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Chapter Two THE BOY IN THE TOTTENHAM HOTSPUR ROOM

The Pidgeons 1981–1987

We bought this house from a man called John Pidgeon.

Just walk through the hall and into the kitchen and immediately you’ll spot a couple of crucial things about John Pidgeon. The first is that he likes to do his own carpentry – all the kitchen cupboards are hand-made by him, with fat, optimistic little bluebirds carved in each corner. And the second is that he had a habit of not quite finishing the task in hand – none of the cupboards have handles.

Right from the start, we viewed this trait of his with a kind of frustrated affection. ‘Pidgeonesque’ became the word we used for anything where the idea was good but the execution lacking. Or maybe it was just that we identified with it so closely ourselves. After a year we decided to paint the white cupboards bright blue. It took us about six months to get around to the second coat. Maybe this syndrome was infectious.

When I first saw the house, in May 1988, Jonathan and I had just found out we were having a baby. We weren’t married but the baby was planned – though it wasn’t expected so quickly. Where was all the ‘trying’ you were supposed to do? At twenty-seven, we were young and romantic enough to feel we might have quite enjoyed the suspense.

Still, now that it had happened, we decided we had to move. It wasn’t just a question of space but also of a new start, a home that belonged to both of us. I didn’t mind about the lack of a wedding – or at least back then I didn’t think I did – but I wanted pots and pans, paint swatches, the paraphernalia of a life chosen together.

We looked at houses around Clapham but none of them were quite right. The only one I’d been drawn to wasn’t all that suitable – it was just, as Jonathan astutely pointed out, that the exhausted woman who showed us round had a dribbling newborn baby on her shoulder. Tiny towelling babygros dripped on a rail over the bath, the whole place smelled of Wet Wipes. I wanted it. Meanwhile details of a house in Lillieshall Road arrived in the post one Saturday morning. It was firmly out of our price range.

‘It looks absolutely gorgeous,’ I told Jonathan, ‘and look at that garden.’ The photo showed a smooth green lawn going on forever, punctuated with the pink, red, and yellow blobs of roses.

He agreed. ‘It’s a lovely road too. Beautiful houses. But look at the price. There’s no point even thinking about it.’

I agreed with him. He threw the details in the bin.

An hour later, I retrieved them.

We rang the estate agent. He said the house had been on the market for a year. The owner had moved to the country. It had been standing empty all that time.

‘If no one wants it,’ I pointed out to Jonathan, ‘maybe we can get the price down?’

He laughed.

‘I’m just going to look,’ I told him, ‘just on my own. Just in case.’

‘In case of what?’

‘Just to put my mind at rest, OK?’

Number 34 Lillieshall Road. Even the street name sounded like flowers. Lilies and shawls. Armfuls of scented lilies and, yes, baby shawls. We’d been to Mothercare and bought several satisfying cellophaned packs of white cellular baby blankets. Just to have in the cupboard. They looked impossibly small. They looked like they were made for a doll’s cot. I couldn’t believe we’d ever use them.

Lilies and shawls. Flowers and babies.

It was a hot afternoon in May. The young man from the estate agents – sweating in his shirt and suit – unlocked the door and said he’d leave me to wander round on my own. A fatal thing to let me do. Like leaving a pair of Victorian lovers unchaperoned. Maybe he knew it. Maybe he knew how hard my heart was pumping. Don’t ever go house-hunting when you’re pregnant. As bad as doing the weekly food shop just before lunch. Too hungry, you’ll buy too much.

I was hungry.

I fell in love immediately, as expectant, first-time mothers do with houses that are beautiful, empty (unloved!) and streaming with sudden late afternoon sunshine after rain. I paced those rooms, the dusty air lit with magic, and knew that it was mine already. It was waiting for me to fill it with children. I could have had my babies right there and then, on the wide, dusty floor of the bedroom.

In fact, I could already hear the furious laughter of toddlers echoing round the terracotta-tiled kitchen. I could see the small Wellington boots lined up in the hall, the school blazers hanging – torn and stained – from the pegs by the stairs. I could even, if I strained hard enough, hear the dull thud of teenage music from an upper room, the slam of an adolescent bedroom door. The house wasn’t empty at all. It was full of my life, my future.

‘Like it?’ asked the young man who stubbed out a cigarette as I reemerged into the sitting room.

‘It’s just perfect!’ I said. Then I worried. Was I supposed to sound cooler?

