Tracking back to childhood adventures

By Julie Myerson, Financial Times

Published: Jun 23, 2007 

Speeding through the eastern English countryside on a train to Cambridge yesterday, past tangled hedgerows and buttercups and fields exploding with poppies, my heart lifted. At the same time, I happened to be reading a newspaper report saying that more and more of today's children are out of touch with nature because their parents are too scared to let them play outside.

Parents need to encourage them to learn about wildlife, the report said. They should take them to parks, show them frogspawn and insects, let them run around in the open air. True, I thought, but it's not just about the open air, is it? Municipal grass isn't really enough and neither are supervised, educational ponds. What children actually need is something else, something that it's becoming harder and harder to give them. What they really need is to be allowed to stay out alone for hours and hours, get covered in dirt, risk life and limb and generally terrify their parents by running wild.

I was eight when we moved from the middle of Nottingham out into the country. The move changed my life. Our house was on a small arable farm that my parents continued to rent out to the farmer who had always farmed it. There were 10 acres of fields that we technically owned - and beyond that, many, many equally enticing ones that we didn't. There was an orchard with a rickety bridge and a dried up pond and long, whispery grass that came up to your elbows. There was a tiny wood, no more than a copse really, with a magical brook running through it. And there were vast brick outbuildings filled with sacks of grain and dangerous-looking, oily machinery - as well as rats. Even on wet days, our mum would frequently push us out of the back door and tell us not to come back until tea time. Life had never been more perfect.

Looking back, as I fell in love with that flat, mauve, tangled land, I slowly turned into someone else: a person who'd be up and out of bed as soon as it was light in order to go wandering through those fields looking for clay pipe heads and stems discarded by farm labourers in a mysterious long-ago age and now sticking up like treasure among the newly ploughed clods of frozen earth.

I looked for birds' nests too. Early one morning, cloaked in cow parsley, I watched a moorhen's eggs hatch out and never forgave myself when I returned the next morning to find that the mother, clearly aware she'd been watched, had abandoned the nest and left her babies to die.

I fished in the stream for sticklebacks, knew where the water rats had their holes and watched the dizzy blue blur of dragonflies over the banks. My sisters and I would wander away over the fields with the single aim of getting lost - really lost. The more hopelessly lost we could get, the better. We wanted to suffer; we wanted to be scared. If we set out in bright sunshine and then the rain poured down, well it just made the game feel that bit more real. It meant we had to choose between taking shelter in some scary-looking shed or else braving the elements to get back home. Of course we always took provisions: a few biscuits, a bottle of orange squash, maybe a slice or two of bread.

I still remember the wholehearted relish with which we sought danger. The unexpected barbed wire fences, the sudden fields of cows (could there be a bull?), the angry men on tractors who shouted at us, the dumps full of broken green and brown glass bottles. I remember crossing what we thought was a small stream, only to find ourselves in up to our waists. I remember my little sister slipping down the river bank while we tried to hold on to her. We loved the drama and we never believed that anything could happen to us, never believed the danger might be real. I remember coming home late on summer evenings, exhausted, muddy, chased by farmers, scratched by brambles - and supremely, wildly happy.

Yesterday on the train I was feeling overtired and overworked and my head was full of problems. But as I hurtled through those English fields, something happened to me. I watched the greenness roll by and I began to notice stiles and paths, dog roses, dull furred clumps of nettles, the glint of a stream - all the grainy up-closeness of the countryside. And slowly I relaxed, my head unfurled and I was back somewhere else, in a place I haven't really been for years but which, I now realise, I access easily, all the time, whenever and wherever I need it.

Just a glimpse through that train window was all I needed and there I was - intensely, eerily there. I could see it and I could smell it too: the musky earth, hot morning sun on leaf mould, the shiny harsh husk of a bright beetle clambering over the edge of a blade of grass, the green-smoke sharpness of dock leaves. It was the restoring power of the countryside, bringing with it all my long-ago childhood adventures: terror, excitement, gloriousness, happiness and dirt.

Foxed by an uninvited visitor

By Julie Myerson, Financial Times

Published: Jun 02, 2007 

All down one side of our inner-city rectory, in the chasm between the huge basement and the garden-that- used-to-be-a-cemetery, is a deep gully. It is accessed only by a small gate and you have to jump down into it. Once you're in, your head is level with the flowerbeds and there's no more than an elbow of room. Though it might have made sense in Victorian times, it's an annoying space for us now, mainly because it fills up with litter blown in from the street - leaves, polystyrene takeaway cartons and the blue plastic bags native to the area. And, now, a fox.

It's a young fox. I see him first, curled up tight asleep among the litter, his side gently heaving up and down. He looks unlikely and impossible - like a child's soft toy accidentally dropped from a bedroom window. Our garden used to be full of foxes, until our two dogs chased them all away. But how did he get down in the gully?

"Is he injured?" Chloë, 16, has rushed downstairs to have a look.

"He looks OK." He's not mangy like many of the foxes round here - smooth coated and bright-eyed, a teenage fox probably.

"Can we keep him?" Chloë asks, only half-joking. "I'd look after him, I swear. I'd have him on a lead and feed him and everything. I'd call him Henry."

We all laugh.

"We can't keep him," I say and go to look for a number for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

I dial and am held in a queue. I don't know what I'm ringing to ask really. How do I tell if he's injured? Should we try going down there? (Please, not me.) Is there an organisation that rescues young foxes?

After eight minutes of hanging on, I give up and go back to sneak a look in the gully. Henry is walking around, sniffing. He's not injured but he's not alert, not running away. Something's not quite right.

"Look at his cute black ears and paws!" says Chloë, who is torn between staying and going back upstairs to drink lime cordial and listen to The Fratellis. "I say we keep him."

"Sure," I say. "Like we can really afford to take on another living thing."

"He could live in my room and

go to school with me. I'd show him the ropes!"

