Julie Myerson - Home - The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House

All of this in our house. Real drama, yes, but no more or less than has happened to most people in most houses.

I loved 34 Lillieshall Road from the start but I was never someone who thought she’d stay anywhere long. And then one day it dawned on me that I had been here ten years and might actually be here another ten. Might even grow old here. I was surprised that the thought didn’t frighten me. In fact far from it – it was oddly comforting. It tempted me. All those years you rush around, waiting for your life to happen. And then you realize it’s just a question of taking a breath and daring to stand still long enough. Let your life come floating down, let it settle around you.

‘I’m going to write a detective story,’ I tell Raphael as he kicks a dog-chewed foam football around our kitchen, closely followed by Betty, the dog who chewed it. ‘About our house.’

He looks worried. Why do my kids always look worried when I try to tell them about what’s in my head?

‘And we’re the detectives, right?’

‘That’s right. We’re going to find out everything we possibly can about every single person who ever lived here!’

Even as I say it, it sounds unlikely and Raph looks suitably incredulous.

‘Even the children? Even the dogs?’

‘If we can – even the dogs. Cats too – if there were any.’

He likes this. But then his face falls. ‘But – what if we can’t find it all out?’

This has occurred to me too. Mostly in the middle of the night when this house seems to be one great big, ferocious, empty space full of secrets. ‘Then I’ll write about that too.’

‘Huh! Great,’ says Jake with his own unique kind of deflating candour, ‘a book about nothing. Fascinating.’

‘It’ll be my job to try and make the gaps and blanks fascinating,’ I tell him – hoping I believe that myself.

Where Do You Get Your Ideas From? It’s one of the great reliable questions that every writer gets asked. A huge, baggy question that we tend, privately, to smile at. Which isn’t fair, because actually it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to ask.

But, deep down, it scares us. It’s impossible to answer because we really don’t know where our ideas come from. And most of us wish we did, because then we could make sure we never ran out. But the truth is they come from anywhere and everywhere and nowhere and sometimes they don’t come at all. We laugh about the question because it reminds us of just how tenuous and slippery a good idea is.

Until now. Because I know where my idea for this book came from. It came from all the things you’ve just read. It came from a fusty South London archive and a helpful librarian who showed me how to use the microfiche. It came from a happy coincidence, a man called Henry, whose wife may or may not have been self-effacing, who may or may not have given a fireguard away to a totter, but who once must absolutely certainly have walked up and down our front path and stood where our dustbin is now.

It came from my kids and their scary sharpness, their sometimes shattering curiosity, their likeable ability to cut through the fancy adult rubbish to the gleaming urgent flesh of fact beneath.

‘my kids and their scary sharpness’

And it came from a bit of over-hasty DIY on a dark Boxing Day afternoon and a house where we’ve spent such a significant part of our lives, but which is never quite the right colour. And the fact that, in the end, we all of us have one compelling thing in common. We inhabit spaces and we know we aren’t the first to do so and we know we won’t be the last either.

I began to wonder how it would feel to find out about the ones who came before – to turn them from the vaguest idea back into substance. I wondered whether it might be possible to persuade our house to give up its secrets, to allow me to know the people, to hear the stories, to resurrect these ordinary lives – some of them long forgotten.

‘It’s not really our house at all, is it, Mummy?’ asked Chloë soon after I’d started on my project. ‘It’s like we’re just the top layer. And one day there’ll be another layer right on top of us, squashing us down.’

I smiled. ‘Do you mind that?’

She gave me a sharp look and went back to cutting pictures of shoes out of magazines.

‘I’ll have to think about it,’ she said.

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