My sister died last summer, before her time, at 58. Her death has left me shaken with sorrow and remorse: we did not always get on. The other day I accompanied her daughters and husband to scatter her ashes on the Thames at Greenwich in south London where she and I had grown up. The great muddy waterway would take Clare’s ashes out to sea eventually.
People like Liz Truss live in Greenwich now, but in my time the inhabitants were Labour-voting bohemian types. Daniel Day-Lewis (a brattish schoolboy) lived down the road from us on Crooms Hill with his poet father Cecil. At Greenwich Theatre opposite, Max Wall performed his anarcho-comic piano sketches on Friday nights. Claire Tomalin was a near neighbour (as was, later, Jonathan Sumption). In those days, wonderfully, a Soviet Russian hydrofoil service ferried commuters upriver from Greenwich to Westminster pier – a goodwill gift to the ‘People of Greenwich’ from the ‘People of Leningrad’.
In 1968 my mother, an antiques dealer, restored the family home at 52 Crooms Hill with the help of a Greenwich council grant. Even in its dilapidated state, the Grade II-listed medieval croft went by the reassuringly bucolic name of The Grange. At the far end of the garden was a gazebo designed by an associate of Sir Christopher Wren. And in wasteland behind the house was a disused London Electricity Board substation where a man called Antony Gormley had a studio. (Gormley used to drop by for tea and to borrow tea bags.)
To my child’s eye, The Grange was a gloomy pile with cobwebbed cellars and needlepoint holes in the woodwork where termites had been dining; still, it had a history. Samuel Pepys visited during the 1665 plague when the house belonged to the alderman (later, the Lord Mayor) of London, Sir William Hooker. ‘Sheriff Hooker’ is dismissed by Pepys in his diary as a slovenly fellow who kept ‘the poorest mean dirty table in a dirty house’; my mother claimed to have seen Hooker’s ghost seated at that table in the kitchen one night.
In 1978 she sold The Grange to a Nicholas Elliott of (I believe) the Elliott shoes company, and we moved to Notting Hill. (Grey Gowrie thought better of buying The Grange from us after the ceiling collapsed on to the baby grand downstairs.) Since then, I have walked past The Grange a few times but I have never seen any sign of life: the motionless shutters give nothing away. Hooker’s gazebo still bears the inscription ‘1672’ but Gormley’s studio has been demolished for sleek tennis courts.
After my sister’s death, I felt a powerful urge to see inside The Grange one last time. I pushed the intercom doorbell by the wrought-iron double gates. A figure moved behind the window on the first floor. ‘Hello?’
I explained my business and to my surprise I was let in. It was strange beyond all strangeness to be back in No. 52 after almost half a century. I might have gone through a looking-glass world and reversed time. The owner, an Englishwoman in her early fifties, said the Elliotts had moved out 20 years earlier. I had no right to disturb this woman, I thought, as I followed her up the staircase to the drawing room. ‘I daresay a lot has changed since you were last here!’ she said to me.
It was as though I had never been away: the same black and white tiled floor in the entrance hall, the same oak beams and oak floorboards in the dining room. The owner led me down the corridor to my sister’s bedroom. Strangely, I felt nearer to Clare at that moment than I had done for some years. The room seemed to have got smaller but the view of Crooms Hill from the window had not changed. I saw my teenaged self talking to my sister. She had on British Home Stores flared trousers and an Alice band. ‘Do you like Fleetwood Mac?’ she was saying. ‘It’s their new album.’ To escape the grown-ups we often used to take the Greenwich foot tunnel out to the Isle of Dogs. It was from the Isle of Dogs, with its view of the neoclassical Naval College and Queen’s House, that Clare’s ashes had been committed to the Thames that morning.
A smell of cooking hung on the stairs. ‘You’ve caught me at a bad time,’ the woman went on. I followed her into the garden. The rose bushes my mother had planted in the 1970s were still there, but The Grange means nothing to my mother now. She still does not know that her daughter has died and probably never will know because, at 95, she has dementia. (Put another way, she would need a memory to know that she ever had a daughter, but she no longer has a memory.) My return to The Grange that Sunday had evoked the happier times I shared with Clare, and that is plenty, that is more than enough. Sleep, I want to tell my sister now, sleep the big sleep.
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