Some jarring adventures by the sea

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Nov 03, 2007 

The cottage was in a little fishing bay in Yorkshire, high up on a cobbled street that was so steep it made your legs hurt. If you stopped for a second (and we always did, moaning that we had a stitch) and turned your head, you saw a quick slice of blue sea. The air shrieked with seagulls and it smelled of salt and seaweed and, sometimes, other people's dinners. This made us hungry. Just like the seagulls, we were always hungry. We were nine years old and we liked toast and peanut butter with baked beans on top.

Inside, the cottage was just as steep. The stairs, for instance, were off the little kitchen behind a door that looked like it was going to be a normal cupboard or something but then opened on to the steepest staircase you'd ever seen. So, up and down, you had to use your hands to climb, almost as if it was a ladder.

It was my first time ever in a house by the sea. I'd been to the seaside before but only stayed in hotels. When Diana's parents invited me for a week, at first I didn't want to go. But Mum promised I would like it.

"And if you don't," she said, "what's the problem? You can always come home."

"OK," I said, knowing this wasn't true. It was miles and miles away.

Diana's parents were Uncle Ray and Auntie Jane although they weren't my real uncle and aunt or any relation to me. The evening we arrived, Uncle Ray put his arm around me. "It's a funny old place," he told me, "but we like it." After that he went inside and smoked his pipe until the air turned purple.

"Why don't you two pop down to the beach while I make supper?" said Auntie Jane.

Diana and I then went down to the beach on our own. We were only very young but we were allowed as long as we stuck together. So, while Auntie Jane began supper, we skipped off down the twisty cobbled street. Diana was showing off slightly. She told me there was an old man who had dead things in jars.

"OK," I said.

"They're disgusting," she told me. "You won't like them. Do you want to see?"

"OK," I said. I wasn't scared of dead things. At home I had kept a dead bird so long its tail fell off and little red worms wriggled out of its belly.

Soon we reached a tiny passageway. "Down here," said Diana and I followed her, both of our flip-flops flapping.

The passageway was dark. In a moment we reached a very small house that almost wasn't a house at all but one single window stuck in the wall. It was quite a big window, quite dirty all over, and next to it was a dark blue door, very scuffed.

"This is someone's house?" I said. Diana nodded. In the window were some big glass jars and in them were creatures - fish with teeth and an octopus thing and several strange animals I'd never seen before with eyes and tentacles and no bodies. They were in water and the glass jars weren't all that clean because there was green jelly stuff around the edges.

"Aren't they awful?" Diana said, even though she was hardly looking at them because she seemed so anxious and jumpy. I was about to answer when suddenly there was a sound at the door - a kind of scraping.

"Quick!" Diana grabbed my hand and we ran. We ran so hard and didn't stop till we got to the bottom of the street where the boats were and the sand began. We both flopped down on the harbour wall. "That was him," Diana told me. "He was about to come out."

"Who was?"

"The man, stupid. The one that killed the creatures. That's why we had to get away. He would've caught us and I don't know what would've happened then."

"You mean ... ?" I wondered if you could get jars big enough to put little girls in.

"What do you think I mean?" said Diana and then she was quiet for a moment before she added: "Don't worry, we don't have to go past there again. There's another way home."

"OK," I said.

And we sat there for a little while longer, me wondering why I wasn't feeling more scared and Diana picking at her toes. And then as the sky got dark and a million tiny stars began to come out, we set off back up the twisty streets. Diana was holding my wrist and the air smelled of chips and I thought I could hear the most beautiful singing.

"What star sign are you?" Diana asked me.

"I don't know," I said, wondering if the singing was real or if I was in a dream. But as we went round the corner, we saw loads of long-haired people sitting playing guitars. Some had on coats with fur on the edges and none of them had shoes and all of them had their eyes half-shut and some were singing.

"Hippies," said Diana. "Have you ever seen a hippy?"

"No," I said.

"Wave to them," she said. "It's good luck to wave to a hippy." And so I waved and some of them waved back but Diana was staring at me.

"You're so wet," she said. "I can't believe you just did that." And she tried to run off home without me but I was much faster than her and I caught up very quickly.

Excitement and Eskimo ambitions

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Jan 19, 2008 

It starts falling somewhere in the middle of French, 16 or 17 minutes before the bell goes for lunch. Slowly at first - forlorn flakes squeezed from a heavy sky - but quickly getting heavier. We all glance up from the pluperfect tense to see a startlingly perfect blind-white swirling sky.

"Settle down, girls, s'il vous plait," says Madame Appleby and when no one even looks at her, she pulls down one of the flimsy blinds. It makes no difference. The blinds are there to cut out the glare of the sun but everyone knows you can't hide snow. The light in the classroom has changed completely - a silent hushed light, full of promise. As soon as the bell goes, we all grab our coats.

Everyone says it won't settle - thin flakes dissolving the moment they touch the hard grey of the playground - and the air's wet, white and disappointing as we drift back in after lunch. Small puddles on the lino floor of the cloakroom, the gloves that people leave on the big old radiator wet-fingered from the game of trying to catch snow. So that's it. It's all over then. The teachers, clothes leaking cigarette smoke after their lunch break, look like they've won.

But towards the end of history, Jackie nudges me. The entire roof of E block has turned white. The tennis courts have disappeared. An ecstatic murmur snakes its way through the class. It's settling, it's settling! "Come on, now," frowns Mr Evans, who is halfway through writing three important points on the blackboard, "I don't know what the fuss is all about. You've all seen snow before."

And we have, it's true, we've all seen it. Never often enough or for long enough or deep enough but still we can't deny that we've seen it. So why is it that every time just feels like the first time all over again? So exciting, so unlikely. What is it about so much frozen water tipping out of a cold bleached sky that can change an entire afternoon - can transform it so completely that, even 30 or more years later, French and history long forgotten, that one afternoon lies stranded in your memory, wild and magical?

But Mr Evans doesn't think about these things. He goes on writing, squeak squeak, on the board. It's not his fault. Mr Evans is the kind of person who dresses all in brown and probably carries on thinking about the Anglo-Saxons even when he's watching television or cleaning his teeth. Mr Evans is either very old now or, more likely, dead, so he almost certainly doesn't remember the moment when Mrs Lakin, acting head of maths, pops her head around the door and tells him that in view of the bad weather the office has decided it's best we all set off quickly and quietly for home. Home! A cheer goes up.

Quickly? Yes. But quietly? No one goes quietly.

People have different arrangements. Some get the school bus, some walk. We have to wait half an hour until our mum can pick us up. Half an hour just inside the playground gates. Half an hour of shouting and screaming and chasing, drinking in the taste and smell of snow. The drive back to where we live nine long miles away in the country is achingly slow and by the time we get home it's properly dark. But you don't need much light to see that here out of town the snow is way better even than at school - properly deep, with seriously hefty drifts up against the back porch, the garden table, the back wall.

I don't know how long it takes me to build it. An hour? Two hours? My sisters don't want to play in the dark, so I do it alone. And it's hard out there with only the gleam of the snow itself to guide me but I have to get on with it right now because you never know with snow. It could all be gone by the morning.

I do it the only way I can think of - one huge snowball after another, lined up next to each other, with another on top and another and another, and more snow packed in the cracks in between, till I have three hard white walls.

The roof's more difficult - how do Eskimos do it? But in the garage I find an old bit of wood that fits perfectly on top and I cover that over with snow. Is it cheating? I don't care. I fetch a torch from the house, and a big plastic bag to sit on, and an apple. And I crawl inside.

