My Life in Houses by Margaret Forster

My Life in Houses by Margaret Forster

Author:Margaret Forster [Margaret Forster]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-09-17T16:00:00+00:00


THE HOUSE WE arrived at, in the Maltese island of Gozo, was not the house we’d thought we would be living in. That one, which we’d been shown slides of, was above Ramla beach, the only good sandy beach on the island. It had looked idyllic, situated on a hill just above the beach, with a narrow path running down to it. But at the last minute, literally the day before we left England, we were told that this house was no longer available but there was another, even better, in the north of the island. We had no alternative but to accept it.

It was not ‘better’ than the Ramla beach one. For a start, it was nowhere near a beach, any beach. The address, Birbuda Street, Ghaab, suggested some kind of organised community but the reality was a dispersed collection of houses stuck at the far north of the island, not exactly a wilderness but tending that way. The last bit of the road to it was stony and dusty and we were relieved to get to the end. The house itself, when we found it, at least looked attractively Moorish in design. It had recently been converted from an abandoned farmhouse and nobody had yet lived in it in its new form. I’d worried about fitting in to somebody else’s house, but there was no difficulty there. The house had no atmosphere about it at all. It felt blank, without any imprint of any kind. Entering it was like stepping into a vault, with the ceiling so high and the walls whitewashed and bare. It felt cool, which was a blessing after the blazing heat outdoors, and there was a faint echo when we talked. It was quite dark, the main light coming from the door, which opened onto a long veranda.

We unpacked our luggage, our clothes, toys and books, and they immediately looked lost. The furniture was basic and cheap, not at all suited to its setting. A Formica table with spindly legs looked like an insult to the living room as did two armchairs covered in grey moquette. At least, we thought, the children can’t damage anything, and there was the advantage of having lots of space for them to run around in. But from the beginning, there was no sense either that this house had ever been someone’s home or that it could be made into one, and certainly not during the short time we were going to be there. It was a house made to be rented, to provide an income for its new, absent, owners, and that was how it would remain.

It proved a strange experience living there. Two maids went with the house, twins called Josephine and Lily, who spoke little English. We weren’t given any choice about having them – they were part of the deal, and turned up every morning for two hours, though there was little to do. A great deal of sweeping went on, and a lot of clothes washing (there was, of course, no washing machine).



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