A dream come true

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Jan 05, 2007 

Most of my teenage summers, we'd go to my stepfather's sailing boat, which was moored in the estuary at Fowey in Cornwall. I loved and hated these holidays. I loved falling asleep at night rocked by the water and waking in the pink chill of dawn to hear the masts clinking and to smell the strange saltwater and petrol smell. I loved the cramped cabins and nylon sleeping bags and general adventurous inconvenience. I really adored rowing ashore to get provisions and feeling like Nancy in Swallows and Amazons.

But I hated it when we left the safety of the harbour and set sail. I hated the panicky flapping of the sails when we "went about ", the moment when the boat lurched and tilted right over as if it was about to capsize. I hated everything about sailing even though I adored, and still do adore, the sea.

Luckily I had something else to distract me in Fowey. I was in love. The object of my affections wasn't a boy but something far more solid and enticing and mysterious: a house. A really fascinatingly beautiful and perfect house. I spent every spare moment - when I wasn't being forced to risk life and limb on the water - curled wistfully in the hull of our boat, from where I could gaze uninterrupted at its delicious, creeper-clad face.

And it watched me, too. It stared back at me from across the water. First thing in the morning its face was in shadow but by late afternoon sun had crept all over it and turned it gold. And it stayed like that - lit-up and smiling - until the sun dropped behind the cliffs and the sky went dark.

Even without the romance of a history, this house would have been beautiful but it wasn't just any old house. This was the house that the novelist Daphne Du Maurier's family had bought in the 1920s, the place where I knew she'd once lived and written her first novel.

Du Maurier was my heroine. I'd read every word she'd written and then, when I'd finished doing that, I'd sent her a letter, care of her publishers, to inform her that I too was going to be a famous novelist. She wrote back warmly and politely. Completely forgetting that she might have other fans to reply to, I wrote straight back. She didn't disappoint me. Over two or three years we corresponded several times and I still have all the letters and postcards. One of them reads "Well done on your O-level [examination] results! " (Did I really bore the poor woman with a summary of my grades?) Another letter mentions her beloved Menabilly, the house that surfaced in her books. "I hope you find your dream house one day, " she wrote. "Menabilly was mine. "

Well this house across the water was my dream house and at 15 or 16 I was reconciled to the idea that this was as close as I would ever get to it. And then, 30 years later, all that changed. I was asked by Virago, a company re-issuing Du Maurier's novels, to write an introduction to Frenchman's Creek. I was honoured and excited, though I so wished Du Maurier had still been alive. I'd have given anything to let her know that the Nottingham schoolgirl she so generously corresponded with was, if not exactly a "famous " novelist, still a proper enough one to be allowed to introduce her work.

When the book came out, I was asked to speak at the Du Maurier Festival, which takes place in Fowey every year. Of course I said yes. What fun to go back there, show my husband all my old teenage haunts. "Oh, and by the way, " added the publicist who was organising the trip, "we've all been invited to dinner at Daphne du Maurier's son's place. It's that lovely house across the water. "

My heart flipped.

It was an early evening in May when the ferry took us over there. I smelled petrol and salt-water, heard the familiar clink of masts. When we stepped ashore on the other side, I remember that there was still sun on the face of the house - lit-up, smiling at me. I smiled back, in a trance.

What can I tell you about that night? I remember drinks in a long, low room overlooking the water and I remember glancing out and noticing the spot where my stepfather's boat would have been so many years ago. I remember faces around a long dinner table, laughter, the warmth and generosity of Kits Du Maurier and his wife, the fact that I kept on wanting to pinch myself. Maybe best of all was the moment when I went up to use the toilet and found myself alone for several delicious minutes on the dark landing with so many Du Mauriers staring at me from the photographs on the wall. I just stood there and breathed.

We caught a very late ferry back across the water, waved our goodbyes in the suddenly chilly night. And then, back at our hotel, I couldn't hold it in any longer, I burst into tears. My husband - amused and surprised - asked me what on earth the matter was. I found I couldn't really tell him. I think the person who was sobbing was the 15-year-old girl lost somewhere inside me, who would have given anything back then to know that one day she really would be a guest in the house across the water.

