Does this count?
I was born in Fulham and grew up in Kent. I remember three houses in my childhood.
First, there was Eastcourt Lane, a bright new council house built for people who wanted or needed to move from London. A big garden and nice neighbours.
Then there was Woodlands Road, another council house, not so new, but bigger and better, again with a huge garden, backing onto allotments and fields. These were places where all sorts of adventures were to be had, climbing “The Banks” and making poor “Mr Peg and ‘Old Ma Washing Line’s” life a misery
This guy, whose real name was Clegg, not Peg, hated children, and lived next door to “The Banks”.
Long hot summers out in the fields…
Then there was Copenhagen Road.
Local legend told the story that the house was taller than all the others in the road because it had first been owned by a sea captain who wanted to be able to see Chatham Dockyard from his front room. When we finally got the ownership documents, the first owner had indeed been “Boatswain ‘Somebody’”
My father, with two young children and the likelihood of aged parents coming to live, bought this monstrosity. It had 4 bedrooms, but two of them were about the same size as the ground floor of my current house and were eventually made into multiple smaller rooms.
The house had inside and outside stairs. Inside, they were regular stairs, but there were two sets of them, the house being on three storeys. Outside a set of grand stone stairs ascended to the first floor and to a front door that was rarely opened.
It is hard to imagine now that this house only cost about £1500 at the time, but it still reduced my parents to penury for a few years as they struggled to pay for it.
Of course, as a seven-year-old, I thought it was wonderful. A whole new set of friends, a whole new garden (in a fearful state) and a huge house to explore.
Then came the problems. A window blew in on the top storey in a gale one night. Slates would be thrown from the roof in the wind and no tradesman wanted to clamber about 50 feet from the ground to replace them. The kitchen roof leaked (it had been added to the back of the house as an afterthought, and the old scullery had become part of the washhouse (which had become a reasonable bathroom by the time we bought it.)
The yard flooded in any sort of heavy rain.
A gas water heater blew up one night, breaking windows and filling the house with soot. The house, with a fireplace, and hence ventilation to the sky, in every room, was impossible to keep warm. Any gust of wind and the whole house would shake, doors would pop open as the walls moved.
There were even darker sides to the house too. Every night loud, crunching, crackling noises could be heard in two of the rooms, as if someone was in the room with you, screwing up chip packets. The noise would move from floor to ceiling and would stop if you asked it to. Odd lights would appear on the walls of some of the rooms, glowing in the dark as if painted with feeble luminous paint.
I was a professional photographer with my own darkroom there and on more than one occasion faces appeared on photographic paper of people that I did not know and had certainly never photographed. On one occasion this happened in front of a goggle eyed friend who was speechless for hours - I was starting to get worried.
But we lived through it all and just got older.
Eventually we all moved on, one way or another, and my parents were left with a house fit for six or seven people and there were just the two of them. So they placed the house on the market, with no real hope that anyone would buy.
But someone did. A pharmaceutical salesman from Gravesend and one of the funniest natural comedians I have ever met.
The day we moved out, part of the stairs at the front collapsed. Not as bad as it sounds but still pretty embarrassing. The house was saying goodbye in its own inimitable way (or perhaps "hello").
The new owner moved in with his new wife and her children.
Two months later, a ‘phone call.
“You remember 98 Copenhagen Road?”
– “Of course I do!”
“It’s ablaze!”
Our "Cheerful Chappie" salesman had doused the place in kerosene, dropped a match and then parked his car with the engine running inside the garage at his wife’s old house – he was inside it. It later turned out that he was hideously in debt, probably "the house" was the last straw.
I drove past "the house"a few weeks ago. The road is now a one-way road and has speed humps along its length. The house barely looks any different from the way it did when I lived there for 18 years, although I know it was completely gutted and must be different inside.
I wonder if the present owners know about the Boatswain, the crackling noises, the glowing patches on the walls, the spooky images or the fire and suicide?
There are, as you might imagine, many more stories about the house - but I’ll leave them for another time.