But how could I? It was quite simply the most perfect house I’d ever walked into.

The rooms were large, light, the walls rag-rolled. Apricot and gold in the sitting room, lavender and hyacinth in the first-floor bedroom. In fact it was a house full of decorative surprises. The loo on the first-floor landing was papered in black and white striped felt, exactly like a zebra, with a silken tassel (a tail!) to flush the loo itself. The top (second-floor) bedroom was described in the details as having ‘wallpaper with matching hand-painted blinds’. What it neglected to add was that the wallpaper was Tottenham Hotspur wallpaper – blue and white shields repeated so many times that it sent you dizzy – and the blinds had ‘The Spurs! The Spurs!’ hand-stencilled on them.

‘I know,’ said the estate agent with an apologetic laugh. ‘We weren’t sure whether or not to come clean about that. I mean, it could be offputting – unless you’re a fan?’

‘My husband’s a cricket man,’ I told him, ‘but we’ve got a baby on the way.’

‘Oh, well then. You never know.’

He left me alone again and I went and stood in the garden, which was eighty feet long and clearly cherished. The magnolia had just finished flowering – huge waxy teardrop petals flushed with pink and still damp from the recent shower. Grass springy and damp underfoot – scent of lilac, honeysuckle, and the strange deliciousness of parched soil after rain. A blackbird called down the lawn.

I had to live here. The baby in me wouldn’t be born till the following January, but I’d recently felt it move for the first time – a fluttery zigzag I could just feel if I lay on my stomach and shut my eyes. Now I knew for certain that this child would live here in this house. It would be his or her house – the place where he or she cried and laughed and took his or her first steps. I went back and told Jonathan.

He put his head in his hands and then he said what he always says in these situations: ‘We’ll just have to find the money somehow then.’

We only met John Pidgeon once, at the house, to talk through fixtures and fittings. He was living out in Kent and should, we reckoned, have been relieved – grateful even – finally to be done with his bridging loan. But if he was, he didn’t show us. He played it so very cool. Years later, all I remembered about him was that he had brown hair and a beard, was a little older than us, and was in rock music journalism. Also – as he told us then – that his wife was an interior designer. This explained the rag-rolling.

We stood with him on the lawn and talked about the big white marble fireplaces in the sitting room. They’d been stolen while the house was standing empty but Val across the road had seen the burglars in action and they’d been caught red-handed. So the fireplaces had been returned and reinstalled, but badly. You could see all the joins between the marble slabs and the mantel of the one at the front wasn’t quite straight.

John Pidgeon agreed to sell us the huge mirror that was screwed to the bathroom wall (I really wanted the house exactly as I’d seen it that first afternoon) and then he announced that he wanted to dig up some plants. The yellow rose, for instance – it had been planted for a child who died. And the magnolia, too, was of sentimental value.

‘He can’t take the magnolia!’ I told Jonathan, horrified.

I’d dreamed about that magnolia several times by now – vague, happily disorganized dreams in which our nameless, faceless baby also featured. The magnolia, with its generous green arms lifted to the sky, was already a part of my life. Trees are owned by places, not by people. They belong to the ground. That magnolia wasn’t going anywhere.

I did feel for him about the dead child, but a meaner part of me wondered whether he was actually telling the truth. But then could a person make that kind of thing up? The fact that this thought crossed my mind shows that I might have been going to be a mother, but I really knew nothing yet of the ferocity of birth and death, of everything that parenthood makes you stand to lose. If I had, would I have begged him to take the rose away? ‘Have it – please, I understand.’ I’d like to think so.

All of this is on my mind as I write to John Pidgeon at the forwarding address he left with us in 1988. The letter comes back a week later, scuffed and creased and marked ‘Not known at this address’.

Meanwhile, I go to the Minet Archives Library in Knatchbull Road – the same library where I first glimpsed Henry and Charlotte on the juddering microfiche – and ask the librarian whether there’s any way of finding out the names of people who lived in our house. She has thick black hair and a frowny face and is drinking coffee from a mug with a picture of the Teletubbies on it.

‘I suppose you could look in Kelly’s,’ she says.

Kelly’s?

She leads me over to a shelf of volumes and tells me I can just look up our address, year by year, and the names should all be there. It’s a kind of phone book from before there were phones; the first half is more like the Yellow Pages, listing shops and tradesmen, and then there’s a long list of ‘householders’, street by street, house by house. It’s that easy.

