Confessions of a failed lodger

By Julie Myerson, Financial Times

Published: Dec 15, 2007 

The house is only three miles from where we now live,down a long, leafy road, the end of which I've been driving past for years but have never turned down. I don't know why, as I drive back from somewhere or other, quite often with a bit of time on my hands, I don't ever take that right turn - just out of curiosity, to sit for a moment outside the house where I lived for about nine months, more than 20 years ago.

It was May 1985. Or was it June? I'd been living and working in London for almost two years. I'd had two different flat shares, one calm and comfortable, the other chaotic and cold. In those days (and even still now) I had an unshakeable optimism about my living circumstances. If I wasn't happy where I was then I always believed that the perfect room or flat or house was waiting for me somewhere. Find it and my whole life would fall into place.

So throughout that spring I pounded the London streets, following up advertisements in the Evening Standard for rooms and flat shares. I saw so many places - places I could never have lived in and others I could never afford. There were tiny garrets with nasty cookers, the fat from some long-ago person's chops congealed in the grill pan; or vast, expensive beige apartments where the carpets reeked of chemicals and the corridors echoed with emptiness. Each time I trudged back to Fulham disappointed.

So when I walked down that long leafy road and saw a white-fronted, early Victorian house with steps up to the door and a pink climbing rose winding its way around the porch, I held my breath. I rang the doorbell. Inside someone was playing the piano - a tinkle of notes, then silence, then a phrase repeated over and over, then another tinkle. Through the bay window I saw a tabby cat curled on the arm of the sofa.

"Large and airy single room with own bathroom in family house," the ad had said. In my two years in London I realised I'd never set foot in anything you could describe as a family house. The lady who answered the door was softly spoken and smiley, with dark hair pushed behind her ears. Her jumper had a stain on it. She told me her name was Kathleen and apologised for the magazines and newspapers all over the stairs, the cat basket and bicycle in the hall. She said she hoped I didn't mind cats and promised me that the piano practice only happened for an hour each day and that mostly the house was lovely and quiet. I told her I loved both cats and pianos. I could tell from the hungry way she looked at me that the room was mine if I wanted it.

And the room was perfect - a light, sunny, first-floor bedroom overlooking the garden, with wooden floorboards, kelims, minimal furniture, a table for writing, a lamp for reading, a bed for sleeping. I gazed around. "You're just the kind of person we've been looking for," Kathleen sighed. "I do hope you'll make yourself at home here." And she showed me the little bathroom and the basement kitchen with its pine table and Aga range and rows of spice jars. "If you need to cook, don't mind us. Just help yourself."

I moved in the next day and I expected to be happy but - oddly - I wasn't. I never did manage to feel at home there. Never for one moment did I relax in that house. Instead, I lived there like a small, scared bird, tiptoeing round its edges, perching briefly now and then before taking off again. I never cooked food in the friendly pine kitchen, preferring instead to buy something horrible from the 24-hour supermarket on my way home and eat it sitting on the edge of my bed, feeling I'd somehow failed as a lodger.

Why couldn't I do it? Why couldn't I relax? What was the matter with me? Kathleen loved having me. I always paid my rent on time and made no noise, creeping around like a burglar, like a fairy, intent on avoiding them all, the whole family - the lanky teenage son; the loud seven-year-old daughter; the husband I never saw but whose cedary aftershave lingered on the landing first thing in the morning; the cat who, even though my door was closed, would often manage mysteriously to be waiting on my bed when I got home. I simply wasn't happy. I played a game of loneliness in that house, a game I stood no chance of winning. And it only ended when I moved out to the bedsit in Notting Hill with the old lady screaming in the basement, which I described on this page some months ago. There, I was no better off at all but, for some reason, I relaxed.

And if it wasn't for the fact that I drive past the end of that road all the time, I would never give that house - or that family - a thought. Nine months is not a large part of a person's life and there have been so many houses since. But today I sat at those traffic lights and for some reason very nearly turned right - almost but not quite. I hesitated for a long second, my hand on the indicator. Then, just like in the old days, I made myself small and sped on silently past.