It's amazing, so warm in there - and snug, really snug, every trace of wind gone, quiet and still. I sit on the bag and eat the apple and when I've finished doing that I just sit.

If you don't count the dens I've been making with chairs and tablecloths for as long as I can remember, this is the first real house I've built. And back then, aged 12, with snow in my hair and the taste of apple in my mouth, I proudly and nonchalantly imagine it's just the first of a long line of igloos that I'll have in my life.

So it's funny and maybe also a little bit sad to look back now, all these winters later, and realise I was wrong, that was it. It was a one-off - and maybe all the more perfect for that. The one and only igloo of my life.

A sad-grand moment that never came

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Jan 05, 2008 

In the two years since we left our old neighbourhood, we've only been back a few times. We've had supper with our good friends around the corner. We've driven through those indelibly familiar streets on our way to somewhere else. And I once parked on our old road for 10 whole minutes - paying because we don't have a permit any more - while I dropped a very overdue book back to the library.

Each time we've found ourselves nearby, we've either gone out of our way not to drive past our old house or gone out of our way to do exactly that. It all depends on how tired or happy or strong or fragile or just plain curious we're feeling. Mostly, for me, curiosity (Is the jasmine I planted surviving? Have they re-painted the front door?) wins out.

"Don't!" Chloë, aged 17, shrieked the other day when, on our way to the dentist, I tried to take a shortcut that would have taken us straight past the house. "Don't make me do it, Mum. I beg you! Please! I really don't wanna see it!" And she covered her eyes with her hands and, even though she was laughing, I knew she was also serious.

Driving through on my own, though, I've done it. I've driven past and slowed. Just so I can lift my head and gaze for a few moments at the dirty brick face of the Victorian terrace where so much of our lives was once played out. Just so I can - what?

I never stop for long. I'm too self-conscious. What if someone sees? What if someone guesses what I'm thinking? Except I don't know quite what I'm thinking. What am I thinking? I don't miss the house. I don't have regrets. I know we did the right thing in moving. Maybe I'm just looking to see whether any trace of us remains, whether even the tiniest fragment of who we were shows up somewhere in that tired old façade.

Tonight, though, we're back in the road legitimately - invited to a party by friends three doors down, people we've seen far too little of since we moved, only because we always took for granted the constant deliciousness of never having to make plans.

It's a cold clear night, a warm and colourful room, lots of people talking and laughing, lots of drink - and the view from the sitting room window still tantalisingly, achingly familiar after all this time.

"That woman over there - " a friend says to me, "do you realise she lives in the Taylors' old house, number 33?"

The Taylors were old university friends of my husband. It was pure, serendipitous coincidence that they moved into their home two streets away the exact same night we moved into ours in 1988. A hot summer's night, our children all as yet unborn, we drank champagne and shared an euphoric Indian takeaway among the packing cases. We saw a lot of the Taylors in the years that followed - our kids all played together - but when they eventually moved our contact dwindled.

Now, though, I look at the woman who's been pointed out to me and a memory bubbles up. "How funny to think that she lives there. Do you know I went into labour with Chloë in the front room of that house?"

My friend laughs. "Come on, I'll introduce you." And we go over and she tells the woman - pretty, dark-haired, sipping a cranberry cocktail - that I know the Taylors. The woman regards me politely.

"Do you know that almost 17 years ago I went into labour in your sitting room?" I tell her.

"Really?" she says without much interest.

"Yes! It was New Year's Eve and we toasted the New Year in and then we all started playing Monopoly. But I was having serious contractions so in the end we had to break off and drive to the hospital ... "

The woman is looking at me. I only intended it as an ice-breaker but something in her eyes tells me this story is a mistake. "And it was really annoying because we had Park Lane and Mayfair and we were winning ... " My voice trails off and I feel stupid. The woman gives me a brief smile then turns to talk to someone else.

On the afternoon we moved out of our house, once the removal men had taken everything and all that was left was fluff and dust and picture marks on the walls and the place was so echoey that even our own voices didn't really sound like ours anymore, on that afternoon my husband and I walked around those empty rooms one last time to say goodbye.

It ought to have been a significant moment, a sad-grand moment, a moment of closure. But it wasn't, not really. Instead what I now most remember is glancing down out of our (already old) bedroom window and seeing our children standing down in the street. And they were chatting and laughing and messing about, our youngest bouncing a basketball and having to chase after it every so often, our eldest telling the middle one something funny or rude or both, all three of them robustly oblivious to the drama of leaving.

And finally Chloë glanced up and saw me standing there and frowned. "When are we going?" she mouthed impatiently. "Now," I told her as I moved away from the old sash window for the last time. "Now."

Chilled by a new visitor

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Dec 29, 2007 

Back in those long ago days when I lived from bedsit to bedsit, I used to offer myself up as a house-sitter or cat-sitter or anything-sitter. I was very happy to drop everything just to live briefly in a place with a hot bath and a working TV.

There was a lady with one fat cat and an apartment so spacious that you had to walk miles just to locate him. Then there was the young woman - a friend of a friend of a friend - who I'd never even met but whose two tetchy Siamese I sometimes guarded while she flew all over the world with various men.

And then there was the little terraced house where I went one freezing winter week because the owners were escaping somewhere hot and had no one to feed their little black cat. I knew these people slightly. The man was called Roger and I was friends with his sister. His wife was expecting a baby in the spring and this was her last chance to fly. They'd been thinking they'd have to put the cat in a cattery, so were overjoyed when they heard I was free.

As they showed me round, they apologised for the mess, the lack of food in the cupboards, the fact that the handle came off when you turned on the shower. They showed me what to do when the heating went on the blink. "Sometimes it just clicks off for no reason," Roger explained and he showed me how to click it back on again. They kept on apologising but I just laughed. They hadn't seen my bedsit. I moved in on December 27 for seven days.

That week was cold - so bitterly, unrelentingly cold that everyone said it couldn't possibly snow but they were wrong. On the 29th the sky turned blank and snow poured out of it. It fell so thick and fast through the day and the night that by the morning of 30th you couldn't venture up the street without rubber boots on.

I didn't mind. I had no plans, no parties to go to. I watched my way through Roger and his wife's video collection and, snuggled up on the sofa with the cat, whose name was Shadow, I was perfectly happy - until the heating turned itself off.

I didn't notice at first. But when I started to shiver and touched the fast cooling radiator, I went upstairs to where the controls were and clicked the dial that Roger had showed me. Click-click. Nothing. The boiler didn't jump into life. Roger had said that sometimes it could be a bit temperamental, so I decided to go down and make a cup of tea and try again in 10 minutes.

It was very cold. The kitchen was so cold. Shadow wandered in after me, demanding food and even though it wasn't her supper time I gave her some. She crunched it gratefully. Outside, the little light that had pushed its way between the clouds that morning was receding under a veil of snow - one flake then another drifting down, thinly at first then harder.

I tried the boiler again. Click-click. Still nothing. "Oh well," I thought. "I'll just have to hope it starts up on its own." Roger had said this sometimes happened. I fetched a blanket and Shadow and I curled up and watched The Misfits.

By 11 o'clock, nothing had happened and the place was freezing and I'd lost count of how many times I'd clicked the dial. I did have a number for Roger and his wife's hotel. But, even if I called them, what could they do? I decided to leave them in peace and maybe phone someone in the morning.