Chloë tramps back upstairs and I notice that Henry is eating something.

"Chloë!"

"What?" Her hair hangs down between the bannisters.

"What's he eating?"

"Dunno."

"Yes you do."

"Well - uh - I might have given him a dried apricot."

"You mustn't feed him!"

"Why not?"

"Because then he'll become a pest. We can't have a fox always at our back door asking for food."

"Well, you see," Chloë comes back downstairs slowly, "he asked me if I had any meat and I said: 'Sorry, mate, we're vegetarians. You pitched up in the wrong gully.' So I asked him if he'd maybe like an organic dried apricot and he said that would do fine . . . Oh, and I gave him a handful of dog food too.'

She sits down on the stairs, chin in hands. "Can we really not keep him?"

"The cats are really going to love sharing their space with a fox, right?"

I remember from my childhood the serendipitous, almost hypnotic feeling you got when a wild animal showed up at your door. It was like you'd been selected or singled out in some way - and it was no more than your duty to act.

In my favourite children's book, Pookie, a rabbit with wings flies in through a girl's window one night and she takes him in her arms and gives him love and he ends up staying with her for ever and sleeping in her sewing basket. That picture of Pookie, tucked up and blissfully, safely sound asleep in that basket - home at last! - still gives me a tight feeling in my chest.

As a child I "rescued" mice, voles, baby blackbirds who had fallen out of the nest and, once, a moorhen. I fed them milk, bits of bread and biscuit, water from a doll's bottle. I made them nests in cardboard boxes. I watched over them with the idea that they might end up like Pookie - mine for ever. They all died.

I try the National Fox Helpline. It's a 24-hour service - except for weekends. Henry should have known not to get trapped on a Sunday.

"Are you sure we can't go down and try picking him up?" Chloë says.

"No," says her father. "We don't know if he's ill or stuck or both. Or he may just be perfectly OK and scramble back up into the garden later."

"Scramble how exactly?" says Chloë. "No fox could scramble up out of that place. It's way too deep."

Chloë's going out to the cinema with a friend and seems to have forgotten about Henry. I have work to do. We eat supper, watch a DVD. Last thing, when we let the dogs out, there's no sign of him. But it's quite dark in the gully.

"We'll see if he's still there in the morning," we tell each other, "and then we'll decide what's best."

In the night it rains for the first time in ages and the morning is dark and blowy. I open the back door and look down into the gully. Henry's body is spread out, on his side, flies crawling over his eyes. I shut the door quickly.

Chloë wanders down in her pyjamas, eye make-up smudged, hair fuzzy with sleep. She sees my face as I put the kettle on.

"What?" she says.

School days steeped in a lurking fear

By Julie Myerson, Financial Times

Published: Sep 08, 2007 

I lived in many different houses from birth to adulthood but a great chunk of that time was spent in one, much grander place: an enormous, late Victorian mansion in the dusty, leafy centre of Nottingham.

Hour upon hour, minute upon ticking minute, I sat in vast, high-ceilinged drawing rooms and once-elegant bedrooms or whispered and giggled in parquet-floored hallways or on creaky upstairs landings as I waited for the bell to go. I spent long afternoons staring out of the wide bay windows at summer rockeries or, in winter, the darkening purple trees of the arboretum.

Years and years of my life I lined up in that huge hallway, with its heavy atmosphere of grandeur and (though I didn't recognise it then) showy wealth. How many hours did I spend yawning up at those intricate, wedding-cake cornices instead of concentrating on sines and cosines and logarithms? And how many times, if no teacher was looking, did I jump the last two or three steps of the grand staircase with its curling balustrade?

The geography of Nottingham High School for Girls - which in fact comprised both this house and several neighbouring ones in the same street - is forever imprinted on my mind. I could, I think, still navigate its dusty corridors, halls and staircases in my sleep. I could still, with my eyes shut, go up the "A" staircase, cross a large landing (where the door of the staff room always ominously oozed cigarette smoke) and go up the narrow twisty stairs that led to a tiny, bright kitchen under the eaves where sixth formers were allowed to eat their sandwiches and boil the kettle to make instant soup. These must, of course, have been servants' quarters. The cramped attic rooms where, at 16 and 17, we gathered in small groups for German conversation, probably once housed a lonely maid-of-all-work of a similar age.

I was five when I first crept through those black wrought-iron gates to take the entrance exam, which I quickly failed. A crowd of happy children were playing in a sandpit and I refused to join in, preferring to stand on the edge and watch. At seven I returned to try again, this time sitting in a small room halfway up the stairs with a kind, grey-haired lady who asked me things such as: "What's wrong with this picture?"

"The lady has an umbrella up but it's not raining," I said scornfully, "though I suppose it could be a parasol," I added with a frown.

All my life, that school, those buildings, perpetually altered in size and shape - both bigger than me and far, far smaller, both heart-sinkingly familiar and terribly strange. I knew my way around, I knew the smells and sounds but it was a jumpy, dreading knowledge. I never really knew what would be around the next corner. And even now, in middle age, I'm startled to find there are whole rooms in that place that I return to frequently, whether I like it or not.

I've no idea, for instance, why I can be sitting at a set of traffic lights in the middle of London and suddenly find myself back in the little downstairs kitchen in prep block where we did art - powder paint and old milk bottles, the rough mauve of sugar paper, a murky window that never gave enough light, the smell of the hamster who lived by the sink, a tap that came on too suddenly and always splashed your overall. Or else I'm in the downstairs vestibule in "A" block where (irrationally) I never dared drink from the fountain because I had once heard a girl being bullied in there.

Most sinister of all, though, were the downstairs gym changing rooms, presumably once a cellar, with the sign that said "Mind Your Head" and the stairs that fell straight down into darkness. Down there was a labyrinth of low rooms with rows and rows of metal pegs. Some had clothes hanging on them and some didn't. The smell was of feet and sweat - and fear. If you weren't quick enough at getting changed, you could suddenly find yourself left alone among the dark shapes that seemed to move among the coats, choked by the certainty that you would be next.

