The heartbreak of selling our happy family home
When spring arrives in Camberwell, the wisteria that grows up the side of Brunswick House is in full bloom. It climbs up the length of the house, its shoots framing the white painted windows, using the pale brick facade as a canvas for colour. Its purple buds burst into flower with the promise of many sunny days to come.
It was planted 25 years ago, when my parents [William Chubb and the late Telegraph features writer Cassandra Jardine] bought the house. She was pregnant with her fifth child, George, and in desperate need of more space. Dad humoured her wishes to house-hunt, not expecting her to find anything larger and affordable. As was often the case, Mum was right, and so we packed up and moved to Knatchbull Road.
At the time, my mother would have expected to watch her five children enter adulthood. She’d have helped us through the trials of youth, the heartbreak and anxiety that comes with growing up; eventually she’d have watched us have children of our own.
But Mum was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2010 and died in May 2012. Towards the end of her life, she reassured us that her last two years had in fact been two of her happiest: she was able to spend time at home, surrounded by her family and legions of friends. As she wrote in an unfinished memoir: “I have become a gossip hub.” She stayed at Brunswick House for as long as possible. Nurses and night nurses came in and out, taking care of her as best they could. Medequip turned Mum and Dad’s bedroom into a makeshift hospital room, and a stairlift was installed to ferry Mum (and lazy teenagers) up and down the stairs.
Eventually, she was taken to Trinity Hospice, in Clapham, where she died in her sleep 14 hours later.
Four of the five of us children have since moved out. My dad has grown tired of lodgers (more on that later), and with the growing cost of keeping it going, he eventually decided to sell it. A selfless man, he also hopes that it might provide enough capital to give some to us. We – the children – had seen signs of this coming long before he announced it. The attic clear-out was a bit of a giveaway. We had private, tearful conversations with each other, all of us feeling the same way: losing the house would feel like losing Mum all over again. The two were inextricably linked.
I know this scenario is not exclusive to us: the cost of energy has increased by a million per cent in the past two years, mortgage rates are astronomical and building costs are rocketing. Many homeowners have decided to downsize, but this cocktail of financial turmoil hardly makes for a “good climate” in which to sell a house.
Now that the house is officially on the market, I can’t help but reflect on the years we have spent there. The hallway leads to a spiral staircase that winds up the house’s four storeys. When standing in the middle of it, you can see right up to the top of the house. It’s here, on the hard tiles, that my sister Dido landed when, aged six, she lost her balance in the middle of a dispute about spaghetti, and fell three storeys down. Amazingly, she was not seriously injured, and we, her siblings, saw her bed-bound recovery as an opportunity to load her into a wheelbarrow and push her around Myatt’s Fields Park, opposite the house.
There’s a large bell hanging here in the hallway. It was installed when my parents got tired of yelling “dinner’s ready”, and so it became our mealtime summons. More often than not, however, it was met with screams of “I hate pork chops!”
The kitchen and sitting room, linked by an archway, were the setting for countless dinner parties, birthday celebrations and Christmases. The sounds of chatter, laughter and clinking glasses echoing off the high ceiling were so appealing that I’d sit on the staircase and listen in on the grown-ups long after I’d been sent to bed.
For a time, Mum was too ill to make her own breakfast, so she’d sit on the sofa and patiently wait for one of us to wake up and make it for her. She’d lost her voice, so would write her order down on a piece of paper. Once, Dido and I reminded her that she’d forgotten to write “please”. She grinned mischievously, wrote “please, bitches” and proudly held it up. Even at her weakest, she was hilarious and playful.
Desperate to fulfil her dream of forming her own Von Trapp clan, Mum was determined that we should all learn every instrument imaginable. Weekend visitors would be greeted by a screeching symphony of oboes, violins, cellos, recorders, saxophones, guitars and piano. Only my older brother Oliver possesses musical talent (five children’s worth), meaning it wasn’t a relaxing sound. Unfazed by the din, Mum would usher her guests into the house, where she’d be busy making an effortlessly delicious meal using ingredients fished out of the bins at New Covent Garden Market at 5am that morning.