A very special place for the Dolly Darlings

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Nov 24, 2006 

It is a rather grand, red-brick Georgian house, with a shiny red roof, Palladian porch and a mass of creeper over the front door. The kind of house where you'd crunch up the sweeping, mile-long driveway on a chill winter's night to hear dogs barking, people laughing and the sway of dance music drifting from inside.

Well, in my dreams anyway. In fact, though the first part is true, the house is way smaller inside than you'd think from the airs it gives itself. Just two meagre bedrooms, a narrow bathroom, a drawing room, hall and kitchen. There's a slightly wonky four poster bed with Laura Ashley sprigged curtains and a bath with a working plug but the fireplaces are only painted on. The once-pristine cellophane window panes are all torn now. And, though there used to be real electric light in all the rooms, it stopped working the day I dropped a doll's plate of bacon and eggs down the chimney.

Then the roof caved in because a cat sat on it and then, because I started to grow up, the rooms gathered dust and fluff, my sister's hamster chewed the banisters and slowly my doll's house fell into disrepair. The Dolly Darlings (you'll know who I'm talking about only if you're a British female and over 40) who used to live there very happily were wrapped in apricot-coloured Kleenex and laid in an old shoe 
box and the house sat dolefully on the landing outside my bedroom while I took exams, kissed boys, discovered Abba, played tennis and wrote poetry.

Its collapsing roof was occasionally used as a resting place for piles of freshly laundered towels on their way to the airing cupboard. And one spring a whole family of kittens amused everyone by squeezing their way in and out of the front door. But gradually the place took on a forlorn and derelict look. It became a forgotten house, unloved, unlived in.

When I went off to university, it was put in the loft, where, sealed in an old black bin bag, the only damage it sustained was a slight further caving in of the roof. Finally my mother moved house and dropped it on my doorstep along with a box of old pony annuals and - yes! - the famous forgotten Dolly Darlings.

My daughter, Chloë, was five and a half then - blonde-haired, dungareed, serious, tomboyish, not really a doll person. But, just like me, she gazed in awe the first time she saw it.

"Can it be mine? "

I looked at her.

"You really want it? You'd look after it? It's a very special house. "

She wiped her nose on her sleeve.

"My Sylvanians could live in it. "

"You don't want the Dolly Darlings? " I asked her hopefully, even though she'd never been a doll person (and I still was).

She picked up the dollies and looked them over. "Tea Time " still wore her tulle party dress, her Alice band, her white gloves. "Slumber Party ", with bobbed red hair and turquoise baby-doll pyjamas, looked almost fashionable. "Boy Trap " was still cute with her long white tights and green waistcoat. I used to long for a waistcoat like that.

"Why's she called Boy Trap? " Chloë asked.

"Because, I don't know, all the boys used to like her, I suppose. "

"And do they now? "

I shrugged.

"She's old now. She's nearly as old as me. "

My daughter considered this.

"I think my Sylvanians ought to live here. But I might let Boy Trap stay in the bathroom. "

"The bathroom? "

Chloë blinked.

"My animals need the other rooms. "

And so a clutch of Sylvanian badgers, owls, ducks and hedgehogs moved into the grand house and Boy Trap slept in the bath like a poor relation. Tea Time and Slumber Party were never very welcome, though you might occasionally catch them propped up outside looking in. A rabbit had the four-poster bed all to himself. It seemed an awful waste but what could I say?

I mended the red cardboard roof with packaging tape and, to our joy and amazement, Chloë's father made the electric lighting work again.

"Now they can do stuff at night, " Chloë announced, and it was true that whenever you peeped in, the house seemed to be crammed with woodland animals clustered excitedly around the electric-lit furniture. It was a relief to see the house restored to its former life and grandeur.

But that was 10 years ago. Chloë is now a guitar-playing teenager, too old for the house and too young to provide it with the new owners it needs. And last month I came across it while clearing out the cupboard under the stairs and had to decide whether it was really worth keeping. It's looking quite battered now. The roof has come right off and I doubt the lights will ever work again.

But then I did what I used to do. I lay on the floor and peeped in through the windows and breathed in its particular smell and suddenly it was a sparkly winter's night again and I was in a grand place, on my way to a wonderful party. Forty years had gone by but the thrill was the same.

