Diary – 26 March 2005

We have just moved back into the house I grew up in. It’s at Sissinghurst in Kent and my father lived there until his death last September, or at least in one part of it. The whole house and garden belongs to the National Trust, but when my father gave it to them in 1967, part of the agreement was that he and any of his descendants ‘however remote’ could live there for ever and a day.

It is a slightly strange experience. The house, of course, is overwhelmingly parental: his furniture, his books, his files, his pictures, his whole habit of being. In one or two of the files, there are little yellow Post-Its stuck in significant places, put there, I guess, in the early 1980s. I catch myself tidying up, not because I mind the mess our family creates but because he would have. Boots in the hall, old cups of coffee, dog beds, last night’s washing-up: all of this would have summoned from him that particular, half-audible, rather sibilant under-the-breath whistling, usually a tune from My Fair Lady, which was the signal of contained rage.