Flustered guests would soon relax: it was chaos, but you quickly got used to it.
Throughout the years, any spare room in the house has been occupied by brave lodgers, willing to live among the madness and be called upon for babysitting duties in exchange for reduced rent. When the house was full, they’d spill over into the adjoining Coach House (originally built as the house’s garage for horses and coaches, but now quite a lovely three-bedroom cottage). The lodgers achieved varying degrees of success: Mum once wrote a piece in praise of them, though she did remark on the “lingering irritation” caused by a girl from Yarmouth who “had never tasted fish, hand-washed all her clothes in the kitchen sink and spent her evenings shuffling around in fluffy slippers”, and the charming but reckless organist who frequently drank too much and fell asleep on the kitchen floor – he became a bit of a hurdle at breakfast time.
But some of the occupants of the house have become lifelong friends of the family. The couple who most recently occupied one of the basement rooms are now regular fixtures at Christmas. Last year, they announced to us, before telling anyone else, that they were engaged. There are the delightful Australians who named their first two children Oliver and William (possibly a coincidence, though we choose to believe that it’s in fond memory of my father and brother).
In 2003, following the death of a -generous aunt who bequeathed some money for “educational purposes”, Mum decided to build a pool in the garden. Though not strictly educational, the rationale was that it would pay for itself in the savings she’d make on holiday clubs, weekend activities and trips to Center Parcs. What began as a secret hideaway for the seven of us has since (very joyously) become an almost public space. Many infants have learnt to swim in it, even if it was too late for us. Come by on a Saturday and you’ll find extended family, neighbours, friends, lodgers and colleagues enjoying a swim, drink, chat and stolen moment together, happily forgetting that we are in the south of London, not the south of France.
For a time, these guests would have been joined by the several chickens that Mum kept in a coop in the garden. They came in pairs, and were quickly gobbled up by a greedy fox. As each pair met its end, two more would arrive. It sounds cruel, and it was. We frequently reminded Mum of this, but, ever the optimist, she only admitted defeat after chickens 19 and 20.
In 2011, following her first year of chemotherapy, my mother threw a party in the garden to thank all of the recurring characters who had provided us with immeasurable amounts of support, love and food whilst she was bedridden. There were countless people there. They spilt out of the house, onto the terrace and down into the garden.
Despite having stage four lung cancer and being just 11 months away from dying, Mum was as alive as I’d ever seen her. The house, and filling it with people close to us, brought her to life. I sometimes wonder if she knew then that this might have been the last time she’d see all of these people together.
It’s been 11 years since she left, but a part of her remains as the very essence of the house. The marigold wallpaper she chose provides the same brightness that she once did. Her furniture, mostly rescued from reclamation yards or hand-me-downs from relatives, tells the story of the family mess it once hid. She wrote about this mess once (she often used her children as the subject for her articles – which annoyed us no end), and this particular piece had the headline “Is this Britain’s untidiest house?” The huge dining table still bears the signs of the food fights my granny would have with George across the table over -Sunday lunch.
Though apparently an empty-nester, my dad is certainly not floating around an empty house. In 2020, with lockdowns imminent, we all flocked back. We’d do virtual exercise classes together, though I suspect Dad joined in to entertain us more than to achieve the much coveted “Bod by Rod”. Every Sunday evening, we have dinner together – a tradition started by Mum and now carried on by all of us. Christmas is still an occasion that finds the house bursting at the seams. We settle back into our childhood bedrooms, go to bed early and wait for our stockings to arrive outside the door.
For lunch, we’ll cram around the table with any and all who can join, screaming over each other to get a word in edgeways. Boyfriends and girlfriends visiting for the first time have been known to cower in silence when faced with this cacophony.
It’s a rite of passage that all adults must eventually go through: saying goodbye to things that matter most to you. It is time for us to employ some of Mum’s determined optimism: we did it once, we can do it again. I know that the wisteria will continue to bloom long after we’re gone, and I know that Dad will find somewhere else he loves, if not quite as much, then almost. I know we will fill it with the same -mayhem and laughter. But I also know that Brunswick House will forever be our home.