Half-formed dreams of the family home

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Aug 03, 2007 

The house where my father grew up was a big and glamorous 1920s place in the middle of Mapperley Park in Nottingham. Though I haven't seen it for years, I remember it as white pebble-dash with black timbering, lavish proportions, bars on the windows.

It was a rich person's house. The terraced garden was all lawns and rockeries, sloping gently down to a glassy green pond. When I think of that pond, I see a heron - though whether that was because my father told me about seeing herons there or because the one time I went to the house, I actually saw one, I don't know.

My father's family had made their money in ladies underwear. The factory was a huge, dusty, gloomy place with high, dirty windows and long corridors that smelled of fabric and ash. As children we'd go there after school, racing around and giving each other rides in the huge wheeled crates that were used to transport the bobbins and fabric bundles up and down.

There was a billiard table in the boardroom and endless, dingy rooms filled with row upon row of ladies in their slippers, fags in mouths, pulling fabric through the machines. My father hated the factory and, when he finally inherited it, he quickly closed it down so he could do something else. But as a young man, living in the house in Mapperley Park, I imagine he must have had to go there with his grandfather and then his father and pretend he was interested in Vilene and Crimplene and cotton gussets.

My grandfather died long before I was born and I only know him from the pictures - a fair, floppy-haired man with a kind face. He met my grandmother when she came to the factory to demonstrate sewing machines. Her name was Ida and she must have been pretty then, though all through my childhood she wore a wig and false teeth and glasses. She liked golf and fast cars and used to tell us she was one of the first people in Nottingham to own a television.

A lot of stories went with the house in Mapperley Park. There was the time my father leaned out of his bedroom window with a pea shooter and hit a boy and had to apologise. There was the time his mother ladled a ton of sugar into his tea and made him drink it as a punishment for having a sweet tooth. And there was the [to me, awful] time he invited a little girl to tea without his mother's permission and she sent her packing even though, as the girl protested, she'd put clean knickers on.

The house was big and grand and as far as I know the family lived there though the 1920s and 1930s, possibly into the 1940s. Then at some point my grandfather died and my father's sister got married and emigrated and he and his mother moved to a smaller house nearby.

It was decades later, when I was about 13, that I finally went to the house myself - and all because a friend of my mother's, a rather chic lady in her forties, had bought it and was living there with her son. We went to visit so she and my mother could chat. All I remember is standing on that smooth perfect lawn on a very hot day while we - the son and my two younger sisters - tried to decide what we were going to "play ". And I was irritated because, at 13, I was far too old to have to "play " anything and would far rather have explored the house where my father grew up. That's when I think I remember a heron but I don't remember much else, maybe because it was all blotted out by what happened later.

My mother's friend woke one night to find a man in her room. He went on to rob her but I think she thought she was going to die. When my mother told us about it, I couldn't stop thinking about how terrified she must have been. And I think she was OK but I also think she moved soon after that. And the trouble is that story stayed with me more strongly than all the other stories I'd ever heard about the house. So in one big swoop, everything - the glamour, my grandparents, the parties, the dubonnets, the whole of my father's pea-shooter childhood - was somehow eradicated from that spot.

My father lived in lots of different houses after that - some of them with his mother, some with us and some [once my mother had left him] alone. The last house he lived in, after he and I had already been estranged for many years, I only visited twice. Once was to bring my baby son, his very first grandchild, to show him. [He wasn't pleased to see me and he didn't want to hold the baby.] And the second time, a couple of years later, was after he'd killed himself in the garage, sealing the door and turning on the engine of his Mercedes.

We went there to help sort out his things and my husband said that, as I was there, I ought to just look through the window into the garage. "Only because if you don't, you'll always be wondering. "

It was good advice and I'm pretty sure I did look through the window but I have no recollection of what I saw. Just like the heron, the inside of that garage has become an image from a dream - blurred and incoherent and quite possibly imagined.