House sitting
The end of July and the peak weeks for the house sitter. As the rest of the world heads towards heat and sun, the pale house sitter turns his key in some London pile, locates the garden hose, settles – routine, minimal tasks performed - in quiet back gardens and resumes seeing what of his London acquaintances and friends remain in the capital. There is one house I’ve been going to for thirty years now. What I love is the relative silence of its garden, interrupted (if at all) by the occasional noise of a weekend barbecue happening a street or two away, and punctuated by the regular thump of the apples as they drop from a high tree onto the lawn.
My one time agent once approached the National Theatre with an idea for a play and the Literary Manager, whom I didn’t know and had never met, said, ‘Ah, the house sitter..’ leading me to wonder how this playwright will be remembered, if at all. There had been an article in the Weekend Guardian about me as house sitter, reproduced elsewhere on this site. He’d read it. As did my old friend Nina Bawden, the novelist (see the previous essay), who rang to tell me one Saturday morning in Provence, where I was then staying (house sitting). Nina, I know, was writing a novel about a house sitter when she died. I like to think it was something to do with me, though her central character seemed rather well heeled. My main advice to any house sitter, I used to say to her when she asked me about my itinerant life, would be, ‘Always keep on top of your washing.’ There are others, of course: ‘Keep off the booze.’ I like owners (usually friends) who say, ‘The really good wine is in the bottom racks,’ and leave it there, without further instructions. ‘Pay and report any breakages,’ is important. My first time at Nina’s I started using a rather faded and old looking dinner service, with the sense, at least, not to put it through the dishwasher. It survived my many months at her place. When she returned and realised what I had been doing, she said, ‘Oh, it’s the most valuable thing in the house. It’s French Eighteenth century’ – and, years later, is an item I have just written into the latest radio play.
The house sitting came with the writing. The first summer of my full time writing life a friend, Peter Biggs, whom I had taught with and had gone on to be an Education Adviser in Wiltshire, asked me down his absence to look after his many terra-cotted plants on his terraced garden (he hated lawns) that lead down to the – then – overgrown and stagnant Kennet and Avon Canal. It was the hot summer of 1976 and I remember driving there (in an MG Midget) listening to Joe Walsh’s ‘Life’s been good to me so far.’ It was the start of what we might call the defining era of my life. I was twenty nine, getting going as a writer, with many plays ahead of me. And many houses. My friend, now in his eighties, has just moved into an old people’s residential complex, not far from that house and terrace. I rang him this week. I loved his, then, cool North facing sitting room with its inappropriate blue wall paper, his many prints and pictures, and vast polished kitchen table (which went in a move long ago). I am just about to buy two pictures from him and, should he pre-decease me, they will be a memory of him, that summer, and listening in that cool room to Peter Gabriel on a slick hi-fi.
Twenty years on from that Wiltshire stay, Nina, who lived in some elegance in Islington, told me she and her husband were going travelling for up to eighteen months. ‘Would I - ?’ It was a wonderful time. Work was not going well but I was compensating with a sociable-ness of which one wise friend said (retrospectively and bleakly) ‘It wasn’t you.’ Well, it was for a bit. Gay clubs, a lot of boozing, some drugs. Both Nina and her husband Austen are now dead so I can reveal there was sex only once on the premises – in the shower actually. A nineteen or thirty eight bus whisked you from close to the front door into the centre of London and its flesh pots. I was ‘looking after’ a raft of brilliant young writers at the National at that time. I remember David Eldridge, who features elsewhere in these pages (and I had better say in this context is straight) missing his last train back to Essex, and sleeping on the sofa. I felt I needed to get him out before the cleaner, Jo (who could be a misery) arrived at nine. But that was OK. One thing I learned about those young playwrights was that work came first with them in a way that was not true for me then. David was back at his desk in Romford early, and Nina – later - was rather pleased that a playwright whose work she had seen at the Almeida had used her sofa. She was less pleased with a boyfriend of mine who had a habit of ringing late. It was the days just before the ubiquity of mobile phones and I had given Joe Nina’s number in the hope of his contacting me there. He did so, drunk from a pub, got Nina in bed (I had left the previous day), and then – no doubt thinking he had dialled a wrong number - rang her again. ‘What did you do?’ I asked her. ‘I told him to piss off’ the author of ‘Carrie’s War’ said.