By the time Shadow and I went to bed it was so cold I could see my breath. But I filled two hot water bottles and, with snow still whirling in the black night sky outside, I fell asleep.

I don't know what time it was that he woke me. Certainly it was the raw black middle of the night and I'd been asleep for some time. All I remember is opening my eyes as a small boy appeared around the edge of the door and stood staring at me.

I gasped. I pulled myself up in bed. I made a noise; I don't know what, half a shout, half a moan. Shadow, who was sleeping on my legs, jumped about 3ft in the air. I snapped on the bedside light. He was there for a single second more and then he was gone. But it was long enough to remember him clearly - six or seven years old, skinny, longish hair, grey ragged clothes, a look of such misery on his face. But, oddly, I didn't feel sorry for him. He knew that he had frightened me.

My teeth were banging. I turned on the radio and kept it on all night. I kept the light and the landing light on as well. And the next night I did the same.

In the morning, the sun was shining and the snow was melting and - of course - the heating was working. I never said anything to Roger and his wife. They live there still. And 10 years later that little boy reappeared in my first novel,Sleepwalking.

Waiting for real life to start?

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Jan 12, 2008 

He lived in the flat above a friend of mine, 20 or more years ago. It was a block of serviced flats in South Kensington, London, one of those lonely, colourless buildings with a maroon-suited man on the desk, a cold lump of sculpture in the lobby and a lift which whisked you soundlessly from floor to floor.

It wasn't the kind of place where real people lived and my friend, who was beginning to be a successful documentary maker but really only wanted to get married and have a load of babies, swore she wasn't staying long. But she did stay, because it was that kind of place: a place where people accidentally spent years waiting for their real lives to start. Some died waiting. One evening as we ate supper we both watched through the window as a black van drew up, collected a human shaped, zipped-up bag, then drove away again. It was hard to carry on with our paella after that.

Actually, nothing in that place seemed to thrive. Down in the vast airless lobby, yuccas went brown and crisp at the edges, placed too close to shrill, hot lights. My friend complained that the service charges were exorbitant and she really resented being forced to shell out for a new lobby carpet before the old one had begun to wear out. I asked why she didn't move somewhere cheaper and more normal - a one-bedroom flat in a regular house, for instance. "That's the trouble," she sighed, "you get used to someone always on the desk. It's just too convenient here."

But wasn't it lonely? She didn't know a soul in the building, after all. "The guys on the desk are very nice," she said. I told her that was only because they didn't actually live there; you could sense the chaos and warmth of real family life lurking beneath their uniforms. "Anyway," said my friend, "just the other day I had quite a long chat with Tony from upstairs. He's quite interesting, actually."

Tony. So that was his name. The man from the flat above whom I'd sometimes smiled at in the lift. His hair was grey but his face was young. He couldn't be more than 30. "He's a rare-book dealer," my friend said. "I think he deals from his flat. I hear his television a lot. I swear he watches until two or three in the morning."

My friend kept on trying to invite Tony round for a drink after that but he was always busy, or else away on business, or his mother was coming round. Finally, she told me he'd invited us for dinner. "Us?"

"He says he's seen you lots of times around the place. Anyway, you've got to come; it would be way too strange to go on my own."

It was pretty strange with two of us as well. We half-expected Tony to have invited other people but he hadn't. It was just us. We arrived at 8pm and he asked if we'd like to see round his flat. We said yes, partly out of politeness and partly out of genuine curiosity. It was a slightly bigger version of my friend's flat below but it felt smaller because it was filled with so much sombre, dark antique furniture. And books. Piles and piles of them. "They're great company," he said and I could tell he was only half joking.

In the sitting room, dinner lay under a pink cloth. "I hope you're OK with poached salmon," Tony said as he eased the cork out of a bottle of champagne, "only my lady thought that, given the weather, it would be all right to do something cold."

Lady? Tony explained that he had a woman who came in at 8am to do his breakfast, then went away and returned to make dinner. I stared. This man was young. Could he really not get his own breakfast? Tony tried to laugh. "I do sometimes squeeze myself some fresh orange," he said. "But I don't like rinsing the juicer afterwards. It's so sticky."

Over dinner Tony told us about his mother, who was wheelchair-bound and lived around the corner, about his early childhood in Malaysia, about his father, who had never liked him much. He said he would love to find a nice woman and settle down and have a family but he didn't see it happening any time soon. He had his mother to think of, for a start.

"I think he's gay," my friend whispered to me after we'd finally said goodnight and were in the lift.

"Or lonely," I said and then we burst out laughing all over again about the sticky orange juicer he was incapable of rinsing.

I met Tony once more after that. I think my friend had a drinks party and Tony's mother had recently died and he and I stood in a corner and argued about some TV programme. And it was a couple of years after that - after my friend had married her farmer and moved out of London - that we heard the shocking news. One night Tony had drunk a bottle of Scotch and gone up on to the roof of the building and jumped.

His body had been found in the morning by the poor man on the desk. No one had a clue why he'd done it. He left no note. But maybe only because there was no one to write one to.

The joy and sorrow of innocent days

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Nov 24, 2007 

When I was five, I loved the boy who lived next door. He was the same age and same shape as me - quick and naughty and fidgety. I don't know what it was about him but every time I saw him I just wanted to sigh with pleasure as something clicked into place.

His house was to the left of ours - similar but bigger - and the road was sunny and calm and on Sundays the gutters turned soapy as all the dads washed their cars. Our mums were friends and so, probably, were our dads and he had a baby brother and I had two baby sisters but we lived our whole lives in the sandpit, white sand running through our fingers and getting in our shoes.

Though he didn't look it, my friend was ill and so was his brother. They had the same illness. I didn't know what. All I knew was it wasn't the same as, for instance, when my sisters and I all had the measles at Christmas and had to stay in our dressing gowns for lunch. And it wasn't the same as the time that mum took me to see Dr Jolly, who lived across the road, because a wasp had stung my finger.

Actually, the way in which he was ill didn't really matter because it never showed. He was fun. We had fun. We pretended to be Indians and ran around both gardens - his and mine. We ran up and down the stairs in both our houses, shouting so loudly that our mums shouted back at us. One time, when we were playing in his house, he pointed to a glass door. "Lean against it," he commanded and I did but there was no glass in it and I fell and banged my head. He thought it was very funny and, once I'd finished crying, so did I.

He had no pets (or was there a cat?) but we had two yellow canaries, Hickory and Tick-Tock. Hickory was the boy and Tick-Tock was the girl. One day Hickory just fell off his perch and died. I don't know why. We were so sad and so was Tick-Tock. Mum said we should all hold hands and walk round slowly in a circle and sing All Things Bright and Beautiful, so we did.

We buried Hickory in the garden, under the rose bushes where my sister once climbed in wearing just a nappy and had to have all the prickles pulled out of her bottom. It was a bad place to fall but a good place to be buried. When my friend and I were in the sandpit, we could look up and see Hickory's little wooden cross made of two ice lolly sticks stuck together.

Not long after we buried Hickory, my friend's baby brother also died. It was odd to have him die when, just a few days before, we'd seen him being held by his mum and waving to us from an upstairs window.

He was too small to wave by himself so she helped him, holding his little hand and making it go up and down. We waved back - hopping and jumping in the sandpit - and he laughed and he didn't look at all like he was about to die. But then Hickory hadn't either. Just like with Hickory, we sang All Things Bright and Beautiful, only this time our mums cried.

My friend and I carried on playing in the sandpit. "Is your brother in heaven?" I asked him. He didn't look at me. He was concentrating on making a channel between two humps of sand. "He's at peace," he said.

