Other voices, the same rooms

I’m not susceptible to ghosts, and never see or sense them; my partner, who is, reports a mildly inquisitive nocturnal presence in our house in Florence, a town where estate agents all acknowledge the likely presence of such infestations, it being so common there. Who our ghost is or was, I don’t know; I am told that he or she has what I would have thought a slightly alarming habit of sitting down heavily at the end of the bed: just a previous inhabitant, whose name is now long forgotten, observing these curiously un-Italian occupants sleeping in his house with emotions impossible to retrieve.

But all houses, in a sense, have ghosts, and not necessarily those of dead people, either. If we have bought our houses, we know a little about the people who lived there before, not just from meeting them, but from their inadequate grasp of plumbing necessities and horrible taste in wall- paper. Before that, darkness falls, and we can only guess at the people who have inhabited these rooms and thought them theirs, who have perhaps left some psychic imprint on the bricks and mortar we are now tarting up and ripping out. Most of us live in old houses, and English people generally feel slightly odd about moving into a perfectly new one; in practice, we feel, those layers of lives ripple about our Victorian walls like the echo of music.

Julie Myerson has had a brilliant idea for a book, which as far as I know hasn’t been done in quite this way before, but whose poetic force everyone will understand. She has lived in her Victorian house, 34 Lillieshall Road, London SW4 for 15 years with her partner Jonathan and her three children.