But next for what?

I went back to my old school a few years ago while researching a little book I wrote about being hopeless at games. I was amazed - or maybe not so amazed - to find it exactly the same. Even though I was larger, it hadn't shrunk. In fact, if anything

I was surprised all over again by its lofty, elegant grandeur.

Back home in London, I got out my old copy of Call Back Yesterday - a book of reminiscences by former students, produced to celebrate the school's centenary in 1975. In there, I read what I must (surely?) once have known but had completely forgotten.

The main house with its grand entrance hall, sweeping staircase and elegant proportions had been sold to the school in 1880, after standing empty for a couple of years. Why had it stood empty? It was, in fact, commissioned by a local lace manufacturer, James Hartshorn, who fancied living in something resembling a French chateau. So he hired an architect from Lille who completed the house in 1875, when he moved in with his family. But Hartshorn's pleasure was short-lived because only two years later, having suffered from months of illness and depression, he was found dead in a downstairs washroom. He had cut his throat.

New York becomes flu York

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Jun 08, 2007 

I can't remember exactly who lent us the apartment. The friend of the friend of a friend, I think. We were in New York to spend Christmas with some people who had recently moved there from London but their own place was tiny. And, back then, with three small children in tow, we couldn't really afford a hotel. So this very kind person - a young woman we'd never met and probably never would meet - said: "I'm away for the holidays. Here's my key. " She arranged to leave it with the doorman and, just like that, we were fixed.

We arrived in the middle of the night. Our children - seven, five and four at the time - could not believe they were really finally going to the land of Spider-man and Superman, the twinkly sticky-up landscape made familiar by a million Disney Christmas films. We'd hoped they might sleep on the plane but no such luck. The littlest one managed to stay wide awake until just a few seconds before we arrived. Then, just as the Manhattan skyline loomed into view, his chin dropped and he was gone.

The apartment was on the Upper West Side, on the top floor of a 1930s block. It was tiny and pink and smelled of pot pourri. It was also very, very hot. Tearing off our coats, we tried to find a way of turning the heating down but there didn't seem to be a thermostat. So we stripped the children to their underwear and set about getting them to bed.

There was a small pink bedroom with a double bed for us and, for the kids, a large mattress on the floor in the small pink sitting room. There was a tiny pink kitchen with a sink and eight packets of Cheerios and a fridge full of brightly coloured drinks that soon began to obsess the children and a pink bathroom full of coconut shower cremes and Wella shampoos. The sitting room contained a lot of wicker furniture, spider plants in macramé holders and a few soft toys. "Don't, " I told the kids who immediately started fighting over the floppy rabbit with the pink plush ears. "They belong to the person who lives here. They're not toys. "

It was late, they were teetering on the edge of jet lag and the moment their heads hit the mattress they plummeted into sleep. Still unable to turn the heating down, we got the window open but loud traffic and sirens poured in, so we shut it again.

Late in the night I woke feeling strange. The room was bright with street light, a dazzle that felt like toothache, and I was shivering. The shivering woke my husband. "You can't possibly be cold, " he said. "It's boiling in here. " My teeth chattered so hard I couldn't speak.

"You're ill, " he told me as he crouched naked by our suitcase and hunted for the paracetamol.

He was right. I was ill. Morning came and I lay there, felled by the kind of flu where you no longer know who you are (a mother? a joke? a parcel of nerve endings?) or care who does what with whom. The kind of flu where the pattern and nap of the duvet (a stranger's duvet) takes on a whole new rhythm and texture, where the possibility of a single sip of cold water breaks the day in two.

I was ill. My husband took the kids to the Natural History Museum - or at least I think he did. They seemed to come back less than three minutes later, opening and closing the fridge and talking in harsh, jangly voices about spiders.

"Why are they talking about spiders? "

"It's OK. Go back to sleep. "

"What's wrong with Mummy? " Chloë's voice was so loud it hurt. "Will she be better for Christmas? "

Another night passed and the shadows in the apartment turned into bears. I thought I was back in my own bed at home and I wondered why the bears were there. Then I remembered: we were in America and these were pink, American bears. My husband fed me pills and brought me water but we couldn't keep three small children in that overheated apartment all day so I spent more hours alone dreaming strange things about the strange pink wall.

On Christmas Eve I felt well enough to crawl to the big mattress on the sitting room floor. There was a small black-and-white television. There I found feverish comfort in the old film of A Christmas Carol with Alistair Sim. It absorbed me and I remember how very odd yet strangely right it felt to drift backwards and forwards between snowy Dickensian London and my bed on the floor of a hot, pink room in Manhattan.

Maybe if I hadn't been so ill in it, I would have forgotten that apartment by now. But it still looms large - a generous gift from a stranger that turned into a three-day nightmare lived out among that kind, faceless person's spider plants and pink furnishings.

The next day was Christmas Day and I was better enough to lie, pale as a ghost, on a sofa in our friends' airy (white) apartment and watch everyone open presents. I couldn't drink any champagne but it didn't matter. I was in that blissful place that only the recently ill can understand: loose-limbed and shaky but comfortable and and just so glad to be back in the world again.

Far happier in my own company

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Oct 20, 2007 

When I was nine or 10 years old and we lived out in the country, I was a very introverted child - excitable and optimistic but afraid of almost everything.

I was afraid of deep water and the dark middle of the night and some kinds of birds (but not insects) and rats. I was afraid of dead people and ghosts and tight clothes that had to be pulled over my head. And I was especially afraid of anything that involved other children of my age - parties, tennis lessons, ballroom dancing, anything that involved nasty girls in patent shoes or boys (especially boys) or any kind of competition or standing up or speaking out or being looked at.