Those were the great years of Gay Pride (before it became too commercial). I’d go with Evan Davis and others – and our whistles and (his) early mobile phone. After the Central London march, within a mile or so of those gatherings in Clapham or Victoria Park, the tubes were packed with brutally short haired men (and women) in ripped jeans and strange body piercings. The disappointment came on the way home as the carriages thinned out and resumed their normal look. Afterwards I’d sit in Nina’s garden which went down to the Regent’s Canal with, no doubt, a last drink, watching the high summer day fade – happy.
After Nina’s I lived, off and on, in France for many years, in the houses of well off friends. It was then that the work righted itself and I ‘altered my swing’ as I describe it in the lecture in this section. I often felt cut off, of course, despite the physical beauty of the places I stayed, and sometimes even lonely. But I secretly knew that boozing and getting high in London wasn’t quite my thing and I needed the space and silence – the glorious monotony and isolation of the French countryside – for any writing to be successful.
So why this reluctance to stay too long in my own house? I’m typing this where I live, in an upstairs study, looking out at France – visible tonight. Why the wanderlust? My old producer Jeremy Mortimer thought it might be my running away from myself. My friend Peter Cole takes the lowest common denominator approach, as he, close and critical, often does with me: I stay in better houses than I can afford. (He sometimes seems to have worked out the notional rental). I don’t know. The way I live suits my work. In the three weeks or a month I stay in Blackheath, say, I get a lot of work done. The phone never rings for me. There are different gardens and walks to the shops. After all these years, there are neighbours I know and like and have meals with. There is variety in an otherwise rather sedentary stir-crazy existence.
The son of one of the people I most regularly house sit for says, ‘Other people get on planes. Steve holidays in Islington.’ I detect a bit of envy in fancy free existence. I don’t pay and don’t charge, I have comfortable surrounds, visit and get to know various bits of England – Cambridge, lately; Brighton; North Yorkshire; Aldebrough . One last memory of the house sitter’s life. I was staying in Brighton fifteen years ago just short of Christmas, working – a bit harassed - to a deadline. There was a large open box of chocolates in the kitchen. I nicked one or two, in-between work sessions, and then one or two more, till it became rather obvious that there were more empty packets than ones filled with chocolate. So I polished them off and went out to buy a similar box. Which I opened and got going on again. When I’d walloped this second box, I went out and bought a bottle of champagne for my hosts, and left a note with an explanation: ‘the play (‘Selling Immortality’) was finished (in fact completely re-written) thanks to Terry’s of York and I’m not likely to open a full bottle of bubbly’ - and didn’t. The message I got back when the owners returned was ‘Oh, we left the chocolates for you. We’re trying to diet. You were doing us a favour.’ Which I hope to continue doing, whatever the obscure psychological reasons..
My one time agent once approached the National Theatre with an idea for a play and the Literary Manager, whom I didn’t know and had never met, said, ‘Ah, the house sitter..’ leading me to wonder how this playwright will be remembered, if at all. There had been an article in the Weekend Guardian about me as house sitter, reproduced elsewhere on this site. He’d read it. As did my old friend Nina Bawden, the novelist (see the previous essay), who rang to tell me one Saturday morning in Provence, where I was then staying (house sitting). Nina, I know, was writing a novel about a house sitter when she died. I like to think it was something to do with me, though her central character seemed rather well heeled. My main advice to any house sitter, I used to say to her when she asked me about my itinerant life, would be, ‘Always keep on top of your washing.’ There are others, of course: ‘Keep off the booze.’ I like owners (usually friends) who say, ‘The really good wine is in the bottom racks,’ and leave it there, without further instructions. ‘Pay and report any breakages,’ is important. My first time at Nina’s I started using a rather faded and old looking dinner service, with the sense, at least, not to put it through the dishwasher. It survived my many months at her place. When she returned and realised what I had been doing, she said, ‘Oh, it’s the most valuable thing in the house. It’s French Eighteenth century’ – and, years later, is an item I have just written into the latest radio play.
The house sitting came with the writing. The first summer of my full time writing life a friend, Peter Biggs, whom I had taught with and had gone on to be an Education Adviser in Wiltshire, asked me down his absence to look after his many terra-cotted plants on his terraced garden (he hated lawns) that lead down to the – then – overgrown and stagnant Kennet and Avon Canal. It was the hot summer of 1976 and I remember driving there (in an MG Midget) listening to Joe Walsh’s ‘Life’s been good to me so far.’ It was the start of what we might call the defining era of my life. I was twenty nine, getting going as a writer, with many plays ahead of me. And many houses. My friend, now in his eighties, has just moved into an old people’s residential complex, not far from that house and terrace. I rang him this week. I loved his, then, cool North facing sitting room with its inappropriate blue wall paper, his many prints and pictures, and vast polished kitchen table (which went in a move long ago). I am just about to buy two pictures from him and, should he pre-decease me, they will be a memory of him, that summer, and listening in that cool room to Peter Gabriel on a slick hi-fi.
