Lift up the living-room carpet, the threadbare one, to replace it or to run a
telephone cable underneath it. Avert your eyes from the places where it has
grown so shamefully thin and look at what lies underneath. Old linoleum,
perhaps, as a reminder of the fact that one’s lucky to have a carpet at all
– old linoleum produced by those long-gone mills in Fife that produced lino
for the whole of Britain – and underneath that . . . newspapers. The papers
were placed there to give some backing to the lino, and they are yellowed
but otherwise preserved. Lift them up. Unfold them. King Abdicates. Allies
Cross Straits of Messina. Soviet Freighters Steam Towards Cuba.
Layers of history.
The people who put the newspapers there had no idea that they were planting
time capsules. Nowadays, time capsules have a rather contrived air to them:
posed photographs, messages of greeting and so on. The informal time
capsules you find in the house are simpler, more reflective of ordinary
life, things not specially singled out, but eloquent in their testimony to a
particular moment. The old newspapers under the flooring place the house at
an identifiable day.
On the day below the newspaper masthead – that actual Wednesday, June 5, or
whatever the date on it – on that day, the people who lived in this house,
the people who laid the carpet, were thinking about the events in the paper,
were living through them. There is a poignancy in that, particularly since
we know the outcome. We know about the pampered, socialite existence that
would be lived by the Duke of Windsor. We know that the allies would make it
to the top of Italy. We know that the Soviet freighters would turn back at
the last minute, and that jumpy commanders’ fingers would stay away from the
button that could have vaporised it all, including this house.
And there is another poignancy: the lives of the people who lived in the house
then are probably over, or nearly over. Houses survive generations of
occupants: we are ultimately all temporary tenants, never permanent owners.
The house’s mystery reveals itself in so many other ways. Many very ordinary
houses in Britain were built a century ago, if not earlier, so the doing of
domestic archeology is not something limited to those who can afford to live
in expensive older buildings.
These Victorian and Edwardian houses often conceal the evidence of earlier
tastes in decoration – contoured Anaglypta wallpaper, dark varnishes, here
and there the piece of stained glass that must have added to the general
gloom. It’s not just taste, however, that is revealed when wallpaper is
stripped back: the hand of the workman is also shown. Pencil markings on the
wall – measurements, lines – make up the signature of those who built the
house or decorated it. These markings have a sense of intimacy about them.
We may not know the name of the workman, but we sense his presence. I feel
this particularly strongly when I look at the details of old woodwork.
Somebody cut that piece of wood a long time ago, made those saw marks,
slotted home those joints.
Who was he? An apprentice working under supervision? A skilled joiner? And who
was it who stood in this place, in this room, 120 years ago and nailed the
floorboards down, or fitted this window frame – and sometimes also fitted
that very bit of glass, with its irregularities and uneven thickness? It has
all survived, too; survived the knocks and jolts of day-to-day life in the
house; survived world wars, the fall of empires. He who made it would not
have imagined that any of those things could happen. If you live in a
Victorian house in Britain, then the people who made it probably believed
that their world would last for ever. Perhaps that’s why we accept
impermanent architecture today, why we often don’t build things to last: we
no longer believe that anything will last.
The pleasure of doing this domestic archeology is not limited to the fabric of
the house itself. There is a particular fascination to finding out who lived
in the house before you, your predecessors in title. The deeds, of course,
will tell you something about that. These documents, couched in impenetrable
legalese and written – in the case of earlier deeds – in painstaking
copperplate, reveal who sold the house to whom. Or left it: houses pass from
hand to hand through the generations, by power of wills drawn up to prefer
the claim of this person against that, this dutiful daughter against that
profligate son.
Resounding family arguments are concealed in tiny phrases; virtue rewarded,
debts of honour recognised. And much social detail is casually included.
Widows may be described as relicts, left behind on this shore by the
departing husband. Lesser relatives may be given small interests: the right
to remain in the house until their death, or their marriage, or whatever
condition defeats them.
In the study of my Victorian house in Edinburgh, there is a mantelpiece. This
Swedish marble mantelpiece has a history: it is not the original, but was
put there by the man who owned the house in the early 1950s, a well-known
Edinburgh fireplace manufacturer. He had one son, David, who spent his
childhood in this house. David had a model cathedral, complete with priests
and bishops.
Somebody later told me that a number of the toy bishops were buried in the
garden. Why? We shall never know; the son is dead, as are the parents.
That’s a secret that the house will keep. A mystery.
Above the Swedish marble mantelpiece, there hangs a large formal portrait of a
woman dressed in black, looking rather like Whistler’s mother. The portrait
was there when we bought the house, and has remained in its place. I was
told that the woman in the picture was the widow of a 19th-century Edinburgh
lawyer, whose daughter bought the house from the fireplace manufacturer.
Recently, I took the portrait down. I found an envelope tucked into the back
of the frame. A considerate hand had written on the envelope: “About this
picture”. Inside, a note gave the name of the artist, a 19th-century
Scottish portraitist called Macbeth. It also gave the name of the vaguely
disapproving woman in the picture.
Of course, every attic has its secrets. Our neighbours, when they acquired
their house, found a box in the attic that was filled with draft letters in
the hand of the elderly woman who had lived there before them. There was
something special about these letters – they were anonymous. She was an
anonymous-letter writer who had spent hours composing draft letters for
every occasion, including one to neighbours on the other side of the road
who had taken to hanging washing out on the front lawn. That, the draft
anonymous letter said, was not how things were done on this street.
Our attic revealed a plan of the house under the regime of those who
immediately preceded the fireplace manufacturer. In those days, the house
belonged to a charitable trust, which ran it as the Edinburgh Home for
Babies and School of Mothercraft. That was its official name, but it was
widely known as a home for fallen women, those being the days in which women
fell. The fallen women came here to have their babies and be instructed in
the art of looking after them, or helped to hand them over to adopting
parents. Every room is identified in this plan: my study was the lecture
room in which the fallen women were presumably lectured on how to avoid
future falls. Our bedroom was matron’s room, and I can imagine that matron,
can hear her.
Of course, not every house has quite that colourful a history, but even a more
prosaic history will have its mysteries. The people before you, the ones
from whom you acquired the house, will always leave some trace of their
existence, even if they were scrupulously careful about clearing up before
they left. How soulless are hotel rooms by comparison with houses. Nothing
is left of the previous occupants, or nothing we can see; their DNA, of
course, lies all about, including on the pillow on which the next guest lays
his head.
Houses are different – there will be little signs of the previous
occupants, raising all sorts of questions. What was the extra, unidentified
key found hanging on the back of the door? Whose photograph is under the gas
boiler? What were they celebrating when they opened the empty champagne
bottle found in the shed? And were they celebrating in the shed? Post
arrives, too, for the long departed. Catalogues reveal their tastes; the
occasional telephone call comes through. The detritus of other people’s
lives, attached in some curious way to this physical place; every bit of it
capable of raising some questions, evoking some reflection on how we occupy
our homes on loan, so to speak.
We are temporary occupants. No matter how we seek to impress ourselves on
place, place smiles knowingly: I am the one who will still be here when you
are not. We are possessed by the homes we live in. We think we possess them,
but they possess us.
Alexander McCall Smith is an emeritus professor of medical law and author
of The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series Taken from UK at
Home by Rick Smolan & Jennifer Erwitt © 2008 (Duncan Baird Publishers
£19.99). To buy it for £17.99 inc p&p, call The Sunday Times
BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