My mum was completely the opposite - young and beautiful and sociable and curious. She wanted me to be the kind of girl who'd come with her to someone's house and, while she had coffee with the mother, play with whoever that mother's child was. She wanted me to be the kind of girl who'd follow them up to their room, play with their toys, maybe stay for tea or even (terrifying thought) overnight. "Everybody's shy," she used to remind me. "You just need to ask people all about themselves, that's all."

I wasn't convinced. And anyway I didn't want to make any friends. I was perfectly happy sewing flowers out of felt or re-arranging the china ponies in my room. In despair, my mum decided she had to find friends for me. One of these friends was Lola.

Lola was the daughter of Abby, a friend of my mum's. She was the same age as me, though at a different school, and had blonde frizzy hair and was pretty, outgoing, a bit rude. Lola was everything that I was not. Lola lived about five miles away from us in another village in a house full of dark and creaking old furniture. The garden had a compost heap, which scared me because (Lola said) it had rats in it. Lola's garden went on for ever before sort of petering out and turning into wide mauve fields that Lola frequently escaped into, dragging me with her.

I was terrified of those fields because, the second time I met her, Lola had taken me up there and tried to force me to smoke a cigarette. When I said I'd rather not, she punched me hard in the stomach and left me there in the field with the rat-infested compost heap between me and the house.

"Did you have a good time?" my mum asked me when I got home.

"Yes," I lied, "only I don't think I'll go again."

"Oh but why?"

"Because I just don't want to."

"Well tough," said my mum, "because Lola really likes you and they want you to go round next Friday."

I went upstairs to dust my china ponies and hoped they'd all forget about it. But they didn't.

"Good news!" my mum would say, putting down the phone just as I was sneaking upstairs to make a charcoal drawing of a lovely leaf I'd found. "Abby just rang and you've been invited round to play with Lola. I said I'd drop you round there after lunch."

"Oh," I'd say, "but I thought I maybe ought to tidy my room after lunch."

"Don't be silly. You can do that any time. Lola's really looking forward to seeing you. Come on. You'll enjoy it when you get there."

Enjoy-it-when-you-get-there was the dreaded mantra. It contained a grain of truth in the sense that very often the terror of going to Lola's turned out to be even worse than the actual ordeal of being there. As my mum's car crunched up the drive, Lola would be waiting for me - at a window or even outside on the gravel.

"We're going to go and pick blackberries," she'd shout, or "Hey, come on up to my room, I've got something to show you."

How nice, my mum would think, because Lola's animated face and voice would make it look like there really was something like a friendship between us.

But, once upstairs, Lola would lock the door and say "right, watch this" and hold me in a painful head lock or tell me horrible things I didn't want to know about sex. Or we'd go up the fields with full blackberry-picking equipment and then she'd take out a pack of cigarettes and start all of that all over again.

I knew Lola until we were about 14 or even 15, when finally I developed the confidence to pull away. Lola was a bully; I know that now. And like many bullies who seem to have a pretty feisty, flame-proof teenage-hood, she somehow turned into a much less scary adult - meek and tired and slightly deflated looking.

Many years later, when we were both in our early 30s, I bumped into her at a party. I had three babies in tow and had recently published my first novel. She was single and between jobs.

She seemed very genuinely friendly and pleased to see me and, as I left, she pressed her phone number on me.

But I never rang it. And I'm both amused and ashamed that now, 15 or so years later, the only thing I really remember about that encounter was that she had really awful shoes on - flat and scuffed and old lady-ish - and also that I'd never noticed before what thick ankles she had.

Memories of heartfelt mothering

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Aug 25, 2007 

My mother-in-law's home is a large, airy groundfloor apartment at Vauxhall in London, overlooking the Thames. Look to the left and you see the vast, faceless M16 building, eyes shut to the world; to the right all the slick new developments at Nine Elms. On summer nights, boats slide up and down this water, pumping out disco music - snatches of boogie that fade as fast as they arrive, dissolving into the blue-black darkness. This used to be the damp, dirty heart of London. A century and a half ago, there were impoverished cottages on these mud-flats, children with sore eyes and runny noses, babies wrapped in rags. The river's stench grew unbearable each summer.

Now the only smells are of the well-watered lawns that stretch from the neat, paved terrace down to the river walkway below, blowsy roses, lavender and the occasional whiff of salt or fuel. My mother-in-law - then 60ish, elegant, a dead-ringer for Lauren Bacall - moved here 20 years ago, knowing it would be ideal when old age came. But now old age has come and, immobilised with back pain for which she's awaiting an operation, she finds even the river provides little distraction.

I'm in her kitchen, making her a cup of tea, which makes me sound like a better daughter-in-law than I am because I'm conscious that I've given her less time than I should have recently. Consumed with work and worry and difficult teenage children, I've thought of her but not quite enough, felt guilty but never quite guilty enough.

I'm in the kitchen, this small white kitchen, a place I too have known for 20 years. She'd just moved in when I met her son. The flat is so immaculately neat and white that you can be here for hours and somehow leave no trace. Antique furniture gleams; there is a red glass bowl, a flowerless vase, a silent grand piano. The sun pours in but bodies leave no shadows. If an object is moved, it's quickly replaced.

But pieces of me are scattered everywhere. Here I've been a girlfriend, daughter-in-law, mother, wife, even a writer, coming here every day one dark winter when she was in Australia, escaping my babies so I could concentrate on the novel I couldn't write at home. It was a novel about the river and the mudflats, 150 years ago. I'd lift my head from the computer to stare out of these windows and see mud, ghosts, a stinking world.

"Is this the right cup? " I go down the corridor to show her because I know that just now the wrong cup might just be one disaster too far.

"No, " she says from the bed, pleased to be consulted, "not that one. The pink one with the gold on it. There's a pink one and a red one but I think the red one's in the dishwasher. "

"And where are the tea bags? " I ask because she likes to tell me where things are.