Twenty years on from that Wiltshire stay, Nina, who lived in some elegance in Islington, told me she and her husband were going travelling for up to eighteen months. ‘Would I - ?’ It was a wonderful time. Work was not going well but I was compensating with a sociable-ness of which one wise friend said (retrospectively and bleakly) ‘It wasn’t you.’ Well, it was for a bit. Gay clubs, a lot of boozing, some drugs. Both Nina and her husband Austen are now dead so I can reveal there was sex only once on the premises – in the shower actually. A nineteen or thirty eight bus whisked you from close to the front door into the centre of London and its flesh pots. I was ‘looking after’ a raft of brilliant young writers at the National at that time. I remember David Eldridge, who features elsewhere in these pages (and I had better say in this context is straight) missing his last train back to Essex, and sleeping on the sofa. I felt I needed to get him out before the cleaner, Jo (who could be a misery) arrived at nine. But that was OK. One thing I learned about those young playwrights was that work came first with them in a way that was not true for me then. David was back at his desk in Romford early, and Nina – later - was rather pleased that a playwright whose work she had seen at the Almeida had used her sofa. She was less pleased with a boyfriend of mine who had a habit of ringing late. It was the days just before the ubiquity of mobile phones and I had given Joe Nina’s number in the hope of his contacting me there. He did so, drunk from a pub, got Nina in bed (I had left the previous day), and then – no doubt thinking he had dialled a wrong number - rang her again. ‘What did you do?’ I asked her. ‘I told him to piss off’ the author of ‘Carrie’s War’ said.
Those were the great years of Gay Pride (before it became too commercial). I’d go with Evan Davis and others – and our whistles and (his) early mobile phone. After the Central London march, within a mile or so of those gatherings in Clapham or Victoria Park, the tubes were packed with brutally short haired men (and women) in ripped jeans and strange body piercings. The disappointment came on the way home as the carriages thinned out and resumed their normal look. Afterwards I’d sit in Nina’s garden which went down to the Regent’s Canal with, no doubt, a last drink, watching the high summer day fade – happy.
After Nina’s I lived, off and on, in France for many years, in the houses of well off friends. It was then that the work righted itself and I ‘altered my swing’ as I describe it in the lecture in this section. I often felt cut off, of course, despite the physical beauty of the places I stayed, and sometimes even lonely. But I secretly knew that boozing and getting high in London wasn’t quite my thing and I needed the space and silence – the glorious monotony and isolation of the French countryside – for any writing to be successful.
So why this reluctance to stay too long in my own house? I’m typing this where I live, in an upstairs study, looking out at France – visible tonight. Why the wanderlust? My old producer Jeremy Mortimer thought it might be my running away from myself. My friend Peter Cole takes the lowest common denominator approach, as he, close and critical, often does with me: I stay in better houses than I can afford. (He sometimes seems to have worked out the notional rental). I don’t know. The way I live suits my work. In the three weeks or a month I stay in Blackheath, say, I get a lot of work done. The phone never rings for me. There are different gardens and walks to the shops. After all these years, there are neighbours I know and like and have meals with. There is variety in an otherwise rather sedentary stir-crazy existence.
The son of one of the people I most regularly house sit for says, ‘Other people get on planes. Steve holidays in Islington.’ I detect a bit of envy in fancy free existence. I don’t pay and don’t charge, I have comfortable surrounds, visit and get to know various bits of England – Cambridge, lately; Brighton; North Yorkshire; Aldebrough . One last memory of the house sitter’s life. I was staying in Brighton fifteen years ago just short of Christmas, working – a bit harassed - to a deadline. There was a large open box of chocolates in the kitchen. I nicked one or two, in-between work sessions, and then one or two more, till it became rather obvious that there were more empty packets than ones filled with chocolate. So I polished them off and went out to buy a similar box. Which I opened and got going on again. When I’d walloped this second box, I went out and bought a bottle of champagne for my hosts, and left a note with an explanation: ‘the play (‘Selling Immortality’) was finished (in fact completely re-written) thanks to Terry’s of York and I’m not likely to open a full bottle of bubbly’ - and didn’t. The message I got back when the owners returned was ‘Oh, we left the chocolates for you. We’re trying to diet. You were doing us a favour.’ Which I hope to continue doing, whatever the obscure psychological reasons..