Home: the story of everyone who ever lived in our house
Julie Myerson Flamingo, 451pp, £20
ISBN 0007148224
Home is very important to the novelist Julie Myerson. When Myerson was a young girl, her mother left her father, taking their three daughters with her. Throughout her adolescence Myerson was moved around various temporary residences in Nottingham. But her mother had a talent for creating instant homes, and Myerson was quick to appreciate the benefits of each. Home, her first work of non-fiction, chronicles the lives of the former residents of the house in Clapham, south London, where she now lives. She attempts to discover what her house meant to the people who lived there before her, what happened in the rooms she and her family now occupy, the emotion invested in this property.
Her family - partner Jonathan and three children - feature heavily. Her house - 34 Lillieshall Road, Clapham - is treated to the kind of diligent historical research usually applied to the nation's stately homes. Myerson does not spare us the hours she has spent at the Family Records Centre and probate search rooms, sifting through documents in search of the descendants of the ghosts who populate her house. In the property-obsessed climate of today, with programmes such as Changing Rooms and Location, Location, Location dominating TV, she could not have picked a more resonant subject.
Structurally, the book is sound, mixing flights of fancy (such as an imagined, anxious encounter between a spinster occupant and would-be suitor) with accounts of Myerson's life and conversations with those she comes across during her research. She has gathered "a clutch of human stories so touching, pungent and outlandish that, had I invented them, I might have worried they were too far-fetched". The stories, especially those dealing with the dispossessed tenants of disreputable landlords, newly arrived immigrants and dysfunctional families, are all too believable.
Henry Hayward, a prosperous journalist who lived in the house from 1881-93, and his wife and three children are the first former residents to capture her imagination, because the ages of the children coincide with those of her own. Although we learn that Hayward wrote for medical journals, we discover little about his wife because of a lack of documentary evidence. This does not stop Myerson wondering. Was she a bullying nag or a self-effacing dormouse? In the absence of facts, it seems that only stereotypes will do.
She is luckier with residents who left a paper trail, or even living relatives, behind them. The first occupant, Edward Maslin (1873-80), was the alcoholic son of Queen Victoria's page of the back stairs, and the Royal Archives at Windsor provide revelatory anecdotes of life below stairs.
The Reynoldses, a West Indian family that occupied number 34 in the 1950s, are particularly inspiring, their stories sad and uplifting in turn. When Myerson first spoke to Alvin Reynolds, he
was the charming dreamer, sitting in Jamaica, longing to be back in his Clapham home, a good man, the head of the family, a man with a true sense of home. In less than a month, he has become a much more tempestuous character - the Wicked Man.
He even opened a gambling den on Myerson's top floor. Doreen Ricketts, who lived in the house between 1976 and 1980, was a young, neglected girl, with a mother newly arrived from the Caribbean, who turned to shoplifting and is still estranged from her family. More cheerfully, Yvette Duncan, who lived there briefly at the end of the 1950s, drops round a photograph of herself as a baby sitting on her aunt's lap. For Myerson, the photograph seems to contain everything she is attempting to explore: "family, affection, love, generosity, hope, and, however fleetingly, home".
Myerson describes her book as a detective story, but what most intrigues her is the extent to which the lives of the previous occupants echo those of her family. Interspersed with their stories are affectionate vignettes of the Myerson household at dinner, at play, slamming doors and redecorating. Although Myerson's chattiness cannot disguise the flimsiness of her material, the overriding impression is of the warmth and determination that has gone into commemorating "everyone who ever lived in our house".
Lilian Pizzichini is the author of Dead Men's Wages (Picador)
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