"In the little blue lidded pot on the counter. "

For 20 years, she's been my friend and ally, jumping to support me, even (or especially) against her son. When we had our first child, she gave endless hours of patient childcare, precious time off when I was sometimes tearful with exhaustion.

She walked our Jake up and down this corridor on her shoulder as he screamed and screamed. As we had Chloë and then Raphael, she'd have all three for days and nights, feeding them nutritious meals cooked in this small white kitchen. When I came to collect them, they'd be calm and content, crayoning happily at the table. I'm not sure what life as the mother of three small children would have been like without this help.

"Did you find the cup? " she calls from her bedroom.

"Yes, " I shout back.

"Ju-lie? "

I go back down the corridor. "Yes? "

"I might have a little bit of that bun loaf that's on the counter. Just one slice with a bit of butter. "

I go back. I can't find the bun loaf.

"Where did you say it was? " I call.

"On the counter. "

It isn't. It's in the fridge. I cut her a cold slice, return down the corridor with tea and loaf.

In this corridor, Jake took his first steps, pushing a brightly-coloured baby walker, hiccupping ecstatically. The other day I bought my mother-in-law a wheeled Zimmer frame, so she could pass along here more easily. "Thank you, " she says, sipping her tea. "This is so good of you. I've got such a good daughter-in-law. "

No it isn't. No you haven't. I haven't done half as much for her lately as her own son and daughter but one cup of Darjeeling and my status is miraculously restored.

I glance out of the window and get a flash of the hot August morning almost 18 years ago when we came to collect her to go and see her brand new grandchild (our niece) born a few hours earlier. We arrived to the drone and yak of helicopters hovering over the river. The Marchioness pleasure boat had capsized in the night, drowning most of the people on board.

And then I think of all the suppers we've eaten here, years and years of them, sitting and laughing and yawning on her terrace while the children fell noisily asleep in the spare room and the river smells and sounds drifted up to us and we felt there was no urgency, no need to think or act because the night, this life, those times might just go on forever.

Life squeezed down to a metal bed

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Aug 17, 2007 

The summer I left school, 18 years old and waiting for exam results, I got a summer job working as a nursing auxiliary at the local hospital in the geriatric ward. I don't know why I chose the hospital. I could have worked in a shop, a bar, a restaurant. Maybe I fancied myself as Florence Nightingale. Anyway, I liked old people. I liked their gentleness, their patience, their stories.

Gentleness, patience - what a joke. That summer and that job turned out to be one of the most savagely illuminating of my life. The ward I was in was known as "long-stay " and I soon learned what it meant. The difference between this one and all the other wards in the hospital was that no one here was ever going home again.

I found the concept very shocking. These elderly women - it was a female-only ward - who had known families, homes, kitchens, babies, marital beds, now had their whole worlds squeezed down to a metal bed frame, a plastic-covered mattress and a bedside table. Of the married ones, most were widows and bafflingly few had children who visited. Many had suffered strokes, most were incontinent and dementia was like a brand new language that I had to learn on the spot.

As I learned to deal with bedpans and commodes, change soiled linen, help lay out the dead and rinse the urine off my spattered shoes at the end of a shift, what broke my heart the hardest was the way these women pined for their old lives and the familiar, comfortable fabric of their homes.

So, while dressing or washing or feeding them, I didn't get the fascinating dialogues of bygone days I'd (naively) hoped for. Instead I caught urgent, painful snatches - glimmers of daily lives that were gone forever. Elizabeth - 93, tall, slim and bed-bound - wanted to know when the plumber was coming to fix the tap. I had to hold my breath while pulling her stockings on because of the amount of skin that flaked off her legs and went up my nose. She talked of a boat on a canal and a man called Abe.

"Was Abe your husband? " I asked her hopefully.

"Abe's the plumber, " she (confusingly) said. "My husband doesn't know about him. Abe's coming to take me back soon. Back to the boat. "

Lucy was more worrying. She woke every morning screaming that the house was burning down. Often I'd arrive for the early shift and as I walked down the linoleum corridor at 6am, breathing in burnt toast and sickly hospital soap, I'd hear chilling screams of "Fire! Fire! " and know that Lucy was awake.

"Did she have a fire in her house? " I asked Jan, the youngest and nicest of the auxiliary nurses who chatted to me on her cigarette breaks. Jan shrugged and flicked ash into the sluice where the bedpans were emptied.

"No one knows much about her. She's got a son who visits about once a year - Roger. "

Once when I was feeding Lucy some mashed potato and she seemed steady and calm, I asked her why she always shouted "Fire ". She turned to gaze at me, eyes empty. She licked her lips.

"You ask Corrie what she makes of it, " she said. "Ask her where she left the matches. And if you find anything out, come back and tell me. "

I spooned some more potato into Lucy's mouth. "OK, " I said. "I will. Did Corrie set fire to the house? "

That, unfortunately, was a question too far. Lucy threw a hand out and caught me on the side of my cheek. Tough yellow nails left tracks which lasted for the rest of the summer.

A welcome contrast to Elizabeth and Lucy was Mrs Elton. (No-one called her by her Christian name.) Mrs Elton was pretty mobile - mobile enough to help serve the meals sometimes. It was nice to have a patient who didn't have to sit in a chair all day, who could carry on a cheerful conversation, who could even make her own way to the toilet.

Mrs Elton had lots of photographs of family on her bedside table - blonde toddlers in party hats, a plump couple with their arms around each other, a black-and-white snap of a man digging.

"Potatoes, " said Mrs Elton, when she saw me looking.

None of these people ever seemed to turn up in the hospital but Mrs Elton said it didn't matter because she was going home one of these days and I think she believed it.

"Why's she even in here? " I asked Jan, because it seemed to me she'd have been very capable of looking after herself.

Jan rolled her eyes. "Because she's barmy, that's why. "

"I don't think she is. "

Jan roared with laughter and patted my arm. She already thought I was a joke because I was going to university. "You're posh, " she said. "I don't know what you're doing mucking around in this place. "

I was being Florence Nightingale, that's what.