‘It’ll only be the adults,’ she says, ‘but it should give you a list of names, if that’s what you’re looking for.’

I go through the volumes – experiencing a small jolt each time I see 34 Lillieshall Road printed on the page. I’m surprised at how just an address can feel like a part of you. In a way, it’s hard to believe that those words existed before we lived here. More than a hundred years of letters plopping through the letter box with that precise number and those words on. Crowds of different people who’d write ‘34 Lillieshall Road’ each time they had to fill in a form or begin a letter.

How many people?

An hour later, I have a crowd of names in my notebook.

After Henry and Charlotte Hayward, there’s Elizabeth and then Lucy Spawton, Isabella Bloomfield Hinkley and Walter Hinkley. Then Charles Edwin Hinkley, Walter Stephen Hinkley. Beatrice Haig, Phyllis Askew, Vera Palmer, Annie and Theodore Blaine, Amy and John Costello, Joan Russell, Olive Russell, Rita Wraight, Mavis Jones-Wohl, Dorothy and Wilfred Bartolo. By 1960, Gloria Duncan, Aston and Melda McNish, Louisa and Stanley Heron, Clarence Hibbert, Salome Bennet, Vincent Dias, Gerald Sherrif, Thomas H. Kyle, Veronica and Doreen Ricketts, then the Pidgeons, then –

I gaze at my notebook, almost dizzy with the sheer number of names, the sound and shape and idea of them. What is it? Didn’t I expect to find so many? Had I even thought about it? I suppose, when your house is a hundred and thirty years old, it’s not so unlikely that all these people will have lived there. But so many different names, sometimes all at once – presumably the house was sometimes rented out as rooms. It’s a shock. Or maybe it’s the names themselves, each one bulging with a mass of possibility, each one suggesting a life, an attitude, a type, a race, a class.

Most of us live in our homes knowing we’re not the only ones to have done so. But we rarely confront those shadows in any significant way. Why should we? This is us and that was them. Their clutter, their smells, their noises, and their way of doing things is long gone. We’ve painted, plastered, demolished and constructed or converted – a loft, a bigger kitchen, a new power shower in the bathroom.

Our moments have blotted out theirs. Maybe this is a necessary element of domestic living – maybe it’s the only way we can co-exist comfortably with each other’s past lives, each other’s ghosts. If Lucy Spawton or Melda McNish – a wonderfully sharp-tongued tartan name! – or Salome Bennet ever stood in our kitchen and sobbed or kissed or opened a fatal telegram, then it’s all gone now. If it wasn’t, the sense of claustrophobia would overwhelm us. We’d be stifled by years of emotional history every time we passed through a doorway or climbed the stairs.

When Jacob was about four years old, he asked me why people had to die. ‘Why, Mummy? Why does it have to happen?’

I thought quickly and came up with what I decided was a brilliant (and true) answer – for a four-year-old anyway.

‘Because, darling, if people didn’t die, then the world would fill right up and there’d be no room to move or have fun or anything.’

He frowned. ‘We’d have to stand on top of each other?’

‘Exactly. It would be very uncomfortable and everyone would get very grumpy and it would be awful.’

It’s 4.30 – closing time at the Minet Library. As the librarian slides the bolts on the big wooden door and turns the sign to ‘Closed’, I go and sit in my car outside and leaf through my notebook again and look at all those pencilled names (no biros allowed near the archives). Louisa Heron, Salome Bennet, Thomas Kyle, Gloria Duncan, Isabella Bloomfield Hinkley …

It’s beginning to rain. I don’t know why I feel oddly deflated when actually I’ve just found out so much. This, then, is it – the beginning of the trail. I should feel inspired and excited, but in fact I just feel sad.

I flick on the radio and it’s a repeat of a programme I heard earlier in the week, about a Hungarian who fell in love before the war and lost her sweetheart; then, through a series of coincidences, she met up with him again more than fifty years later and married him. A year later he was dead of cancer.

We moved into 34 Lillieshall Road on 4 July 1988. It was a hot day and still early enough in my pregnancy for me to be feeling constantly sick.

The only other thing I remember is that some good friends of ours happened to have moved into a house on a parallel road on the exact same day. In the evening Jim and Ruth came round and we shared an Indian takeaway among the cardboard boxes and packing cases. The turmeric in the sauce stained our best grey melamine coffee table bright yellow.

