she said: "It's not really our house at all is it, Mummy? It's like we're just the top layer. And one day there'll be another layer on top of us, squashing us down. " I asked her if she minded that. She said she'd let me know.

She never did but maybe I answered the question myself anyway because not long after the book was published we moved. We'd never really planned to go but one day I just woke up and something had shifted. Maybe it was to do with layers or maybe it was just that we were finally sick of sharing a bathroom with three teenagers but, either way, I knew the house was ready for someone else.

Now, if I occasionally allow myself to drive past, I have to take a deep breath. It's being done up. The jasmine's gone and so has the lavender and the other day there were smart louvered shutters on the windows. Where the house used to seem to smile at me, now it cuts me dead like the stranger I am.

It's not that I still think of that place as home. I have a new home now and I'm very happy there. But now and then, in the deadest bit of the night, there's a part of me that wakes just like Izzy and cries out, simply because I can never go back. And in my dreams I can imagine how it might feel to be standing at that oh-so-recently-familiar front door and have it magically open and be allowed to race right up those lovely old stairs and straight back into my sweet old life as if nothing had happened. As if we could all continue just where we left off. As if there was no new layer of people just waiting to squash me down.

Mysterious rooms and naughty nuns

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Feb 23, 2007 

Even to us back then with our wild hearts and even wilder imaginations, it seemed a bit too amazing to be true. But if you looked carefully - if you stood under the spreading cedars on those darkening lawns and stared up at the house - there was no doubt about it. There were two more windows on the outside than on the inside. Absolutely definitely.

We'd walked right round the outside of the house counting all the windows. Then we'd gone inside and run from bedroom to bedroom, landing to landing, checking. And the numbers didn't tally! Which meant there could only be one wonderfully chilling conclusion. Somewhere in that house there was a secret room. A room that no one ever went in. A room that no one wanted anyone to know was there.

At least this was what Tracy encouraged us to believe late on that summer evening - dusk falling fast, bats swooping so low you could swipe at them with a fishing net - when we did our final count.

"Told you! " she said, face hot with triumph.

We stared at her, all of us, six small girls and an even smaller boy, on holiday.

"Hey, maybe they bricked someone up in there, " Tracy suggested, her mouth so close I could catch the pink elastic of bubblegum on her breath.

"Bricked who up? " I wondered. I'd never heard of someone being bricked up. I struggled to picture it. Was it like being stood up?

Tracy rolled her eyes. "A nun of course! "

A nun. Of course. Tracy knew so much stuff we didn't know. Like what a pro was ( "A professional? " I offered. "No, stupid, a prostitute! ") and how to pull your eyelashes out one by one, or throw a dart, or turn a proper cartwheel without letting your legs flop over.

Tracy knew everything. She had Scholl sandals and a Robertson's Gollywog brooch. She was an annual treat. We only ever saw her in August as her parents ran the hotel in the big house in Cornwall where the windows didn't match up. She was older than us - long-haired, long-limbed, brave.

And thick.

Thick?

"As two short planks, " our father said, launching the ash off his cigarella with one finger-flick.

"Why is she? How do you know she is? "

"It's just obvious. " He lit another cigarella off the one he was finishing. He smoked them instead of cigarettes because they were better for you. Everyone knew that everything brown was better for you. Tracy's legs were long and brown from being by the seaside all year long. I wanted legs like that.

But how could someone who knew so much general knowledge (something our father rated highly) be thick? I decided I didn't want to know any more about what he thought about Tracy. We liked her and that was all that mattered. We loved her. Every year we worried she would say she was too old to play with us but every year - after a couple of days of coolly pretending she'd forgotten who we were - she'd suddenly suggest some brilliant game and we'd be off.

We formed a club. An urgent club. We called ourselves The Secret Eight. We made badges. We had a password. Our mission? To solve the mystery of the extra windows and find the secret room! (And release the poor nun, I added to myself.)

In the afternoons when everyone was at the beach and the house throbbed with silence, I said I had a tummy ache and needed to lie down. Then Tracy and I crept around, creaking over carpeted floors, up and down stairs, giggling silently. Once, we came across a maid cleaning the bathroom, singing loudly to herself. Then a man came out of one of the bedrooms and asked us crossly where our parents were. "My parents own this place, " Tracy snapped and that shut him up.

But it was no good. We found nothing. No secret room.