One day I ran a bath for Mrs Elton and called her when it was ready. "Let me just fetch my handbag, ducks, " she said. Mrs Elton liked to have her handbag with her at all times, another thing I took as a sign of normality.

But as she came into the bathroom, she stumbled at the door and dropped her bag. It snapped open and its contents fell out over the floor: half of the hospital cutlery was in there, as well as 50 or so pieces of her own faeces wrapped in newspaper.

The perfect place for an oxymoron

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Oct 13, 2007 

When we bought our home, a couple of years ago, it was divided, as so many old London houses are, into three flats. Though originally built as one large house - it's an old rectory and stands next to an awe-inspiring church designed by Sir John Soane - it hadn't been lived in like that, and certainly not by a family, since the early 1960s.

So, while the ground and first floor were one living space (for the rector), the enormous old basement, once kitchens, had been turned into offices, brutally divided up by flimsy plasterboard walls. And the old servants' quarters at the top of the house - destined to be our teenagers' space - had been converted into a self-contained flat. An ugly flight of concrete stairs had been added on the side of the house for access and, where there had once been an elegant sash window, there was now a cheap front door.

As soon as we knew the house was ours, we dreamed about how to put it all back together again. The basement was easy. The twisty stone stairs leading down from the hall had never really been closed off and the fake walls could soon be demolished. But what about the top flat? We knew that it had to connect in some way to the main house but it took us half an hour of knocking on walls to work out exactly where the old staircase must have once come down into the hall. So was it still there? It wouldn't have been demolished, surely, just covered over, waiting to be rediscovered? "If we put an axe through this wall here," said my husband, rapping his knuckles on a hollow-sounding wall, "I bet we'd find it."

And so on the day we moved in, before we'd even cracked open the champagne, that's just what we did. It was late October and late afternoon before all the removal men had left. The light was already going and the house was badly lit and gloomy as, after a lot of dust and a lot of noise, we prised the pieces of hardboard off in chunks so that a biggish hole appeared. Straight away I grabbed a torch and peered in - and gasped.

Because even though what we saw was exactly what we'd hoped to see, there was still something heart-stopping about coming face to face with a set of dusty wooden Victorian stairs that had stood undisturbed and in darkness for more than 50 years. Through the 1960s and 1970s and into the 1980s; through The Beatles and Punk and Thatcher and Blair; through all the endless daily comings and goings of this house, doors slamming, telephones ringing, laughter, talk, sleep; through all of this, those stairs had been sealed off in that dark space, unable to join in.

There's a quality of stillness that I've noticed in spaces that have been shut off for a long time - a numbing, cloth-like silence, an extreme and velvety quiet of a sort that you don't find anywhere else. The first time I experienced it was when I visited Saint Enodoc church in Cornwall, which became so neglected in the 18th and 19th centuries that sand blew up all around it until it was buried so deep that the only access was through a skylight. Walk in there and you can still feel 150 years of silence pressing on your ears.

Just a few miles from where we live, near London Bridge, there's also an old Victorian operating theatre in the roof space of a baroque church that was shut up some time in the last century and lay forgotten for 50-odd years before builders discovered it by accident. Now open to the public, it is a caustically silent space to visit. Go on a winter's day when the sky is heavy with snow and it's hard to raise your voice above a whisper in there.

And then, a few years ago, on a visit to Budapest, I came upon another of these incredible spaces. Saint Istvan's Cave Church at the foot of the Gellert Hill was sealed off behind an 8ft wall of concrete for 40 years until the Iron Curtain fell. It feels like a space that has had all sound pumped out. The silence in that cave is deafening.

The silence on our stairs dissolved and fell apart as soon as they were open, as soon as feet were placed on them, in fact. The first were my eldest son's - big feet in scuffed trainers, rushing upstairs to fetch his guitar. The second were the dog's - white paws with clicky claws, not strictly allowed upstairs but following him because, hey, we'd just moved in and all bets were temporarily off.

And so the old stairs were welcomed back into the world. Once we'd opened them up, we had no need for the ugly exterior door so we sealed it shut - much to the annoyance of our kids, who had quite fancied an extra escape route. And one day we might get around to pulling down the nasty concrete staircase but for now I've put a pot of hot, bright geraniums on every step.

The old stairs are meanwhile making up for lost time, as cats and dogs and teenagers belt up and down, stomp in and out, living out their lives on all levels. It's more than enough to make up for 50 years of silence.

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?

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.

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.

Stranded with a stranger

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Jul 28, 2007 

At 23 or 24 I was still quite a home girl. I was not well travelled. The few times I'd been abroad, I'd lived with families. I'd never done the sort of travelling where you packed your own bath plug and set off somewhere completely foreign with no one waiting for you at the other end.

So when my boyfriend suggested a trip to the Greek islands, I was excited. Born in Athens but educated in the UK, he spoke crisper, posher English than I did but Greek was his first language.

"Kythera is at the foot of the Peloponnese, " he told me, spreading out a map. "It's the island where Aphrodite was born! "

I stared at a tangle of ancient and beautiful words: Paleochora, Hora, Milopotamos, Kapsali. "Here, " - my boyfriend put his thumb on a speck on the island's edge - "Diakofti, the most beautiful place on earth. That's where we're going! "

We took the ferry out to Kythera, arriving in the dusty yellow afternoon. I remember heat, smells, donkeys, cans of oil clunking on and off boats. I also remember being very, very hungry.

My boyfriend had brought his car, a beat-up old sports car, on the ferry and, since no one seemed to have any food, we set off at once for Diakofti. "It's paradise, " he told me as he lit a cigarette. "You'll see. "

I asked if we could get food there.

"There'll be something, " he said but, sucking on his Camel, he already seemed more Greek than English, too impatient with thoughts of paradise to think of food.