I told him we might get a new canary. "Good," he said.

A couple of years later we moved house and I don't know if our mums kept in touch or what but I don't remember seeing him after that. I don't remember thinking about him either, though I must have. I did see him once, years later, when we were both about 13, but I hated boys by then and he was shy and wouldn't look at me. He said he was going to be an ornithologist.

"What's that?"

"Someone who likes birds - the feathered kind."

When I was researching my book, I revisited that house I'd lived in when I was five. The elderly man who lived there told me my friend's parents were still, 40 years on, in the house next door. "But both boys died," he said.

"Both? Are you sure?"

"Yes, oh yes. One as a baby, the other as a teenager. Cystic fibrosis - a terrible thing. Very sad for the parents."

I think of my friend quite often these days - very often actually, considering how long ago I knew him and how little claim I would have had on the person he might have grown into. It's the quick, clean shape of him that I remember - a flash of blond hair hurtling down the lawn and the frowny set of his jaw when he thought hard about something.

And I remember the doctor coming round and giving us both our polio boosters - a white lump of sugar with sour stuff on it - and us crunching it in our teeth and then racing round the garden, laughing, to get rid of the taste, while the soon-to-be-dead baby brother waved and smiled at the window.

Alive with an air of anticipation

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Dec 01, 2007 

Houses that are expecting babies have a whole different shape and texture.

When I was three-and-a-half and my sister was two and our mother was pregnant again, I don't remember understanding a thing of what was about to happen but I can still very sharply recall the ways in which our home felt different.

Strange new objects appeared in the bathroom. There was the translucent, scuffed baby bath, taken out of the cupboard again - a thing of fascination for my sister and me, mainly because we weren't allowed to get into it. And then all the magic of nappies. Was there a changing table or were nappies changed on the bed? And, anyway, wasn't my middle sister still wearing them? I don't know. But I remember the almost edible sweetness of Johnson's baby powder, which never really smelled of babies but entirely of mummies - my mummy, our mummy, who was about to be someone else's mummy too.

Could it be true? I didn't like to think about it too much. Instead, I remember twisting the baby powder cap to make the little holes appear and disappear - open and shut, open and shut - until I was told to stop.

The baby wasn't born yet but our house changed in other ways too. Downstairs it was almost Christmas and people in perfume-scented coats came and went, laughing and whispering and bringing presents for the baby. (What baby? Where?) We had a purple tinsel tree and shiny metallic baubles hung in the window and we wore our dressing gowns buttoned up to our chins after our bath and tried to be as quiet as possible - except it wasn't possible and we ran around giggling and shouting out silly words. "Sshhhh," everyone said to us, which just made us laugh louder.

And I don't remember Mummy's big tummy at all but I do know there was a special, cold and bright early morning when my sister and I were in our nighties bouncing on our beds - up and down, up and down, out of breath - and in came our father in his pyjamas, his shape suddenly huge in our doorway, telling us we had a new sister. Where, where?

That morning, after our baby sister was born, I know we crept into our parents' bedroom to see her. I remember doing it. I remember the long walk along the landing and that it was dark and warm in there and there was a lovely big clown toy that someone had brought - she couldn't possibly play with it, so could we have it? - and a Teasmade machine by our parents' bed with steam coming out of it. There was the grown-up smell of Typhoo tea and our lovely mum with her pink cheeks and long hair. I remember nothing at all about the baby but the room and its secretive, magical atmosphere is lodged for ever in my mind.

When I was expecting our first child, there were two houses. First, there was the little house where he was conceived, the early summer's evening when the air fizzed with this dangerously wild and wonderful idea. To make a baby! In the downstairs of that same house was the blond pine hall where I walked in after the pregnancy test and stood, exactly halfway between the uncarpeted stairs and the sofa, to tell my husband the result. But I couldn't get the words out fast enough before I fell into his arms. (Funny that I remember that embrace in so much greater detail than I remember the act of conception.)

And then there was the second house, the house we bought and moved into when I was barely four months pregnant, the house I never spent a second in without there being two of me, a double self, my child and me. I loved that house - the first house I'd ever owned - and I haunted it at night. I was its happy, restless ghost. All those nights I couldn't sleep for excitement and for the nameless, sexless child turning and stretching inside me, I'd get up and pull on something that would barely cover my shape and wander round and round those endless, lovely rooms, the house fitting itself more and more snugly around me.

Downstairs in the dark, cold kitchen I'd watch the kettle come to a slow boil for camomile tea. Upstairs I'd stand exhausted in the bathroom and paint my 10 shaky fingernails crimson. (I couldn't reach my toes.) And sometimes I'd take the 20 paces into the little room off the landing that we'd painted banana yellow and stand and stare awhile at the forlorn little folded piles of clothes, the white cellular blankets, the mysterious piles of muslin cloths that people had assured us we'd eventually need.

The house was waiting for the baby and so was I. It was empty and I was full to bursting. And so we were strangely comfortable companions in those long ago, dead-of-night hours, both of us waiting for that impossible-to-imagine moment when our boy's loud cries would fill those rooms and we'd both turn into something else - me into a mother and the house into our baby's first home.

The look in Camille's eyes haunts me

By Julie Myerson, Financial Times

Published: Jan 26, 2008 

The summer I was 16 - that long, parched, UK heatwave of 1976 - we were living in a house in the middle of town; the one with the stained glass windows, Hammer Horror turrets and monkey puzzle tree in the garden.

It was the house next door to the red-haired woman who made the best chocolate ice-cream and had a ghost called Lily. The house where the old lady opposite used to enjoy seeing our bare feet appearing above the top of the wall when we were turning cartwheels on the lawn. It was the house where I first read Wuthering Heights and listened to Abba's "Dancing Queen" and painted my toe-nails pearly pink. It was the house where I got the letter saying my father didn't want to see me any more. It was also the house where I (finally!) got kissed by a boy.

The idea that so much can happen to a person in such a short space of time in one single small house still amazes me. I can't think of any other place where so many aspects of my self have altered and expanded so quickly. And sometimes even now, deep in some adult task or other that must be done, I'll have to jerk myself out of a dream that's still somehow a dream of that particular house. Why? Has this always happened or did it start just recently? Is it hormonal? Is it seasonal? Or is it just the years gathering a kind of forlorn pace and, in their razzed-up confusion, flinging me straight back to one single place? I don't know. I can't answer these questions. I'm not sure I even want to.

That summer 30-odd years ago we had a French au pair to look after us. Camille was 19 and blonde but she wasn't at all how that makes her sound. She wore shirts and jeans, sensible brown leather shoes and no make-up but underneath her glasses she was beautiful in the Frenchest way. She also painted her short, square fingernails the brightest, chicest crimson I'd ever seen. I took immediate note of this, quickly ditching my pale pink polish for pillar-box red.

I liked Camille but I couldn't see why we needed an au pair. I wasn't a child, after all. Our mum said she wasn't really there to look after us - more to entertain and keep order. In fact what she mostly did was organise endless card games - Rummy and Black Jack and Switch. I can still see her long, tanned French fingers holding a fan of those cards, her nails an exact and satisfying match for the hearts and diamonds.

