A woman who wears her homes like garments

Depending on your approach, home is where your heart is, where you hang your hat, or possibly where you hang yourself. Our homes reflect our characters, social milieux and finances, but we also reflect them. Leonard Woolf wrote that a house ‘has an immense influence on its inhabitants’, and contended that Monk’s House (where he lived with Virginia Woolf from 1919–1941) was ‘the most powerful moulder’ of how they had lived their lives.

Taking a lead from this notion, Margaret Forster has produced a memoir focussing on the homes she has lived in throughout her 76 years. This is no history of the buildings or who came before, like Julie Myerson’s Home. Reading it is a gentle experience — like sitting down for tea with a highly intelligent woman and chatting, not so much about ‘a room of one’s own’ as ‘a home of one’s own’. Forster is innately modest; the 25 novels, nine biographies and memoirs, the films and awards are skated over in pursuit of what her homes have meant to her. Even the people who share these houses are sometimes incidental — husband, parents and children glide in and out of the story when they are relevant. It is the places and how they inhabit us that provide the focus.

If we are moulded by our homes, then those from our childhood surely leave the most powerful imprint. Forster’s descriptions of her early years in Carlisle are among the strongest in the book. ‘I was born on 25 May 1938, in the front bedroom of a house in Orton Road, a house on the outer edge of Raffles, a council estate. I was a lucky girl.’

Lucky or not, Forster didn’t think so at the time.