I don't remember at what point we abandoned the car. But soon the rough roads turned to nothing and so we parked and went on foot down the steep dirt tracks to the sea. Heat from the scorched earth hit my face, crickets hissed in my ears and I smelled thyme. Hunger was making me shaky.

"It'll be worth it, " my boyfriend said as he pulled me down the scrubby cliff. "You wait. "

We found ourselves in a tiny inlet with the whitest sand I'd ever seen, the bluest sky. In front of us, a couple of fishermen's huts and nothing else. Nothing. It was the kind of place that made you unable to believe you'd ever been at an airport, in a shopping centre, in a crowd.

A man came out and walked towards us. He greeted my boyfriend with hugs and kisses and pats on the back like a long lost friend, then gave me a cursory glance. Everything about my boyfriend seemed suddenly different, foreign, Greek. I tried not to keep on thinking about food.

Round the back of the hut, some more men were playing backgammon. Black coffee was offered and ouzo. I whispered to my boyfriend to please ask for some bread and it arrived and I began to cheer up. My boyfriend seemed very happy, very relaxed. I sat and listened and smiled and pretended to understand and not mind being completely ignored.

A few hours later, night fell and the air grew cold. Blackness covered the water. I was amazed to realise that apart from the string of bulbs over the porch, there wasn't a single light to be seen anywhere. I asked my boyfriend where we were going to sleep and he gestured to the sand. We were lent a blanket and I lay there shivering till dawn.

We spent two or three days at Diakofti. There was nowhere to wash but we swam in the sea. I remember how my hair grew matted and bleached and how the only toilet was unspeakably filthy and had no light. I'm not sure whether it was that or the fact that I spent all day every day watching men smoke and drink and play backgammon that finally got to me. In the end, feeling like a bad traveller, I cracked. I begged my boyfriend to let us move on.

"Move on where? "

"Anywhere. "

"But this is paradise. You won't find better than this. "

"I don't care. I need a bed. "

We arrived at a village high in the mountains. People were singing, dancing; you could smell cooking - tomatoes, lamb. All of this made my spirits soar. I never thought I'd be so glad to see women and children again.

The place where we ate supper wasn't exactly a taverna - more a couple of tables where an elderly couple made us welcome. We ate everything and this time I didn't mind feeling excluded.

"Ask them if they know where there's a hotel, " I said, "or a room to rent. "

After a little discussion, my boyfriend said to me: "It's OK. We can stay here. "

"Here? "

"They're going to give us their bed. "

I struggled to understand. "What? For money? "

"No, just because. It's the thing to do. "

My boyfriend seemed even more foreign. Unlike me, he'd been quite at home sleeping on the beach. Now he was suggesting we move in with some elderly couple.

"But, " I said, "where will they sleep? "

"Downstairs, of course. "

"On the floor? "

Now he looked impatient. "Maybe on the floor. How do I know? "

It was a comfortable bed, a double, lent to us by kind strangers who shared their home with us that night. I remember the room was whitewashed but still very dark and that there was nothing on the walls except for one single figure of Christ on the crucifix, crying tears of blood.

I felt so ungrateful. I knew my boyfriend had accepted this offer to make me happy and now I couldn't sleep. I lay awake all night in that dark Greek island bedroom and as soon as the rooster crowed at first light, I was up, smiling and ready to get out of there.

A teenage view of New York

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Aug 17, 2007 

The first time we took our three children to New York - aged eight, six and five - they were in heaven. Or if not quite heaven, then certainly they thought they'd landed smack in the middle of a Spiderman cartoon. Never quite adjusting to the time difference, they fell asleep in taxis, demanded bagels at 2am and pinched and punched each other all the way to the top of the Empire State Building.

Occasionally my husband Jonathan and I did wonder whether the whole thing had really been worth the effort. Might they have been just as happy (and more awake) at Legoland? Still, the three of them sighed about that trip for years afterwards. The highlights? The cuddly leopards in FAO Schwarz, the "smoke coming out of the pavements " and one perfectly ordinary pizza eaten one perfectly ordinary lunchtime off Madison Avenue but still recalled with misty-eyed awe a squillion lunchtimes later.

That was 10 years ago. Now the breathless little pizza-eaters have grown tall, spotty and are not so easily impressed. Returning with the younger two - Chloë, 16½, and Raphael, 15 - it's clear that, fed on their constant diet of Big Apple-based soaps, these hoodie- and Converse-wearing wise guys think they already know everything there is to know about Manhattan. "I'm going walking in Central Park at night, " enthuses Raph when he hears our hotel is close by. ( "No, you're bloody well not! " we tell him.) "I just want to chill in the West Village, " sighs Chloë.

Seven hours of movies and a big dose of travel sickness tablets later, we touch down at JFK. "Wow! " Chloë seems intensely excited even by the passport control queue, "It's all so - American. " If passport control is impressive - the uniformed staff actually smile - then our hotel, the Mandarin Oriental at Columbus Circle, is as well. We've never slept in a skyscraper before. Reception is on the 35th floor and our rooms on the 54th. The bedroom windows are floor to ceiling and Manhattan looms below like a vertiginous black-and-white movie.

Dazed by the beauty of it all, I stand at the window to change. "Should you really be walking around naked? " asks Jonathan, pointing out that there's another skyscraper right opposite. I laugh. At this unreal height, it feels as if neither I nor my nakedness really exist.

But the Xbox in the children's (sorry, teenagers') room certainly exists, and so do the super-helpful concierges - especially the one called Ken. Ken knows everything - and nothing is too much trouble. "You'd like to see a baseball game? Well, sure. Now where do you like to sit? Oh. You don't know the rules of baseball? Well, let me explain... "

I'd like to be able to say that my children came here for the Staten Island cruise, the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art, and the chance to get the flavour of the real Manhattan. In fact, they really came here to shop. The first morning, after a disappointingly healthy take on French toast (served with fresh fruit, for goodness' sake!) at Café Café in Broome Street, they investigate Canal Street. Here, Raph instantly buys a pair of $3 sunglasses that fall apart three hours later, and Chloë is infuriated at the lack of vinyl records. "You said Canal Street would be good. Well, it's not. It's a tourist rip-off. "

We try to explain that the whole point of an unknown foreign city - even when you're doing something as apparently simple as shopping - is that you don't know where the good places are until you find them. That's the pleasure, that's the holiday - you never know what amazing something is just around the corner. "Which corner? " Raph wants to know.