The house is safe in my study now. I'm going to look into what a new roof would cost and see about the lights. And when it's all fixed up I'm going to see if the Dolly Darlings want to move back in again. I don't think of it as playing. I think of it as property renovation.

My 'writing room is in my head'

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Nov 17, 2006 

I wrote my first novel in the (then) spare room at the top of our house in Clapham, south London. Actually it was more of an everything-else room - a big, dusty, chaotic space crammed with all the things we hadn't used for years but couldn't quite bring ourselves to get rid of. My "desk " was an old wooden door supported on two stacks of cardboard boxes and wedged between suitcases and piles of old tennis racquets and Wellington boots. To get to my chair I had to ease myself in sideways and then I was pretty much there for the duration.

In some ways it felt right having to squeeze myself in like that. I wasn't yet a real writer and hadn't earned the right to anything more. I was still doing a full-time day job, had two noisy children under three and, for almost half the time I was working, was pregnant with our third. But all my life, for as long as I could remember, I had talked about the novel I wanted to write. So now here I was - wedged between the second and the third baby, wedged between stacks of junk - finally shutting up and having a go.

The novel took 18 long months of evenings and weekends, all in that room, so maybe it's not surprising that I still have raw, sharp memories of the space. I can still see the (firmly shut) pine door with its tarnished brass Victorian knob and, turning my head, the grey view of the houses opposite, telegraph wires, purple slate roofs, red chimney pots, fast-moving clouds.

The house across the road was a refugee hostel and, as dusk fell, I'd watch the unknown, transient people moving in their separate, dimly lit spaces. I'd gaze as they walked in and out of rooms, disappeared from view, then re-emerged. What were they doing? Where were they going? Probably just a trip to the kitchen for a cup of milk but watching them lead their lives a few yards away made a change from staring at the blank screen of my basic Amstrad computer (this was 1991) and wondering how I would ever find the confidence and staying power to create a whole novel.

I didn't always get the peace I desired either. Some days three-year-old Jacob would come and stand outside my door and just breathe. "Mummy? "

"Yes? "

"Are you doing your nobble? "

"Yes sweetheart, and now can you go back downstairs and leave me in peace to work? "

"OK. "

No movement.

"Jacob? "

"Yes? "

"Darling, you have to go downstairs now and leave me in peace. "

"I'm not doing anything. I'm just being here till you've finished. "

Did Virginia Woolf struggle to finish The Waves with a small dungareed person breathing outside her door? I don't think so. Not that it mattered. As I somehow wrote my way through two long winters and out the other side into spring, I realised with elation that I was getting there. I was actually close to typing "The End ". Never in my life had I made such a life-changing journey in a single room.

When I sold that novel, I was ecstatic. This was all I had ever dreamed of. Actually, it was more than I'd dreamed of: my advance was just enough to allow me to give up the day job and write full time. But did this mean I was going to spend every day from now on in the spare room among the junk? Rather haughtily, I took a leaf out of my literary heroine's book and claimed "a room of my own ". The spare room was cleared out to accommodate all three of our babies (who were happy to sleep hugger-mugger in those days) and the tiny, bright sunshine-yellow room on the landing, which had until recently been the baby's room, became my study. I was a proper novelist now, after all.

But space and inspiration are strange things. Though I took enormous pleasure in my room, though I enjoyed filling its shelves with the books I loved, in having a proper desk, a proper chair, in surrounding myself with my stuff and not being wedged in by junk any more, still it changed nothing. My head was still the place where I spent all my time, the place I pulled the words from. And while I did that the room dissolved around me. As I began my second novel, I had no idea whether I was surrounded by Wellington boots or pristine bookshelves. I could have been anywhere or nowhere.

So these days when aspiring writers tell me they want to write a novel but they're just waiting to find the right working space, or get a new computer, or take some time off work, or for everything in their lives to be just so, I'm afraid I tell them the truth: that they'll wait for ever.

Because though I am very happy to have my four white walls and my glass-topped desk, I know I was never more inspired than stuck in that room between those piles of junk, with a toddler breathing outside the door and another baby kicking inside me.