Finally we gave up and lay on the floor of Tracy's attic room eating boiled sweets and talking about boys. Tracy said she had a boyfriend, or was getting one soon anyway. She also had copies of Jackie magazine. I asked her what "bricking up " was.

"You know! " she said. "When they put you in a room and instead of the door they put bricks so you can never get out. "

I flinched. "Would you suffocate? "

"I don't know which would happen first - starving or suffocating. "

I thought about this and shivered.

"But why would they brick up a nun? " I asked her because I suddenly didn't get it at all.

Tracy shrugged. "Why d'you think? Because she wasn't a virgin any more of course. Do you know what a virgin is? "

I nodded and made a mental note to find out.

"Tracy's not thick, " I told my father later over a dinner of corned beef salad and peach melba. "She knows so many things. "

"I wouldn't count on it, " my father said through a mouthful of potato mayonnaise. "She'll be an unmarried mother at the rate she's going. "

The following summer Tracy didn't want to play any more. And when I asked her if she'd found out any more about the secret room she looked at me as if I was mad. The summer after that, they said she was living in Falmouth and waitressing. And many years after that, I heard she got married, got divorced, had a child. Though in what exact order I'm not quite sure.

Kissing the last wall goodbye

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Sep 15, 2006 

As a child I thought everyone moved house every few years. From being born to leaving home, I lived in eight different houses - nine if you count the time my mum wrote mid-university term to say "by the way, we're moving and here's the new address ". My early childhood was spent forever packing and unpacking my precious china horses and, literally, kissing the walls of each old bedroom goodbye. How else could I mark the ends of these all too brief relationships? But there was one summer - the summer of 1972 - that made even that old life look fixed and stable and solid. It came to define for ever the way I thought about home.

I was nine when I moved with my parents, sisters and a bunch of pets to a large Victorian farmhouse in the flat, mauve fields of Nottinghamshire, England. We had an orchard, outbuildings and 10 acres of land that we rented to a local farmer. I was in heaven. I was a girl in a book. I roamed the fields at dawn looking for clay pipe heads; we put on plays in the barn and fished for sticklebacks in the stream; we dressed up as gypsies and wandered the hedgerows hoping to get lost. It was an idyllic place to be nine, 10 and then 11 years old and I think I knew it.

But my young, feisty mother was more and more unhappy with my older, introverted father. In the evenings they smoked and drank and argued. Sometimes worse. He said if she left she couldn't take anything - not a stick of furniture, not the dog, not her daughters. Though outwardly life went on as normal, I lay awake at night in my attic bedroom surrounded by David Cassidy posters and china horses and waited, heart banging, to see what would happen.

What happened was this: she left him in the middle of the night while he was away doing the seaside stint with us. (They were holidaying separately by then.) She hired a removal van and took half the furniture, the hamster, the duck and, yes, the dog. The next day she drove to the Suffolk hotel where she was meant to take over the holiday reins. But, as soon as she'd waved him off - he had no idea he was returning to a literally half-empty house - she told us she'd left, that she'd bought a house, that we were going there now.

"Now? " we cried. "But what about the holiday? "

We sobbed all the way back.

We arrived at the new house - a Victorian terrace in the red light district of Nottingham - in the airless dark of an August night. It looked horrid, it had gas fires, it smelled of cat. It was not what we were used to. But Mum had (secretly) been decorating and there were our very own beds, cosy and familiar, waiting for us. There was my sister's yellow teddy. There was my best doll, eyes widely smiling as if nothing had happened. Our duck was quacking in the yard and the hamster was busy on his wheel. We drank some milk, then cried again, then slept.

In the morning things looked brighter. We discovered a secret ivy-clad alleyway between the houses. And a newsagent's shop round the corner. We'd never lived so close to somewhere you could buy sweets. I felt anxious about my Dad, all alone, but a vague heaviness (the weight of parents who hated each other?) lifted from my chest. I realised I could imagine living there.

Meanwhile the police called: our furious father had reported us missing. Mum showed them we were safe, said that all she wanted was some time with us before the inevitable court battle started. The police agreed to stay out of it. But Mum didn't want us found too soon. Our grandfather owned a spare mobile home just outside the city, so suddenly off we went. We thought we were on holiday but the truth was we were in hiding.