Camille used no deodorant and always smelled faintly of sweat. But it wasn't the cheesy, obnoxious smell of the school gym changing rooms. More a faint, careless whiff, which even back then we recognised as sex. In her room she had a bottle of dry shampoo that she used between washes. She also had a boyfriend who had followed her over from France and who spent hours sitting on the wall across the road waiting for us to release her for the evening. As soon as our mum understood this, she asked him in. From faraway he'd looked nice but up close he was probably the dishiest man we'd ever seen apart from in films. Once again my estimation of Camille just soared.

All through that long, hot summer we played with Camille. Sometimes we'd play cards; other times lazy, half-hearted tennis in the park with the boyfriend watching from a wistful distance because Camille had firmly explained that she was working. Sometimes in their company I felt like exactly who I most wanted to be: a young woman, mysterious and almost pretty. Someone who didn't necessarily look as if she'd never been kissed. Other times I reverted to exactly what I was: the quite obviously inexperienced oldest of three girls, who behaved pretty badly when she didn't get her own way.

Two particular memories still shame me - memories that in my mind are irrevocably tied to that action-packed house. Sometimes instead of cards we played Ludo and one time, on the verge of losing to my youngest sister, I tipped the board over in one quick, sulky, impetuous movement, ending the game. The look in Camille's eyes - utterly unsurprised recognition of my lack of maturity - still shakes me now.

Then, later that summer, I got a cold, a really bad, feverish summer cold. I was in bed coughing and coughing when Mum brought me some hot milk and honey and ordered me to drink it. I had always loathed this drink so, once she'd gone downstairs, I opened my bedroom window and poured it out, completely forgetting that Camille was in the room below. She would have seen the hot stream of liquid go past. She would have quickly (and contemptuously) worked out who had poured it.

She and my mother laughed about it later but in my dark little heart I knew it was all over. Camille left when the summer ended and we all hugged and she promised to write. I think she did write and so, I think, did we. There might even have been another summer when she came over and stayed briefly as our guest. But in my dreams of that house that is not what has stuck. All I see, replaying over and over in slow motion, are the Ludo board, pieces flying. And a stream of hot, sweet, milky liquid flowing through the balmy night air.

julie.myerson.com

How will it feel to look at them now?

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Dec 08, 2007 

A grim and devastating story consumed the UK media last month. In a small red-brick house in Margate, on the south-east Kent coast, the remains of two long-missing teenage girls were discovered buried in shallow graves.

Fifteen-year-old Vicky Hamilton and 18-year-old Dinah McNicol went missing - at different times and in different places - in 1991. For 16 long years their families were forced to live in darkness, with no idea of what happened to them or where they were.

And now they know. It's hard to imagine how it feels to take comfort from this news but the families have said they have. Meanwhile, in the papers and on television, Vicky and Dinah's last smiles beam out at us - amused, feisty, optimistic. And a man who lived in the house briefly in 1991 has been charged with murder.

There are two parts to this terrible story. First, and hardest to think about, is the girls. We know little but imagination fills the gaps with distressing efficiency. And then there's the house. Though it's the girls and their families that you shudder for, it's still hard not to think too of the ordinary and innocent family who have lived there all these long years - 12 years of happy family life in what they imagined was an ordinary happy home. And then the police come to their door and, in the space of a night and a day, it's all over. They're sent away, their home broken up, literally, with diggers and drills.

They can never live there again and would not want to. And, though their trauma and disruption is nothing compared with what Vicky and Dinah's families have suffered, still you can't help wondering about the long shadow cast over their whole lives by these events. Because nothing can ever be the same again. The photo albums crammed with snapshots of birthdays and Christmases in this house - how will it feel to look at them now? And it's not just the pictures but the memories too. Not only has this family's present and future been crashed into but its past is also somehow indelibly stained by these shocking discoveries.

The pictures on the TV and in the newspapers drew us in, whether we wanted to be drawn or not - the neat paved back garden with its ordinary wooden shed and fan-shaped trellis on the wall, the patio dug up and reduced to mud, the sinister blue tent a reminder of precisely why. There, peeping happily over the plain wooden fence, was next door's spiky little yucca and, on the other neighbour's side, some mature shrubs and a small greenhouse, a honeysuckle twining itself over the fence.

Looking at these spaces, I thought of ordinary fun - barbecues in the summer, laughter and paddling pools, friends and grandparents, kids running in and out with crisps and drinks. And then the bleak routine of winter - the chairs brought inside, the leaves swept, root-bound plants in plastic pots left to droop and die, the cold back garden view cheered up only by the approach of Christmas and, ultimately, spring. And all this time two bodies were lying there just beneath the concrete surface, waiting to be found.

The father of one of the girls visited the house - a frail old man with a corduroy winter hat on, a man who told the waiting press he would do his crying later, on his own. The photo of him, in dignified profile, anorak on and scarf tightly wound, walking to the house, was hard to look at. On TV, trembling slightly, he was so anxious to be polite to the reporters. Gently, the police officer led him away. It was heartbreaking.

And part of me thought: "Why go there. Why put yourself through that? What on earth's to be gained when your child's body's already been removed and this grim and muddy site can give you nothing but pain?" But another part of me knew very well why he would go. Everything and nothing's to be gained and certainly nothing can be changed. And yet the need of a parent to confront, to see, to know, to accompany their child even on this most brutal of journeys, is paramount. The reason Dinah's father went, the reason I would go, is that it simply isn't possible not to.

In 1991, when those young girls went missing, my own daughter had just been born - a round, blonde baby with the greyest eyes I'd ever seen. I remember the easy euphoria of her birth - second child, faster labour - and the warm safety of that first winter, her first winter, the far off impossibility of the idea that she would ever have to leave my arms.

Now, at almost 17, she's ready for the world. The only fights we have are about how late it's safe for her to come home at night. Some days now I feel very old and other days I feel young and small, as if I've barely begun. I looked at that sad, dug-up garden on the news and I wondered what would happen to it. And then I thought about that bereft old man struggling to put his loss to rest and I didn't know what I felt any more. Confusion, anxiety, humility?

Laughing all the way to the South Bank

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Mar 08, 2008 

The first time I ever went to London's National Theatre, it was just for a drink. In London for the weekend, I was taken by a boyfriend - a man whose glamour only seemed enhanced by the fact that he knew his way around the South Bank. As we sipped vodka on those vast terraces overlooking the muddy Thames, I sensed that I was in a mammoth place, a mysterious, unfathomable complex. A place I would never find my way around - or even, possibly, out of.

The second time I went there was for a job interview. I got the job - my first job. And though I would never have predicted it, over the next few years, the "mammoth place" became as comfortable and easy to navigate as any home I'd ever had. In some ways, more so.

Because, while I nomaded my way around a series of not very enticing London flats and bedsits (as described so often in these pages), I came to regard this huge, concrete piece of modernist architecture as the one reliable thing in my life: my comfort, my rock. First, it was big and exciting and crammed with clever, creative people. I was only a secretary in the press office but it seemed to me that I suddenly had unfettered access to some of the most fascinating souls in the world.

And then, there was always something going on. Always! This was no nine to five place. All day the building buzzed with energy and activity but at night - just as most of my friends who worked in offices were trudging off home - the main action here was just getting going. The shows. The whole reason we were there in the first place.

I saw them all, some of them several times over. I loved them all, too. I was in love with theatre and when I watched those shows, everything made sense and, almost for the first time in my life, I felt as if I was really part of something. It was very hard, some nights, to find any motivation at all to go back to my bedsit. If I'd been allowed to sleep the night there, I definitely would have.