A room of one's own isn't a thing you can buy or rent. It's a place inside your head and once you own it, no one can take it from you. It's yours to go to as often and for as long as you choose.

Julie Myerson is the author of 'Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House' (Harper Perennial, £8.99)

A haunting presence next door

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Oct 27, 2006 

Maggie and Ken lived next door when I was 13. While our house - a wonky Victorian pile complete with turrets - faced on to the street in the normal way, theirs was turned sideways to face ours. It was much older than the other houses and probably even pre-dated the street. Long, low and white-washed, its dark windows gazed out unblinking, like eyes.

I was transfixed by this house and by its occupants. Late middle-aged and childless, Maggie and Ken seemed to like having our big, noisy family next door. Maggie had bright red hair and skin like paper. She wasn't pretty but she wasn't ordinary either. She'd stand in her garden and talk to Mum over the ivy-clad wall with the house staring from the gloom behind her.

We five kids were regularly invited round for home-made chocolate ice-cream. We'd never tasted anything like it. We thought all ice-cream was made by Wall's. Every time we trooped up the drive for ice-cream, the house watched us.

Some houses seem to be lying in wait. This one knew something. I was worried by its long, low-ceilinged rooms, dark barley-twisted furniture, ticking grandfather clocks and rugs from India. Maggie said she grew up in India and as a child was so anaemic that she was forced to eat raw liver. Something about this story horrified me so much that, when I went upstairs to the bathroom, I froze on the landing, unable to go up or down. It felt like the whole house was tipping over, tipping me out of it.

"Oh the floorboards aren't quite straight, " said Maggie when she found me trembling there. "That's why they creak so much. " But I hadn't heard them creak. I'd just been terrified.

It wasn't that I didn't like going round to Maggie and Ken's - a calm relief after the bright, barking chaos of our own home - it was more that something about the actual house felt wrong. It didn't want me there. Maggie told us that sometimes you could hear children laughing.

"But you have no children. "

She looked triumphant.

"Don't worry, " she said. "We're completely used to it now. It's been going on for years. "

Our mum was very fond of Maggie but admitted she got a bit much sometimes. Mum worked full-time and Maggie just sat in her house. Maggie didn't always understand that not everyone had time to chat.

"I think she's lonely, " our stepfather said, ' "with Ken out all day. "

Ken worked for the Post Office. He left each morning in a brown coat and came back each evening carrying a newspaper. He never ever mentioned his work.

One night our parents went round there for dinner and came back with a story.

"They've got a ghost, " said our stepfather. "A maid called Lily. " He winked at me but my heart lurched. Next time we went round for ice-cream, I asked Maggie about Lily.

"Oh yes, " she said. "Have I never mentioned her? She's here all the time, probably right now. Sometimes you get these wafts of lily of the valley scent, right under your nose. "

"Do you ever see her? "

"Ken did once. On the landing. She was carrying a bundle of washing. She moved aside to let him pass. She's very polite. "

After that I stopped using their bathroom. If I had to go, I waited until I was bursting, then made an excuse and went home.

Maggie and Ken's bedroom upstairs was heavy and ornate, with a huge bed like the ones in a stately home. Soon Maggie started to be in bed all the time. Her skin turned yellow and the roots of her bright ginger hair were white.

"Is she anaemic? " I asked Mum.

"No, " Mum said. "I'm afraid she has cancer. "

After Maggie died, we didn't see Ken any more. He kept to himself and sent out such signals of wanting to be left alone that, as Mum said, it wouldn't have been the right thing to press him. With Maggie gone, the house stopped staring at us and seemed to shut its eyes.

The following year we moved to another part of town. Our neighbours were teenage boys, which was much more fun. And I didn't give Maggie any thought until years later when I was suddenly overcome by a memory of that strange old place, the way everything was infused with a sense of significance, of eeriness and somehow of panic. And I found myself wondering, was it actually haunted, that ice-cream house of my childhood? And if it was, who exactly was haunting it - Lily or Maggie?

A place that made me go floppy

By Julie Myerson, Financial Times

Published: Jun 16, 2007 

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

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

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

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

"Next weekend?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?