A place that made me go floppy

By Julie Myerson, Financial Times

Published: Jun 16, 2007 

When I was at university, my best friend - the one with the American thrift shop jacket and the one who saw a ghost on the landing in our student house - came from a village just an hour or so away in the country. The first time I found out where she lived was when I noticed a photo in her room. "Oh, that's home," she said as I picked it up.

Home? I was gazing at what looked like an ancient, honey-coloured, sprawling pile in rolling green fields. I'd never seen such a romantic-looking place. "But it looks enormous," I said.

She laughed. "It's not that big. That photo was taken from a funny angle. It's a strange old house, actually - kind of long and spread out. But it's home and I love it. You should come and stay."

"I'd love to," I said, thinking she probably didn't mean it.

"Next weekend?"

"OK," I said, feeling more and more like Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited.

My friend was nothing like Sebastian Flyte but her home lived up to all my expectations. It wasn't huge but it was old and calm and comfortable and sat on a stream right next to the church. It had that heavy, unfussy stillness you get in buildings that go back centuries. It had two staircases, a back one and a front one that joined up somewhere on a creaky upstairs landing; a huge old white-washed sitting room; a sunny kitchen; a muddy boot room and a glorious garden full of fruit and herbs and cowslips - and a flock of speckly ducks.

"I breed them," explained my friend. She claimed to have talked her way into a university place by boasting of her duck-breeding skills and the more you knew her the more you could believe it.

I loved that house. After the shabby, uncertain chaos of student living, there was something about the air there that made you go floppy. But, for me, the most impressive thing of all was the fact that my friend had lived there all her life. So the bedroom she returned to now, at 20, was the same one she'd slept in as a baby - the same walls and floor, the same sunshine moving over the same sloping ceiling. Here was a life spent under one single roof, parents who (unlike mine) had stayed together, the shivery romance of continuity.

Over the next few years this house became my own home-from-home. Her parents' easy, warm, humorous hospitality was something I pretty much took for granted at the time but, looking back, it was generous beyond belief.

Every time I crunched up their drive - and I did more and more as we fled our dreary student lodgings at weekends - they hugged me and welcomed me and then ignored me as if I was their own.

We always did the same things: stuffed our dirty washing in the machine, had a bath in a clean bathroom, drank her father's incredibly stiff gin-and-tonics and felt like grown-ups, set the table for supper and felt like children again. It was a home where people wrote intricate and comical instructions and stuck them to the fridge, where everyone got teased and had a nickname, where it always seemed to be summer and the sky was always blue and endless much-loved cats and dogs blinked and stretched in the sunshine.

We walked those dogs up the lane and through the fields talking so hard we were soon out of breath, vigorously dissecting every aspect of our left-behind university life. We talked about philosophy, boys, Jack Kerouac, Alberto Giacometti and Iggy Pop. One memorable New Year's Eve, with no men and no party invitations, we drove up to the end of a lonely road and sat in the defiant windy darkness drinking champagne as Dexys Midnight Runners blared out of the car radio.

A few years later my friend did what I knew I'd never do. She got married from that house, her childhood home.

I shared a room with her the night before her wedding - dress hanging like a pale ghost on the wardrobe door - and the next morning I watched her leave the house with her father, him beaming and calm in his grey morning suit, her still fussing that her headdress wasn't quite right.

And what felt like far too few years after that her father suddenly died - much too young, on a hot summer's day, just when he seemed at his busiest and most energetic, just when he had a great long list of things to do ahead of him.

I drove down from London for his funeral, which went by in a blur: the stunned faces in church, her mother's typically brave good humour, everyone struggling to come to terms with the loss of someone who should have been standing there joking and pouring the drinks, not being remembered over them.

Much later in the afternoon, as I left, I drove past his new grave, by the side of the church, close to his home. It was a very beautiful place to be buried and it was also impossible to believe he was there. The sun was low in the sky and a couple of his young grandchildren - blonde, contented, oblivious - were pottering and playing on the grass. It was a scene so full of peace, yet at the same time somehow so unlikely, that it took my breath away. I drove a little further until I was out of sight, then pulled into a lay-by and, finally, cried.