This week's BBC Radio 4 book of the week featured Margaret Forster's novel 'My Life in Houses' and reveals why houses mean so much more to her than bricks and mortar.
‘I was born in 1938, in the front bedroom of a house in Orton Road, on the outer edges of Raffles, a council estate. I was a lucky girl.'
So begins Margaret Forster's upwardly mobile journey through the houses she's lived in, from the sparkling new council house, built as part of a utopian vision by Carlisle City Council, to her beloved London house of today, via Oxford, Hampstead and the Lake District. In each place, she explores the emotions a house can stir up: the ways in which it may be dearly loved or despised.
Safe as houses
Sometimes she touches on aspects of social history as revealed by the stripping of floorboards and the ripping out of old fireplaces. There are tales of awful builders and noisy neighbours, and touching details about the author’s encounters with cancer.
Rejecting the unhelpful battle metaphors associated with the disease, she prefers to compare the body to a house that can deteriorate, or have ‘a touch of woodworm, or dry rot’. Today, as Forster's struggle with cancer continues, she reflects the importance of home, and why, inside her own home, she can cope.
Read by Sian Thomas, these five episodes of
My Life in Houses were first broadcast on the Radio 4
Book of the Week series 24-28 Nov 2014. There are four weeks left to listen to the five podcasts:
- I Was a Lucky Girl Margaret is born in the front bedroom of a sparkling new council house in Carlisle. ‘It was a good house to come home to.’
- A Room on One's Own The studious young Forster makes it to Oxford, and a 'room of one's own'.
- In Need of Modernisation The wreck that becomes the family home.
- Secure and Safe After the thrills of 60s London living, a fairytale cottage offers refuge.
- Inside My House, I Can Cope As Forster's struggle with cancer continues, she reflects on the importance of home.