Actually, I didn't care. I remember a week of eating Spam and instant mashed potato, of sleeping in bunks, of not having to listen to grown-ups fighting at night. I remember kids bombing each other in the swimming pool, the smell of disinfectant from the shower and toilet block, the feeling that this strange summer might just go on for ever.

I also remember a kind of euphoric confusion. Where exactly did I live now? Part of me already missed our scruffy new home in town but another part of me still dreamed about the unimaginably vast and now irrevocably lost spaces of our old country home. I'd thought I'd live there for ever, that life was perfect, that I was safe. But I realised with a bump of shock that I'd never felt more alive than in this ugly mobile home where I had to walk a whole block to use the lavatory. How was this possible?

Our mum said home was not about the place but the people in it. "You can make a home anywhere, " she told us as we drove back into Nottingham to the (already old) new house. "You just need a little bit of imagination and a lot of hope.

"Think of The Sound of Music, " she said. "We're walking over the mountains. The adventure is just beginning. "

I looked at her and saw that she'd got thin but that all the shadows had left her face. And I realised I believed her. I never kissed another bedroom wall after that.

A dogged love of domesticity

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Oct 13, 2006 

He's quiet. He's very, very quiet. His absolute favourite activity is standing still. He'll stand and stare at a plain white wall for half an hour as if it's the very most interesting thing in the whole world. And then, when he's finished doing that, he'll potter off and find another one to stare at.

He follows you around the house like a polite but slightly annoying guest who feels he ought to help but can't quite summon the confidence to offer. He wanders around tentatively, as if he's never had the run of a whole house before, as if he can't quite believe in all this space, all these stairs, all these (fascinating) white walls.

He acts like he can't afford to take anything for granted, as if there has to be a catch, a snag, a price. He acts like he can't quite believe his luck and is just waiting to have the rug pulled from under his four furry feet. He's only a dog but I'm startled to find he breaks my heart - because he behaves like someone who doesn't know what a home is, who can't quite believe he's really being offered one now.

We'd only had him a day or two when a possibility struck me.

"I think your dog might be deaf, " I said to Raph.

How else can you explain a dog who literally doesn't notice you come into a room, who has to be gently tapped on the shoulder like some old man dozing over his newspaper? Yet once he knows you're there, he's alert. He jumps to his feet, stretches, yawns, wags his tail, eager to know what's next. And like all the best guests he's up for anything: walk, watch TV, sit on your lap, lie in his bed (facing the wall) and wait - for ever if necessary. He's cool. All he wants is to fit in. He does fit in. You so wish you could tell him that.

We got him from a rescue centre. A dark rainy day, middle of the country, black skies. The noise of barking was so deafening that the staff wore earplugs. They charged up and down in their wellington boots, patiently telling us about all the dogs and their personalities.

Some were hurling themselves against the metal of their cages, barking and yowling, but not him. He was sitting quietly. We noticed him straightaway because he wasn't trying to be noticed. He looked like a puppy with his wispy blonde hair and dark eyes but they said he wasn't young. They'd been told 13 when he was first brought in but 
the vet had then looked at him and said no way was he more than eight or nine.

They released him into the field so we could meet him. He leapt around in stunned, grateful silence like a small, tipsy rabbit. He sniffed the air carefully. They said he'd lived with an old lady who had a lot of dogs and cats - too many. She couldn't cope. She'd been rehoused anyway and most of the dogs had to go.

His name was Ted but he didn't respond to it. Raph changed his name to Andy. He didn't respond to Andy either. He didn't respond when we blew a dog whistle behind him, when we clapped our hands, when we rustled a biscuit wrapping. Definitely deaf, we said.

We brought him home and he gazed around like an orphan being shown a palace. He sipped some water from a bowl then stood for a moment, savouring it. The look on his face said it was the best water he'd ever tasted in his life.

"He looks like Timmy from the Famous Five, " I said. "You should call him Timmy. "

"He's Andy, " Raph said firmly. "Andy suits him. "

I was drinking tea and Andy trotted over and stood beside me looking up politely. I had a sudden vision of what his old life might have been: a little front room crammed with animals, an old lady in a chair, TV flickering, a gas fire turned up hot, a saucer of tea on the floor.

