House of Fiction by Phyllis Richardson

Author:Phyllis Richardson [Richardson, Phyllis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783523818
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2017-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

It satisfied in them the longing for a particular place, a home, which is common among our upper and middle classes, and some of them transmitted that longing to their descendants, who have lived on into an age where it cannot be gratified.64

We may quibble with the class distinction, but the sentiment is one that had been crystallising for Forster since he first held it to the light in Howards End. He kept the nursery table from Battersea Rise, an oval of dark walnut, six feet by four, with, according to the nursery nurse of the time, no ‘nasty corners for her children to knock their heads against’.65 Forster passed it on to the grandson of his friend and lover Bob Buckingham many years later.66 The house was demolished in 1907, he explains, ‘at a time when development was unusually ruthless’.67

Forster’s connections with particular houses had other reinforcement. His father worked for the London architectural firm of Arthur Blomfield in around 1870, only a few years after Thomas Hardy had left the office. One of Eddie’s few achievements was West Hackhurst, a house designed for his sister Lauren at Abinger Hammer, near Weybridge in Surrey. Forster had visited the house frequently since he was a child, and it was there that he lived with his mother for twenty years from 1925. After her death, he was forced to give up the tenancy, another blow to his ‘longing for place’. However, this occurred many years after he published his paean to the ancestral home.

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