Finders, Keepers - Sabine Durrant Page 0,4

when I was tall enough to go on the waltzer. If such visits did exist, they eventually stopped. Maybe he moved away, or got bored. Sometimes I wonder if he is out there still, but he was older than Mother, and she was in her eighties when she died, so it is unlikely.

My mother never worked, because of her condition, and I have no memory of her drawing any benefits. Instead, after he left, we scrimped and saved, made do, waste not, want not, etc. We grew veg, and collected coupons; we took in ironing, we constantly recycled, ‘upcycled’ to use modern parlance, our own clothes. We didn’t have a mortgage – my father had inherited the house, located on a main road, from an aunt. In those days, Tooting was nothing to write home about. Things have changed dramatically around me – ‘Trinity Fields’, I believe the estate agents are calling this patch now – though it’s still extraordinary to me that anyone would spend as much as the Tilsons on a house here, let alone bother to dig out the basement.

It has taken me a while to adjust to the notion of ‘neighbours’. We had no visitors from outside, when I was growing up, though our world was populated nonetheless. My mother’s parents were killed in the Blitz, and she moved in with her grandmother, a strict Victorian, in Eastbourne. As a child she escaped her surroundings (sadness, fear, relentless boredom) by colouring them in with her imagination, and it was a habit she never lost. All her significant relationships were with creatures, both real and imaginary. She had a vast collection of woodland-related ornaments – rabbits a particular favourite – and she talked about hedgehogs and birds and foxes as if she knew them individually. ‘Mr Hedgehog’s been sent out on his ear to find some worms.’ ‘Oh look, cheeky Rufus Robin’s come to see what’s what.’ If anything went missing in the house it was blamed on the Borrowers, the family of miniature humans who lived behind the skirting boards. She talked about them so often that when, visiting a school friend, I happened upon Mary Norton’s novel, I embarrassed myself, and was subsequently the object of much scorn in the playground, by insisting the book was written about our house. You could pull a room to pieces in search of the lost item – a sock or a protractor, say – but if you found it, it wasn’t down to your efforts but those of an invisible lodger called St Christopher. For anything more serious we called on our guardian angels – we had one each. It was mine, incidentally, not my mother, who sat by my hospital bedside after the removal of my tonsils.

Does it sound charming? It wasn’t actually. It was more of a tyranny. Every item in the house had an animus. She would never leave an egg alone in the box ‘in case it was lonely’, and we used loose tea to prevent the upsetting tearing of conjoined teabags. The cushions on our sofa sat in preordained family groups; soft toys and old clothes were never thrown out. In my treasured box of Caran d’Ache, each pencil was worn down to the same level, even the white; she made me use each implement equally so as not to hurt any feelings.

Someone – a young doctor who visited her at home once and noticed her distress at taking a single tablet – told me it was a psychological disorder. Acute empathy of that kind, he said, wasn’t easy; it was linked to over-sensitivity to slights. We agreed it was a reaction to her illness, the isolation of it. But I’ve thought hard about this recently. Ailsa says it explains a lot about me. It’s probably generic, a family trait.

At first it seemed as if I would escape. ‘The clever one’ in relation to my sister – ‘the pretty one’ – I left school for university, King’s College London, the lucky generation that got it all free. I lived in halls, and then in student digs near Elephant and Castle, and had finished my degree and begun a doctorate when two things happened: my mother’s ill health flared, and my sister decided she had had enough of being the main carer. As a result of both, I moved back home.

I was in trouble anyway. Like all family myths, my reputation as ‘the clever one’ had turned out to be an exaggeration. ‘The slightly