We tried everything, but nothing would remove the bright yellow cloud. And then one day, almost a year later, it just disappeared all by itself.

‘That’s all you remember?’ Jonathan says. ‘About moving in here?’

‘It was a big thing,’ I tell him, ‘one of those things you can just never explain.’

Dinner at Nick and Beth’s in Wandsworth. They are a bit older than us and, I half-suddenly remember, old friends of ‘Bubbles’ (real name Susan) who happens to be John Pidgeon’s ex-wife.

In the seventies, Beth lived in Macaulay Court, the 1930s art deco block at the far end of Lillieshall Road, where it turns sharply left and becomes Macaulay Road. And Bubbles lived at 61 Lillieshall Road with John and wore gold platform boots – or at least that’s what Beth once told me. And eventually John left her to live in our house, on the other side of the road and just a few doors down.

Now as Beth and I walk up their garden steps to inspect her echinacea and phlox before dinner, I decide I ought to question her about John Pidgeon. Bubbles must know where he is. So could Beth give me Bubbles’ phone number so I can ask – as delicately as possible of course?

‘Oh, Bubbles and him, they really really don’t get on,’ Beth says. ‘But he works at BBC Radio now, I think – he’s big, head of something – just send an e-mail to the BBC, you’ll get him.’

Next day, in the kitchen, Jonathan – chopping onions – asks me what I did today.

I tell him I sent an e-mail off to John Pidgeon at the BBC.

‘That’s all? But did you at least start chasing the deeds? You need to know which of those millions of people actually owned the house.’

I tell him the truth – that I’m a bit stuck on that. Because the other day I called the Bank of Scotland, our mortgage company, and all they would give me was a fax number for the deeds department.

‘You mean you can’t phone them?’

‘No, they said there wasn’t a number for them – only a fax number. So I faxed them, explaining.’

‘But that’s ludicrous – will they fax you back?’

‘I think they said they’d phone or e-mail.’

‘How soon?’

‘They didn’t say.’

From: John Pidgeon

To: Julie Myerson

Sent: Friday, March 10, 2003 2:51 PM

Subject: 34 Lillieshall Road

Julie

yes it’s me and yes we’d be happy to talk about the house. As for who we bought it off, the name Ricketts does ring the vaguest of bells but it was a long time ago. I saw the house towards the end of 1979 – I was already living in Lillieshall Road (at 61) but parting from my first wife – and moved in in April 1980. I bought it via the ABC estate agency. The interior doors were covered with hardboard and painted orange. There was a purple carpet in the front room. I fell in love with Julia (my wife) there. We were very fond of 34…

Best

John

I ask him where he lives and if it would be possible to come and see him. He says they live in ‘deepest Kent – between Canterbury and Hythe’ and that his wife Julia has ‘quite a stash of 34 Lillieshall Road photos’ and that I can come and visit them this Saturday if I like. I tell him that would be great and we fix a time.

I bound downstairs and tell Jonathan I finally have a date to talk to someone from the house. ‘One down … and about forty-five to go.’

‘The Pidgeons are the easy ones,’ he says, as if I needed reminding.

I leave it a couple of days and then I decide Enough is Enough. I am going to phone the Bank of Scotland to chase the deeds. My faxes have all gone unanswered.

The man starts to ask me for my name and mortgage account number and I interrupt politely to explain that it’s not an enquiry about the mortgage.

‘What then?’ he asks me in a slightly ruder voice. I explain that I’m a writer, actually; that mine is an unusual request; that I just want to look at the deeds of my house for research purposes. I faxed them four days ago and I’ve heard nothing. Can’t I just be put through to the department. Please?

‘No one,’ he says very frostily, ‘can actually speak to the deeds department.’

‘But why?’

‘They don’t deal directly with people.’

‘But – why?’

‘It’s just the way they work.’

‘So they’re only reachable by fax?’

‘That’s right.’

I sigh. ‘But what if they don’t ever fax back?’

‘I’m sorry, madam, that’s not for me to say.’

‘But you work for the Bank of Scotland!’

‘I’m not in the deeds department.’

I try to work this one out. ‘But – so there’s no way of chasing them other than by sending another fax?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

I try another tack. ‘Do you think it’s likely they got it?’

‘I really couldn’t say. If you sent it through then I dare say they have it.’

‘So – how long do you think I should wait to hear?’

He takes a breath. ‘They won’t have prioritized it, madam,’ he says at last.