Luckily Bleecker Street, with its coffee shops and scuffed record stores, makes Chloë a whole lot happier. But the find of the morning is Yellow Rat Bastard on Broadway - three loud dark caverns stuffed with all the clothes the kids crave, American and cheap.

"Wait till you see this shop downtown called Century 21, " I tell them - it's a huge discount clothes warehouse that comes highly recommended by our local friends. We jump in a taxi (cheaper than the subway for four). What I don't tell them is it's right next door to Ground Zero.

"It's really just a building site, " everyone had said but it's not. It is not. Even approaching it on this ordinary blue-sky morning, on these calm and everyday streets, my heart starts to pound. It's impossible not to think of the dust clouds and running faces we saw on television. We scan through the long list of names in silence and stare at the empty space, now dotted with hard-hats and cranes.

"Do you remember when we went in the World Trade Center last time? " I ask the children. Raph shakes his head.

"You bought a Biker Mice T-shirt, " Chloë tells him.

"And I couldn't remember which tower I'd said we'd meet up in and I lost you all for nearly an hour and in the end this lovely shop assistant remembered what you looked like and found you for me. "

"And she's probably dead now, " says Raph, and we look again at the list.

Only in the company of teenagers could you move so quickly from Ground Zero to a discount store. But we do. Century 21 is cheap but it's loud and tiring and also a lottery as to whether they have your size and in the end we give up without buying anything.

We go to a café in the West Village and while Jonathan and I eat salad, the kids go straight for the heavy fried material.

"Can I get some fries with my salad? " asks Raph, who has started to look and talk like an American.

Later a New York-based friend takes us walking in Riverside Park with her two little boys. "This is a real park, " she tells an unconvinced Raph, "Central Park is more for the tourists. "

"Would you get mugged here? " he asks her hopefully.

A cool wind blows in off the Hudson and we dodge the roller bladers and pull her smallest boy out of the path of high-speed cyclists. He's content but the teenagers are flagging. "I'm fine, " says Chloë when I suggest she needs food; "I want to stay up all night. "

Determined to do some proper sightseeing ( "I'd rather go back to Bleecker Street Records, " says Chloë), we go to Battery Park to get on a ferry to the Ellis Island Museum, only to find long queues. "We should have asked Ken, " we all sigh, wondering how Ken would have solved it for us. Bribed our way up the queue? Moved the island a bit closer to the hotel?

Instead, Chloë and Raph demand an immediate lunch at a diner. Followed by some more shopping on their own in SoHo. "And then can we go to the petting zoo? " asks Raph.

"The what?! "

"The petting zoo. It's in Central Park. It has polar bears. "

"Come on, " says Chloë, "It's instead of Ellis Island. " So they do the petting zoo while we do Saks. They also go on the subway alone (together) and make their way successfully back to the hotel.

We trudge slowly back up Fifth Avenue and along the green sun-drenched edge of Central Park. The air is so Manhattan - manure (all the carriage horses are eating their buckets of oats), hot dogs and the warm urine smell that comes up from every pavement grate.

"I love the way Manhattan fits together, " says Raph later, "The grid system. I love how easy everything is to find. "

"I love the side dishes, " sighs Chloë.

"Side dishes? "

"I mean I love the way everything comes with chocolate milk and fries. "

"It doesn't come with it, " Raph points out, "That's just how you always order it. "

Then it's off to the baseball game. We take the subway to Shea Stadium and then - just like the movies - guys constantly walking through the crowd offering all manner of side orders. We have little idea of what's going on in the actual game though, and Jonathan has to restrain his desire to compare every element unfavourably to cricket.

But then we get the moment we're waiting for: a previously-benched hitter comes on for the final inning and as one, the crowd rises to its feet to hurl abuse. Native New Yorkers by now, we enthusiastically join their screams of "Cheat " and "Steroids " and "Disgrace " even though we haven't a clue what the poor man has done wrong.

Teen tricks

The thing to remember about teenagers, just like toddlers, is that they don't know what they want. The big difference - and the one that makes them harder to travel with - is that they think they do. So you need to trick them into thinking that they're making all the choices and decisions.

1 Teach them to use the subway, then take a deep breath and let them do it. Time off for you, independence and a proper sense of travelling for them.

2 Check out in advance where the good vinyl record/CD/grunge clothes stores are. Teenagers don't like to be dragged around in the heat but they are desperate to shop. We wished we'd let our two loose on the bit of Broadway where Yellow Rat Bastard (478 Broadway) and a whole lot of similar stores are, a bit earlier. They were in heaven, and could easily have spent a day there.

3 American food can be ideal teenager food. The choice, the fries, the sauces, the staggering portions. We went to a couple of lovely places for breakfast - Café Café (470 Broome Street) had a wholesome muesli vibe; and Florent (69 Gansevoort Street) is famously good if you want the real shiny American diner experience. But actually the sensationally cheap little diners (on just about every street) were every bit as exciting to our kids.

4 Jet lag is your friend. Teenagers wake up earlier in NY. It is even possible to get them out of the hotel by 10am.

5 Reconcile yourself right now to the fact that - even though they're in a new country with a million exciting new experiences awaiting them - they're going to spend a great deal of time watching TV. Yes, American TV just like they watch at home. Forced to choose between a trip to the Guggenheim and a repeat of a Simpsons episode they've seen a hundred times, try not to weep too hard as they plump for the latter.