All houses have voices, said Virginia Woolf. The cadences of those voices shelter clues which speak directly of the lives that were lived there. Woolf herself was especially impressed by the battlefield of the Carlyles’ home in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, where the composed dignity of middle-class life had to be wrought from a ‘high old house’ with no running water, electricity or gas. It was an effort for Thomas Carlyle and, even more, for his devoted wife, Jane. In contrast, consider the different habitus of the poet John Keats in Hampstead, where ‘All the traffic of life is silenced. The voice of the house is the voice of leaves brushing in the wind.’

Half a century after I stopped living in the Blue Plaque House, its voice echoes in my head. The voice is a strained, whispering spirit. In the early spring of 2012 when I sit with my notebooks trying to put memories into words, I while away a period of enforced idleness following a surgical operation (so-called ‘sick leave’) by sorting through some old family photographs. Faces from the past stare out at me curiously, uninformatively, mockingly: the faces of great-great-grandmothers in long dark dresses and bonnets, of stern upright gentlemanly ancestors with white whiskers and tight waistcoats, of small, disciplined children removed peremptorily from their play. There are posed family portraits in sepia with blurry edges, suggestive of the hazy distinctions that exist between life as it’s recorded and as it’s lived. What were those lives really like? What kind of family is this?

I notice some things about the photographs for the first time. My mother’s mother, a thin sprightly dark-eyed woman called Katie Louise Caston, had a sister called Nora. It was in Nora’s marital home in Yorkshire that my mother and I sheltered from the London bombing during the Second World War. I always thought it was just the two of them: Katie and Nora, but here is a little photograph stuck on card of Katie aged about four and her parents and a small boy held proudly in his mother’s lap: ‘her little brother who died’ my mother has written on the back.