Eventually and grudgingly he gives me the name of the deeds manager. I say I’ll send yet another fax to him, a personal one.

‘That might be an idea,’ he says.

I put down the phone. A tabby cat lands with a thump on the desk, walks her muddy rainpaws all over my Post-it notes.

I’m driving to Kent to see John and Julia Pidgeon. I’m nervous. Ridiculously so. It’s just the idea of seeing John again, of meeting the mysterious Julia – of asking them a whole lot of personal questions about their lives in this house that I’d never dreamed I’d have to ask.

How will they react? Won’t they mind? Is it any of my business anyway? All I can think of is the beautiful garden we didn’t maintain, the fireplaces we eventually ripped out, and the sentimental rose I didn’t let him take.

‘Bear in mind it’s far worse for them,’ Jonathan tells me before I leave. ‘The one thing you can usually rely on when you sell your house is that you’ll never have to see the person who bought it ever again.’

He’s right, of course. You stand on a lawn somewhere between exchange and completion and have a brief altercation about a bathroom mirror (I think we handed over £50 cash), a magnolia tree, a rose bush – but at least you think there’s nothing to lose. You’ll never see each other ever again. And when the new owner discovers that painted-over damp or the collapsing ceiling, you’ll be long gone.

John had said ‘deepest Kent’, and that’s just what this is: soft, sweet, English butter-wrapper countryside, rolling fields, sudden canopies of trees that turn the light an underwater green as the car dips beneath. Even though John sent me meticulous directions, I still manage to drive right past the house and all the way up to the end of the lane where it peters out into a rough track. And then nothing, no space to move forward. I have to back out and turn around in a clearing, branches and brambles scratching against the roof of the car. I rumble all the way back down the track and eventually find the house, a long low cottage set back from the road. Quiet and tranquil and utterly rural. As different as it could be from Lillieshall Road.

As I crunch across the gravel, a nervy, noticeably beautiful woman with reddish hair and a plum-coloured shirt comes striding out. Julia is slim, wide-mouthed, bright-eyed – younger than I’d expected. She holds out a hand. I tell her it’s so good finally to meet the person whose walls and curtains we lived with for so many years.

She laughs quickly. ‘Ha! The sponging, yes!’

And we always thought it was rag-rolling.

She calls to John, who’s doing something in the hedge. He steps down the bank, some kind of pruner in his hand and holds out the other one. He is just exactly as I remember him – solid, gruff, bearded, and slightly on edge. But then so am I.

We go in the kitchen – a little farmhousey kitchen whose long low window is filled up with a view of smooth country lawn. Julia makes coffee and John clears stuff off the table, spreads a load of photos out, and straightaway starts to tell me how he was in the process of buying the house – in 1980 – when he met Julia.

‘My wife and I lived at No. 61, but we’d decided the marriage wasn’t going anywhere. And she went to stay in her parents’ place in Kensington – a mews, I think they still have it. Anyway I think the sign went up at No. 34 on the Saturday morning – and I went straight round to the estate agent and the house was hideous, dreadful decor and all that, but I remember still thinking it was under-priced. I bought it immediately. For – guess how much?’

I shake my head and bite my lip. I can’t guess.

‘£32,000.’

He smiles and straightaway so does Julia. They both know we paid £217,500 for it just eight years later.

Julia pours coffee, pushes the sugar and milk across the table.

I ask him if he can remember who the seller was, but he can’t. He vaguely thinks that when he was first shown round the house there was a large black woman living there.

‘Was she called Kyle maybe? Or Ricketts?’

‘I don’t know. The name Ricketts rings a bell, like I said in the e-mail.’

Suddenly Julia takes a bottle from the fridge, pours herself a glass of water, and stands and tips her head back and drinks it all in one. We both watch her.

‘It was hideous,’ John says again as if he realizes this spectacle has been distracting. ‘The house.’

‘But you could see its potential?’ Julia prompts.

John tells me exactly what it was like. ‘The front door was orange and hardboarded over with a rectangular panel of fluted glass –’

‘I thought it was bobbly?’ Julia says, pouring more water.

‘Or bobbly. Bobbly or fluted anyway – down the middle. All the internal doors were hardboarded over too and the banisters. I pulled the hardboard off and there were no – what do you call them? – actual banisters, the verticals.’

I’m surprised. ‘None?’

‘I had to put them in – the ones you have there aren’t the originals, far from it. I got them from a squat on Clapham Park Road. They were pulling this squat down – I knew some people there – and so I whipped out the banisters.’