What's it like, I thought, to be a dog - to have no say at all over where you live and who with? You don't know what class you are or what your income is. You don't know whether you're going to end up in a tiny room with a gas fire and three rottweilers or with a great big garden of your own, two cats to chase and a whole shouty family to subject you to regular hearing tests. Home for a dog is - what? - comfort, food, walks, routine and affection. But when a dog stands waiting for you to put your key in the front door, what precisely is he thinking?

Andy has lived with us for a month now and we're not quite as convinced as we were about the deafness. Because just recently he's started to seem to hear things - the clink of his waterbowl, the bang of the front door, Raph chirruping his name in a particularly stupid way. Probably coincidence, my husband says, and maybe he's right. Or could it just be that a big dollop of love and security - and the understanding that at last he has a home - is all it's taken to persuade this small dog to start listening?

A sobering discovery in the dark

By Julie Myerson, Financial Times

Published: Nov 10, 2007 

Katy's house was in the same village as ours, a 10-minute walk down Main Street, past the pub and the field with the brown horses, before the road narrowed and you walked for another few minutes, and there it was, a large grey stone house set well back from the road, with a porch, a big front garden and a bright blue climbing frame - Katy's house.

Katy's mum was a French teacher and her dad was an alcoholic and Katy was an only child. At Christmas they always had parties with pineapple and cheese on sticks and tiny wrinkled sausages and Twiglets. They had a huge purple tinsel Christmas tree and their Christmas cards were pegged to a long sparkly string that went all the way up the stairs. They must have had a lot of friends because it was a very long flight of stairs and the cards stretched all the way up to the dark and creaky landing.

Because Katy was an only child, she was allowed to have other children round to play whenever she liked - to make up for it. She was younger than me and older than my middle sister; I don't know whose friend she was really. Anyway, she had friends of all ages. There was just something about her house that drew people in.

Sometimes we went the normal way along Main Street and other times we took the short-cut across the fields and shouted out to Katy to come and play. Sometimes we were all spies or secret agents and sometimes we were ballerinas who just happened to be spies as well. At Katy's house I watched Laurel and Hardy, tasted my first chives and experienced real fear for the very first time.

Our favourite game - a game we played at everyone's house including our own - was to turn out all the lights and just see what happened. You could only really play the game in winter, when it was dark by 4pm and parents might need to pop out for an hour or so.

The moment Katy's mum's car disappeared down the drive, we'd turn out the lights. All of our houses were different - some old, some modern, some big like Katy's and others quite tiny. But the one thing they had in common was that they all felt totally different when you turned the lights out. However normal and friendly and happy a person's house might seem in the daylight, the thick black gloom that descended with darkness changed everything.

Sometimes we'd all separate from each other and creep around in the dark - feeling for walls, doors, beds, window ledges. Other times it was just too frightening to do that and we'd stick together, creeping up the stairs, gripping each other's knees and fingers, clutching at each other's clothes. If we saw a shape or heard a noise, everyone would stop and stare into the darkness until it morphed into tiny pin pricks of coloured light clustering before our eyes.

It was just before Christmas and we were doing the game at Katy's. Her parents were out with everyone else's parents at a party down the road. Quick! Katy rushed around flicking out the lights. She was wearing a tutu and a sheepskin coat because we often dressed up to do the game. I had on some kind of pyjama bottoms and a slave girl's top. As even the twinkly lights on the Christmas tree were extinguished, darkness fell and infinity loomed.

I don't know why this time I ended up going off on my own but I did. All I remember was I was on the upstairs landing, hand on the bannister, Christmas cards and sparkly string quivering beneath my fingers, and I could hear the others screaming downstairs and suddenly I heard a low growly breath, a stumble and a groan. Then I felt the grab of a hand at my shoulder - a heavy male hand.

My heart was banging. I wanted to scream but it was like my breath was all shut off. I wanted to move but I couldn't do that either. I felt the Christmas card string start to break and the roots of my hair go hot and tight. And part of me was there in my body feeling the fear but another part was just hovering above, looking down and thinking that in a minute every single Christmas card was going to be on the floor.

The thing about turning lights off is you can also turn them back on. As I blinked into Katy's father's face and smelled the boozy-sweetness of his breath and heard him mutter a swear word I had never heard before and - sure enough - saw Christmas cards all over the landing and flapping down the stairs, all I could think was: "We are going to be in such trouble for this."