Because this place, this beautiful, gracious, concrete building - its public spaces somehow magically designed to spring to life as people flowed in - had everything a home could possibly need. There was food - the subsidised canteen stayed open all day and evening. And warmth - it was always warm. Often in the winter months, living in bedsits without central heating, I rushed to my office early, an hour or so before everyone else came in, just to warm up.

But it wasn't just about food and warmth. After a few months I realised I was getting to know my way around this place which only a year ago I'd found so daunting. One of the benefits of being in the press office was that we, probably more than almost anyone else, had to liaise with every single department. My favourite task - in those days before e-mail - was to be asked to deliver a memo. Fifteen or sometimes 20 copies (laboriously typed, then photocopied by me) would need to be distributed into pigeon holes around the building.

It could take half an hour. Casting, directors' office, stage door, post room, education, marketing. And then the fun ones: rehearsal rooms, costumes, wigs and - best of all - right on down to props, an enormous warehouse-type space in the building's heart where sets were built and (or so it seemed to me then) bearded men in overalls just sat around next to piles of Roman helmets, making jokes and drinking tea.

The only space that always eluded me, the only place I always got lost, were the dressing rooms. So many of them, and so confusingly numbered. Long lino corridors where you could take a fatal wrong turn and find yourself right back where you started. Once, attempting to lead the actress Julie Walters to a dressing room where she was to be interviewed by a journalist over a large plate of sandwiches, I lost my nerve and tripped, throwing the entire plate over the floor.

Her response - "Oh never mind, let's pick them up, they're never going to know" (laughing and grabbing bits of buttered bread and cramming the fillings back in as quickly as she could) - was every bit as generous and kind as my experience of the whole building. Everywhere you went, people helped you, inspired you, saved your bacon. I had never been so at home and happy in a place.

Meanwhile, though, there was something else. I loved the theatre and everything about it but, deep down, I really wanted to be a writer. And here, finally, wondrously, I had access to an electric typewriter. So on those early freezing mornings, I didn't just come in to warm up, but to write. Short stories. Poems. The beginning of what might one day be a novel.

It never once occurred to me that this might be a strange thing to do. Here I was in a place where people didn't just talk about art, they got on and did it. And here was I, doing the same. Looking back, it was that unequivocal sense that I had as much right as anyone else, that deep excitement, that the building conveyed to me. No place could have been more homely and inspiring to a 23-year-old would-be writer, and I feel today that I owe it a large debt of gratitude. Not to mention a few typewriter ribbons.

There's a message in the bottle

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Feb 23, 2008 

His house was a small one, right next door to ours. While ours was big and Victorian and set back from the road, his was a bungalow with just a small amount of front garden, gravelled over to make a space to park just one car. I remember the parking space especially because, a while before the man moved in, my younger sister found a three-penny piece on the pavement and picked it up and placed it on this car. And a really cross woman with fair hair and glasses immediately came storming out of the house and said, "What the hell do you think you're doing?" and we ran away, literally trembling.

Looking back, though, I wonder about this memory. First, I say a three-penny piece but it could in fact have been a 1p or 2p piece. I'm not sure how old we were at the time - 10 and eight? 12 and 10? - and whether this was before or after decimalisation. And, second, who exactly was the woman?

If she was our neighbour, then we must surely have known her. My parents must have known her. And if we knew her, then why would she come storming out like that? Why would she be so furious with us? In our village, the grown-ups were all good friends. Sometimes they went to the pub together and sometimes they had affairs or ran off with each other's wives - but that's another story and not the one I'm telling here.

I don't really wonder about why my sister put the coin on the car, though. That's simple. In those days, stuff like that was just what we did. At a loose end all summer long, we wandered the village in shorts and T-shirts and flip-flops, looking out for adventure, just waiting for something to happen. And if you saw something lying there, something that might belong to someone else, you picked it up and put it where they might find it. And, having found this coin glinting in front of our neighbour's house, well, the car seemed as good a place as any to put it.

She didn't leave it there. She only placed it for a quick second, the coin on the bonnet, her plump, little-girl fingers still hovering over it.

And we probably did giggle for a moment. But not because we meant any harm. Just - well, because. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" Did she really swear at us or have I made that bit up?

Fury was all around us in that place. There was the farmer who waved a stick at us when he saw us on his land. The man in the tractor who yelled when we strayed off the footpath. The lady at the post office who was visibly annoyed when we counted out the candy shrimps and penny chews we bought with our pocket money, laboriously, by hand.

The bungalow was ugly and squat with a closed-up face, its blinds always drawn, its door shabby and in need of a lick of paint. But we didn't think this then. This is the adult me, looking back.

I don't know when the man moved in. It's possible, now I think of it, that he had something to do with the angry woman. Maybe they lived there together and then got divorced and he ended up there alone? Certainly I remember him as a single kind of man - grey-haired, balding, morose. I recall his name, too, but because of what happened to him I'm not going to write it here.

I remember going in the house once. He invited us. I remember his kitchen - some yellowish paper stuck to the cupboards, a lonely single man's sink with washing up piled in it. I remember standing there and having the feeling, as I glanced back at our big, warm, safe house, that I always got when I saw my own home from a strange new angle: unnerved, disorientated, swervy.

In my memory, I feel that the man offered us a drink of milk or juice or something and in my memory I see him drinking whisky. I see him chatting to us and either pouring it and drinking it in front of us or else I remember the familiar detritus of a whisky drinker. The bottle on the table, the empty glass from the night before.

But even now I'm doubting this memory. Because I know my own father's drink was whisky. And because I know he was weaving in and out of its clutches when, so many years after all this, he managed to kill himself. That could well be why I'm now conjuring it as the drink of this poor man.

Sitting here, trying to write the truth is difficult. Again and again I slip back into a gulf that contains nothing but the car, the coin, my giggling little sister and the angry lady. A summer's day long ago - long before the man even moved in, maybe?

I could tell you that the grey-haired man eventually shot himself and that I clearly remember the day it happened. But I'm not sure that would be true. I think it would be a lie. I know that he did - because I was told, because the fact is in my head - but I remember nothing really except what I've written here.

A talk from a tentative teenager

A talk from a tentative teenager

By Julie Myerson
Published: Mar 22, 2008 

I haven't lived there in more than 25 years - even my mum finally moved away and left the area. These days the only time I ever go there is as someone else: the local girl who grew up to be an author; the woman who only returns to her home town these days to read from a new novel, discuss her work, answer questions. The journey from London lasts two hours. In the old days I scrimped and scrounged to buy my train ticket. These days everything is paid for by my publisher.

And it ought to feel - what? - glamorous, coming back like this? It ought to feel like I'm the person who in the end did exactly what she always said she'd do - write for a living; a lap of honour. Why, then, does returning here always turn me back into that tentative teenager, on her reluctant way home, yanking her bag off the dull dirty train at Midland Station and setting off to walk into town?

Into town. My home town. These days you can get a tram straight into the city centre - a gleaming, European kind of experience - but I don't do that. I still do the walk, unchanged in more than 25 years - over the bridge, passing the slippery grey canal, through streets that float with litter and pigeons, and down, down the walkway into the Broadmarsh Centre. Grubby, tiled, desolate. A lone, white-faced boy on a bicycle barely bothering to swerve around you.

And then, up in the shopping centre, sudden, desperate fluorescent lighting and harsh music. Boys in red paper hats forcing passers-by to try some sort of food. A sausage slice. A corner of cracker. A promotion for this or that. Moving on, past the man asleep against the wall, past the people in purple collecting for charity, the huddled office workers eating pork pies out of paper bags in their lunch hour.