I laugh. Because it’s surprising and funny, the idea that the banisters in our house – which we’ve painted and repainted reverently and have always assumed were original – actually came from a Brixton squat.

‘They were pulling it down anyway. So you didn’t actually do anything wrong,’ Julia interjects quickly.

John ignores this. ‘They don’t match at all,’ he points out. ‘Some of them are completely different. Haven’t you noticed?’

I tell him I haven’t but then I am famous in our family for not noticing that sort of thing (and besides I always make an excuse when it comes to tedious banister painting), but I know that Jonathan, who misses nothing, will have noticed.

John tells me that there was an outdoor loo which they later turned into a pantry.

‘But it never felt right,’ Julia adds quickly. ‘We never quite liked the idea of it, did we? You know, a loo being a pantry.’ She wrinkles her nose.

‘There was also a bath right under the kitchen window,’ John says. ‘That was the only bathroom, you know.’

‘What?’ I ask. ‘You mean a horrid sixties one?’

‘No, no, not at all. A really nice cast-iron one. I had it outside the back door for ages and then eventually a rag-and-bone man came by and I said he could take it away. But I got something in return. Come and see.’

He takes me through into the low-beamed sitting room. Julia follows close behind. There on the wall are two brass candelabra-style light fittings, with flowers and bows. ‘I asked for those – they were on his cart – so he gave them to me in exchange.’

Julia says it was funny but in those days you still had this man with a cart and a bell – ‘a real rag-and-bone man’ – and as she says it, a dim memory slides back into view.

‘I remember him too!’ I say. ‘He still used to come when we first moved in.’ I realize he was one of those things you took for granted and then didn’t notice when he’d gone. The area comes up in price, times change, people too … the man with the cart goes.

I ask John how the house was arranged. Was it split up like flats for instance?

‘Oh no, not at all. No actual partitioning. But there were certainly different people living separately in different rooms.’ The little room at the back on the first landing (this is now my study but it’s also been a baby’s nursery and Raph’s room) was the kitchen. He says that in the (real downstairs) kitchen, the brick fireplace was plastered over with a nasty gas fire in it.

‘We pulled it all off and discovered this glorious original brick chimney breast behind.’

I apologize and tell them that in fact we finally got rid of it – ‘There was no light, we couldn’t see each other when we were cooking.’

John doesn’t react to this but says there used to be a door to the left of the fireplace – so those were originally two separate rooms. And the slab of York stone in the hearth came from Lassco Reclamation Yard. And we thought this was original as well. When we extended the kitchen out over the yard, we put the slab of stone in the garden, beneath the swing seat to stop feet scuffing the grass.

Julia asks if we kept the floor in the kitchen.

I hesitate. ‘The terracotta tiles? No, I’m afraid not. It wasn’t that we didn’t like them – in fact, we did, we loved them – but when we extended the kitchen they had to go.’

Julia gives John a private look and sighs.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, putting down my pen.

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘but they were so special.’

He smiles uneasily. ‘They took a while to find.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say again and I mean it. I realize I don’t especially want to mess with their memories. If the house was such a special and happy place for them, if they invested so much care in its decoration, do they really want to hear how we trashed so much of it?

But Julia’s face brightens. ‘Don’t be silly! We have practically the same here,’ she says, and I look at the floor and it’s true, they do. The earthy warmth of terracotta with little blue and white china patterned tiles at the corners, just like the ones that used to be in our kitchen. John asks me if I remember the zebra print wallpaper in the upstairs loo?

‘With the tassel tail you pulled to flush it?’

We all laugh. I tell them that for years we used to send guests upstairs to check out two things: the zebra loo and the Tottenham Hotspur Room.

‘Ah,’ says John and his face relaxes into a smile, ‘that was Leon.’ He shows me a photo of Leon in bed in the corner of Jake’s room. There’s the famous wallpaper with its blue and white Tottenham Hotspur logo repeated over and over. Leon is about Raph’s age – maybe nine or ten – and he has a Tottenham Hotspur duvet and a television and most of the rest of the room is taken up with a snooker table. Jake would be so jealous.

We kept the wallpaper for the first few months and then, that first Christmas in the house, with the baby due in late January, I began my maternity leave. The first thing I did was paint that room. It took me a week: Radio 4, the cool white light of mid-winter, and the sudden luxury of waking in the morning with no office to go to.