Far off moments of connection

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Aug 11, 2007 

We all remember every house we've ever lived in, as well as the homes of neighbours, family, friends - places we've visited often or spent nights at. But what about the in-between spaces - the places you've existed in so randomly or fleetingly that they've fallen from memory, places that you wouldn't know or recognise now, even if you walked right past them, places where a trace of your bodily self, an imprint, a shadow, must (surely?) linger still, even though you yourself might have no idea of it?

I wrote some months ago about the first night I ever spent in London - eight years old, too excited to sleep - at the home of Melanie, in Bromley, Kent. All I remember of the house is the bunk bed I slept in, the car headlights slipping across the dark ceiling, the shock and drone of so much night-time traffic. But I've no idea where exactly in Bromley it was. And even if I were to go there today and happen to walk right past the very house, I still wouldn't know it. I'd raise my head and glance up at that first-floor window and that's all it would be - an ordinary first-floor window. Nothing about it would tell me that once, almost 40 years ago, I was hypnotised by the bright beams of light that came swerving through it.

This fact upsets me slightly. How can it be that our experiences leave so little trace on the fabric of the place where they happened? I don't know what I expect exactly. A fanfare? A blue plaque announcing that in 1968 a little girl once spent a night here in a bunk bed? But there's something sad about the way our bodies drift around so randomly, stopping, feeling, yet leaving nothing whatsoever in their wake.

Sometimes, when I stay a couple of nights in a hotel, even a really unremarkable one, just by the fact of sleeping there I feel a relationship is forged. And I can't help it, even though I'm very glad to go, when I pack up my things on the last day I always take a moment to glance around the room and think, "I will never again return here. " Just that thought - just the simple act of thinking it, the hard fact of it - takes my breath away. It means I can't leave the space without saying a sort of goodbye.

There's a cottage in the countryside somewhere in England - I don't even remember which county but there were blackberries and a heavy, late-August sky - that might still contain a rough oak chest of drawers where, 15 years ago, my youngest baby once slept. (We were spending the night there with friends and had no travel cot and a drawer with a fleece stuck in it did just fine.)

In that same unknown cottage there might still be a sagging brown armchair where a miniature bottle of whisky and half a pound of butter was found down the back, staining its greasy way into the cushion. But I remember nothing else of that place except for the drawer, the butter and the hopeful, happy feeling I got when I stood by the back door and waited for the kettle to boil.

I would not know that place again, just as I've no idea what the address was of the bungalow where I once curled up on a strange blue sofa for a nap while my parents talked to someone in the sitting room. I must have been three or four and the mug I drank milk from had a face on it, with a radish for a nose. I don't know if I slept or not in the end and I don't know what part of England that was. All I know is I'll never be in that room again.

But then again, life can be surprising. When I was researching my bookHome, about all the people who'd ever lived in our Victorian house in Clapham, London, I came upon something I could never have made up. In the 1940s the house had been owned by a man called Reggie - a second-hand-car-salesman-cum-landlord who was a bit of a rogue from what I'd heard. I knew that Reggie was long dead but in the end his niece Diane (who I'd traced through records) told me he had a daughter, an actress called Alexa, living in Brighton.

"I'll get her to call you, " she said. I thanked her and waited for the call but instead Diane rang straight back, sounding a bit shaken. "You won't believe this, " she said, "but Alexa says she's already met you. She says she's been to the house! "

My husband was a theatre director and it turned out that 10 years earlier Alexa had rehearsed a play for him in our sitting room. Of all the streets in Clapham and of all the houses in Lillieshall Road this was the one she'd ended up in that morning, without ever having had any idea that her father had once owned it. And had it not been for my book I don't suppose she ever would have known. The only other question is: did the house know?