In the Market Square - the square where I'd come alive, meeting my first love by the big stone lions - only the tram lines are new. The Bell Pub's still there. Girls still dress in impossible clothes, white cotton flapping against blue legs in the freezing wind. And Smithy Row, where I'd go with Mum to buy meat from Burton's - breathing in the gamey smell of those meat counters, the sad, open-mouthed fish, the blocks of yellow cheese, men in their white coats, cheeks dark from the refrigerated air - is now just clothes shops such as French Connection and Karen Millen.

Across the road, though, Debenham's is still there. "I was 15," I tell my audience at the library, "And I had a Saturday job over there at Debenham's. I was a floater - hosiery one week, ladies' separates the next. On my tea-break in the canteen I gobbled novels - Graham Greene, Wilkie Collins, Daphne du Maurier. And at lunch I came over here to the library and consulted The Writer's and Artist's Yearbook, looking for an agent for when I became a proper writer myself."

A flicker of laughter here.

"Then one day, sick of floating around Debenham's, I asked if there was a job here at the library. And there was - a man called Mr Vinnicombe took me on."

"Oh, but he only just retired last year!" gasps the lady who organised the event.

"Well, he gave me a job and I loved it. Working here among the books, stamping and issuing and re-shelving. And in the lunch hour I'd sit upstairs and write short stories, poetry, anything. And it was funny, because no one in our family was a writer. We didn't know any writers. But if someone had come up to me then, at 15 or 16, and told me that one day in the far distant future I'd be sitting right here reading from and talking about my 7th novel, I wouldn't have been even slightly surprised. It was exactly what I expected, what I knew would happen. I was incredibly precocious, you see. My self-belief was unshakeable!" More laughter.

I tell them all of this. I tell it as a story - a true tale both for and against myself. The dreamy, precocious girl who wanted to write. And the more I tell it the less I understand it, the less likely it seems. Is it really possible, the 15-year-old in me wonders, that all of this really did happen? Did I actually get exactly what I'd dreamed of? And if I did, then what's happened to all my tender astonishment? Why don't I feel it more now? Why do I still return to this strange, unfamiliar city feeling like a fugitive, a nobody, a pretender?

After the reading, a woman comes up to me. "There was something about you in the Evening Post," she says, "A few years back. Pictures of you when you were young. Something about haunted Nottingham."

"Mmm," I say, not really remembering. Not that she requires an answer. She just needed to say it.

An elderly man presses an envelope into my hands. "A short story I wrote," he whispers, "Have a look at it for me, will you?" And he's gone before I can tell him I just don't have time to read manuscripts.

I walk back through the city, catch the 4.07 back to London. The train's slow and I'm tired. The landscape that speeds past the window turns mauve then grey, then black. Horizontal streaks of rain. Next to me a young man sits for the whole journey, hands on lap, staring straight ahead. I find myself making up stories about what he might be thinking.

Never got used to living in awe of Alice

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Feb 16, 2008 

The city where I went to university was built on tobacco and slave trade wealth. Vast, lavish and crumbling, it teetered on the edge of a gorge, its curlicued terraces spilling down towards the river and the docks.

Though some insisted that street names such as Whiteladies Road and Black Boy Hill had nothing to do with the slave trade, still just their very existence constantly brought Bristol's queasy and terrifying history to mind. Some days the angles of the buildings didn't look quite right. Other days I'd walk down the street in bright sunshine and be sure I heard voices.

I still don't quite know why so many of those beautiful 18th-century terraces were student houses but they were. And one night I went to a party in what was possibly the coolest in the entire city - a monstrous, end of terrace crammed with bicycles and boys and with a view straight out over the twinkling gorge - and I thought: "This is it. This is where I want to live." A few months later, having become friendly with the girl upstairs, I moved in.

My ground-floor room was long and thin and at the bitter end of the wide, draughty hallway where bicycles were propped and muddy circulars lay an inch thick on the tiled floor. It had tall, double doors that opened on to a stone balcony and when I lay on my puny little mattress on the floor - the decorative 18th-century ceiling miles above my head - the wind whistled under both doors and past my ears.

A rugby player, who was OK but never said a word to me, had the bigger room next door. And next to that was the kitchen - a vast, warm mess of a room where someone was always making tea or toast or rolling a joint. No one ever washed up. On the big old pine table, among the open jars of peanut butter and marmite, the bread crumbs and torn up bits of Rizla were simply added to, rather than wiped away.

Upstairs were two more bedrooms with two more people in them - one of them the glamorous girl who was my friend. Then you went up another flight of stairs and there were three more smaller bedrooms containing three more people. Down in the basement were two post graduates who we didn't see much of. They were old enough not to need to hang out with us but young enough not to bother to complain about all the parties, which was good.

In terms of where to live in the city, I really thought I'd arrived. But the room turned out to be strange. The day I moved in a boy I'd never seen in my life before - a ferociously attractive boy in a big dark overcoat - rang the door bell. As if it explained everything, he sat in my room and, keeping his coat on as the wind rattled through, he drank a mug of Lapsang Souchong and told me he used to know Alice.

"Who's Alice?"

He seemed to hesitate. "You don't know about Alice?"

I told him I didn't. Why would I? Who was she? He bent his head and traced his finger round the grimy top of his mug.

"Alice left. She's not here any more - at the university I mean. She was very ill. She almost died from a heroin overdose. She was my girlfriend. This was her room."

This was her room. I remember the boy sitting there and telling me this but I have no idea what happened next. I'm sure I would have asked him where Alice was now and if she was OK. But if I did I have no memory of the answer. But after he left - and always, in fact for ever, after that - Alice was there in that room with me, somehow getting between me and that new, cool life that I'd hoped would start with my moving into the house.

Certainly none of its other inhabitants had ever heard of Alice and, once he'd drunk his tea and gone, I never saw the boy again. And then one night I was pulled out of sleep by the sound of someone knocking at my window and, when I opened my eyes, a pale girl's face was looking in at me. Too frightened to scream, I crept into the kitchen where the rugby-playing boy found me shaking. He insisted I sleep on the sofa in his room, which I gratefully did. But why did it never once occur to us either to find out what the girl wanted or else call the police?

Years and years later, passing through the city with my husband and three children on our way back to London from Wales, I made us do a detour and swing round through Clifton to see the house. It was easy to find. We drove right up to the very end of the street and got out.

I think I'd fully expected it to be done up - either converted into expensive flats or else a lavish residence for one wealthy family. But I was amazed to see that it was still clearly a student house - scruffy and dilapidated and completely unchanged. I looked through the kitchen window and saw a table covered in crumbs. The same crumbs. And, peering through the letter box, I saw, as I knew I would, bicycles propped, circulars on the floor. And a tall door to a room that still, all these years later, seemed not to be mine at all but Alice's.

Life and death under the Tuscan sun

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Mar 01, 2008 

His stepmother was dying. Looking back, that was exactly how they put it. No vague euphemisms. No one tried to imply she was ill but might get better. It was definite, an unquestionable fact. She was dying and that was that. Dying! In some mysterious and vivid way, it was almost something to celebrate: the Italian way of death.

We went to visit her. She lived up in the hills, just beyond Fiesole, in a lonely, crumbling villa with yellow walls and bougainvillea clambering up the side. And I was the English au pair, 19 years old, looking after her stepson's three-year-old boy and, so far, the job had been a success. They all seemed to like me. They said I was bella, simpatica. Before my arrival, the grandson had been a nervy, upset child, frequently wetting the bed. Now he played and laughed and slept through the night. He snuggled on my lap. I was part of the family. It went without saying that I would come too, up to the villa, to see the dying stepmother.