But in fact we never were. In fact, Katy's parents split up soon after that night and so did ours, closely followed by everyone else's parents, apart from one couple where the dad was killed in a car crash. All the same, it took a few more years for me to realise that this had been the very last time of playing in darkness. After that, even if we wanted to scare ourselves, we always played with the lights on.

The darker side of days by the sea

By Julie Myerson, Financial Times

Published: Jul 21, 2007 

It was August 1999, the edge of the century, the edge of the millennium, the summer of the total eclipse of the sun. I was 39, teetering on the edge of 40, and because my husband didn't really see the point of English seaside holidays, I'd rented a place by the sea for a fortnight alone with our three children.

It was a seaside palace - a lofty, three-bedroomed flat over the butcher's in the high street. Light and sunny, it had a feeling of holiday - as well as the smallest dishwasher I had ever seen. The entrance was in a narrow brick alleyway that led conveniently straight to the children's playground with the rubber tyre swing that my three adored. There was no sea view but the beach was two minutes' walk away and you could see the lighthouse from the bedroom windows. At night the children made me leave their curtains slightly open, so they could fall asleep to its regular, reassuring wink.

I slightly missed my husband. But there was something delicious about giving myself over entirely to the children, not even attempting any grown-up time, not trying to get them off to bed early, not caring how messy anything was or how long anything took. I remember that fortnight as a time of endless Coco Pops, longer-than-usual bedtime stories and socks, knickers and Batman figures scattered all over the floor. I remember the anarchic fun of eating on our laps simply so that we could leave a mammoth Star Wars jigsaw puzzle half-done on the dining room table for the whole two weeks, popping in to have a go whenever we felt like it.

And every day we did whatever we felt like doing. We caught tiddlers in the boating lake, played Crazy Golf by the pier. We ate cream teas and crab sandwiches and fish and chips and sometimes carried supper down to the beach and ate it on our big green blanket as the sun sank into the sea and the shadows crept up around us. If it all sounds pretty perfect, then really it was. Until the rain started.

We woke one morning to a steady downpour but we didn't panic. One rainy day was hardly a problem. And anyway the kids had been desperate to go to the Sea Life aquarium in Yarmouth and I'd said it was a waste while the weather was so nice. But we set off for Yarmouth only to turn back after 20 minutes as I couldn't even see to drive. Next day it carried on raining. And the next and the next. August 11th was only a few days away. How were we going to witness a total eclipse of the sun in pouring rain?

I decided that a little bit of rain wasn't going to ruin our holiday and I went and bought us all matching waterproofs from the chandler's at the harbour. But, next day, four navy blue, waterproofed people - one big and three small - only got as far as the nearest shop awning before having to rush straight back to the alleyway, where the water was so deep that each child had to be lifted over and on to the front doorstep. They laughed but I nearly cried.

From then on, the holiday got slowly more surreal. I remember an afternoon when the water stopped falling out of the sky just long enough for us to watch out of our sitting room window as a car parked in the high street began to smoke and then burst into flames. Floods and now fire - what was going on? Raphael (seven) said he didn't want to see the eclipse after all, he just wanted to go home.

But a day later it was just about dry enough for us to sit on the beach with a huge, silent, cross-legged crowd and wait for it to happen. "Will it get pitch black?" the children wanted to know. "Might the sea actually burst into flames?" They dug sandcastles while they waited and Raphael sat in my lap with his thumb in his mouth.

But instead of day turning to night as we'd expected, all that happened was the light got a little bit dirty, the sea turned grey as metal and time seemed to slow down in the strangest, most sinister way. Even the most familiar faces looked odd and dead in that harsh sad light and my children's quick, happy voices slowed down and grew jagged. Raphael shut his eyes and shoved his face against my T-shirt. And then, just as suddenly as it had started, everything seemed to speed up again. The darkness loosened its grip, faces grew rosy, the light bloomed yellow, the world started turning again and everyone was laughing. We went back to the flat and heated up spaghetti hoops for tea.

We have a place of our own by the sea now and everything's changed again. Now my husband loves going there but the children - typical urban teenagers - can't bear to leave London. And a few months ago I was there all alone and there was an eclipse of the moon. Over a couple of hours it dissolved to black, before standing out in mysterious relief, like a beat-up tennis ball. And I sat on that same beach at night with just the dog for company and couldn't really believe I was the same person who'd once seen the high street under water, a car in flames or had a thumb-sucking seven year-old safe and warm in my lap.