I remember a hot car journey out of Florence. Late spring, the trees waxy with blossom. The car seats smelling of new leather, the plaid car blanket rolled neatly on the back windowsill, the travel sweets in a tin. We rolled out of the hazy bowl of the city, past the blank white face of San Miniato al Monte and up into the hills. Blue cypress like candle flames. A shrine of flowers at the roadside.

Up at the villa, dogs were barking and smoke curled from a chimney. The sky blazed but inside it was cool and dim: long, tiled corridors and statues of the Madonna - or were they saints? Vases of flowers relaxing in the shadows, the pink arc of a petal on the polished floor. We went upstairs. Creaking up into darkness. I'm trying to think if there were servants - maybe one quiet manservant in a dull green uniform? Or a housekeeper, elderly and toothless. But I'm making it up now. I don't remember anybody, really, except her. The dying stepmother.

She lay alone in a room hung with lace and rosaries. Mirrors, rugs, furniture so dark and shiny you could see yourself moving in it. Pills on the side table, a jug of water and on the huge white pillows of the huge, high bed, a face so thin and pale and tired it could have been made of tissue paper.

I hung back at the edge of the room, unsure of how I belonged in this scene. And was the child with us or did we leave him downstairs, to be fussed and cuddled by the housekeeper? It's hard to remember now. But I do know that in that room of death, I somehow turned from the au pair, with her keen sense of responsibility and servitude, back into myself: a 19-year-old on the edge of her own real life, hungry for each new experience.

Outside, the Tuscan afternoon blazed and the sun moved over the hills, while in there we all stood in the shadows around the bed. I don't recall many words being spoken but I know that I discovered that the stepmother - married and widowed, alone here in Fiesole more than 40 years - was originally from Kensington, London.

An English face, an English voice.

So what happened? Did they tell her I was English too and did she turn her tired face to talk to me about Kensington -- a place that, back then, being from Nottingham, I barely knew? I am scraping back into my deepest memory now, struggling to remember. I would like, more than anything, to know exactly what was said. But all I see is her white face on the pillow, the parted hair, the hands with their blue ropes of veins, pulling and fidgeting with the sheets.

We must have drunk tea because I can see the cups - shallow, the thinnest, palest porcelain. Earl Grey with slivers of lemon dropped in. And the afternoon must have slid into evening because I also remember the woodsmoke smell of dusk outside - a chorus of barking and the sound of a vehicle crunching up the drive, only to turn and move away again.

We only visited once. She must have died soon after, weeks or maybe days later. But I still have something of hers, something she gave me: a small, black satin evening bag, the kind of bag you'd put your lipstick in if you went to a dance. I don't remember whether she gave it to me on that afternoon or whether I was handed it later, after she died. I only know it was hers and that she wanted me to have it. For some reason, she let me have it. Why? Was it just because I was English?

I've never used it. I'm not sure why, because it's nice, actually, timeless enough that it almost belongs to now. Not that I go to many dances. I don't go to dances now but back then I was a disco girl. That night back in Florence, the grandson bathed and put to bed, I would almost certainly have been picked up by some boy on a Vespa and zoomed off to the piazza to eat ice-cream before going on to some place on the edge of the city where we'd dance until the sky grew yellow with dawn.

Alone with the sobs of a ghostly child

By Julie Myerson

Published: Apr 12, 2008 

I can't remember how I heard about it but it certainly wasn't on the tourist map in the way that the London Dungeon or Madame Tussaud's are.

The House of Detention in Clerkenwell, central London, was once, long ago, an infamous Victorian prison. Ideal, because the novel I was writing back then was set 100 or more years ago and I had a scene that took place in a prison. I've always been a minimal researcher, preferring to pull substance out of the uneasy chaos of my own head. But here I knew that I needed something my imagination couldn't quite provide - the crunch of fact, of how things might have been. I phoned and checked the opening times.

There'd been a prison of some sort on this site ever since 1616 but the current building dated from 1845. By that time it was being used as a temporary home for inmates awaiting trial and something like 10,000 miserable souls a year passed through its gates. In 1890 the ground-level part was demolished but its subterranean passages and cells were later reopened as a bomb shelter during the Blitz. But after the second world war it was shut up again and pretty much forgotten until, in 1993, those cells and passages were reopened as a museum. And now, on a sunny, blue-skied morning in 1999, in T-shirt and jeans and with a basket on my shoulder, here I was.

I walked down some steps towards a little booth where a grey-haired woman seemed startled to see me. "We don't get many visitors here." (Yes, I swear she really did say that.) Then she sold me a ticket and came out of her booth to point out the entrance of the museum: "See that doorway? Just go in there and follow the yellow arrows until you come out the other end." I thanked her and, without a second thought, I walked in.

I should have had a second thought.

It's almost 10 years ago now and, in the occasional retelling, the tale has turned from horrible to comical and somehow back to horrible again. But at that moment when I first walked in I don't think I felt anything but open curiosity. This was research for my book, right? In I went.

I found myself in a narrow, dimly lit brick passage. A drip-drip of water from the low ceiling. Now and then some cell bars - the glimpse of a face, waxwork, grim and toothless. "Just special effects", I told myself and I walked on, only slightly tense.

I was aware of sighing. And groaning. And sobbing. More effects. And maybe it was at that moment that it dawned on me that I was completely alone. I looked back to see how far I'd come. Hard to tell. And the yellow arrows ahead seemed to lead me on into rankest darkness.

The air was sticky, chill. And somewhere a child was sobbing but I couldn't tell if it was in front of me or behind. "It would be fine," I thought, "if there were just some other people in here." A few tourists in anoraks, anybody. But there was no one.

"Actually, there's not much more point in doing this research", I thought, as I noticed that I was shaking and that my neck and head felt cold as stone. "No point if I'm terrified. Maybe I've got enough. Maybe I'll just go now, get out".

And I glanced behind me again and that's when I realised: if I retraced my steps and attempted to go back the way I came - less than five minutes, surely? - I might manage it. But I also might not. And if I didn't manage it I'd be in here for hours. So, heart banging and sweat on my neck, I was condemned to follow the only guide I had - the yellow arrows - to watch the dank bricked darkness unravel in front of me, with no idea of how long or short this trail might be.

It's all a long time ago but even writing this now I feel the grip of fear. The knowledge that the only way to get out is to keep on going forwards, going in. I know that the ceiling is too low over my head and the taped cries of the child are unbearable.

How long was I down there? How long before I saw daylight again? I have no idea. It felt like an hour but it might have been only 10 or 15 minutes. Coming out to feel sun on my face, I hurried to nearby Farringdon Road, where I sat on a low brick wall facing the steady grey traffic. I sat there for a long time and then I caught a bus home because I couldn't bring myself to go down underground again and travel on a Tube train.

I told my family the story. I told it against myself - stupid, research-mad novelist finds herself trapped in that horrible place - and they all laughed. It was quite funny if you thought about it. I wrote the scene in the novel and it did have atmosphere.

Yet it wasn't until years later, just quite recently in fact, that I stumbled on a piece on the internet that said that the House of Detention in Clerkenwell was one of Britain's most haunted sites. The kind of place that people only consider wandering around in a crowd because hundreds of people have seen and felt the freezing cold, seen apparitions - and heard the heart-rending sound of a little girl who cries incessantly.