Author Vanessa Beaumont on how an inherited house became a character she has fallen in love with
My novel, The Other Side of Paradise, begins in 1921 with a young American woman of substantial means and impeccable credentials marrying into an English family in decline. This family, undoubtably grand but with dwindling finances and an uncertain future, has a house in the north, a Palladian pile, teetering on the edge of wild, untended moorland. The marriage falters, and so does my central character’s relationship with the house, Harehope. She struggles to feel a sense of ownership when it has existed for so long without her and her money, though of course that is put to good use. In essence the house, Harehope, is a character in the novel as real as any other, that Jean Warre, my heroine if you like, must react against, must battle with. And when she goes to the South of France, a burgeoning world of artists and writers, where lavender runs riot on a lawn that runs down to the sparkling Mediterranean below, the conflict between these two worlds – between duty, on the one hand, and freedom on the other – is one that she must confront.
I loved imagining these houses in the novel and creating two entirely different worlds: the faded elegance of Harehope, the house in the North, where generations of one family had lived, loved, squabbled and squandered, thrived and survived, in contrast to the promise and lure of the house in Antibes, where the culture, the climate, the people were so new to her, and so instantly magnetic. The novel even comes complete with a fabulous decorator, Constance Holmes, a sort of Nancy Lancaster figure who had I such joy in writing, not least because I knew I’d love her company – and her taste even more.
Literature is rich with grand house laden with the past but with future's uncertain, that I have always found irresistible: the pull of Brideshead on the Marchmain children, and of course on Charles Ryder – “I had been there before’; ‘Last night I dreamed ….’ of Manderley and the gothic battle for its soul, guarded fiercely by Mrs Danvers in Rebecca; even now Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn – pumped with electro-pop and sex and drugs, but still drawing on the eternal lure of the ‘big house’. I am just rereading one of my childhood favourites – Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase – and my nine-year-old son is being drawn in, just as I was thirty years ago, by ‘the great rosy glittering façade of WIlloughby Chase, with every window shining a golden welcome’, by the chill of its frozen park and the eery call of wolves at its gates.
I have my own story of a house – a house I now feel is a friend, who I have come to know and love. A relationship where first impressions were made that were then changed, where there are faults and imperfections on both sides, but where the story is, in essence, a love story, and if my house were a character, as the one in my novel is, it’s a character that has captured my heart.
My husband and I took on his grandfather’s house, Bywell Hall, a Palladian house built in 1752 to designs by James Paine, just before lock down. After a period where its future was uncertain, where we had to wonder, could it be brought back to life? Could it work for a family in the 21st century, after years of being mothballed? How would it respond to us? To constant noise, to children, to laughter and tears, to all the bustle and chaos of a young family pushing out the ghosts and bringing life back in. When I first met my husband, aged 22, with no idea of where my future lay, let alone the house’s, I remember him taking a group of us around it. It was shuttered and dark inside, paintings in crates in one room; another room, when the door was pushed open, was just a pile of mattresses stacked to the ceiling and undoubtedly home to a not-insubstantial family of mice and a dead pigeon. He would prise open a shutter, plug in an old lamp, and we would look around an abandoned room where dust had lain undisturbed for years. When I look back on this scene now, the fact that he took us around this forgotten house meant something quite important. The house would one day play a part in our story, would become a character in our tale.
Years passed, we got married, the house lay empty, we had one child, then two, then a third. We were living in London but spending every weekend and holiday and spare minute we could in Northumberland, but all the while taking over more and more space in my parent’s in law’s house, with the chaos and mass of stuff that three small children inevitably brings. And so, one day, we decided it was time. The room of mattresses was cleared, the crates of paintings prised open, the box upon box of old lamps, ceramics, china, old curtains, were opened up, shaken out, dusted off. A 1970s pine kitchen that had been my husband’s grandfather’s was pulled out, its false ceiling dismantled to reveal a beautiful Georgian cornice. A kitchen was put in, and an Aga, curtains hung, a huge oak table found in the garage was sanded down, the study hung with paintings of his and mine, and shelves filled with books (and complete with the absolute essential, a telly), we reorganised the library – total heaven for me – and a scrappy but vital playroom created from old sofas and long-overlooked armchairs and tartan rugs. The untold joy of the first supper cooked in our new family kitchen gave the house breath in its lungs.
And then came March 2020. Twelve weeks were spent in lockdown living here, home-schooling and working, but also watching spring come, leaves grow, flowers bloom… and we have never looked back. And now, when I look up at the portraits of my husband’s family – for I am in one sense the outsider in this house, the interloper who has come in – I hope that, though they might find our taste in music and food and the Pilates mats of lockdown a little confusing, that they would give a nod of approval.
Because it’s a home, with a heart, and it’s a character that I’ve undoubtedly fallen in love with.
The Other Side of Paradise by Vanessa Beaumont is published 9th May by Oneworld in hardback; £20.
Tom Griffiths1/20In the drawing room a painting by American old master John Singleton Copley hangs over the fireplace. At the far end of the room is a family portrait by John Hoppner. The family rehung the art and ‘softened’ the feel of the room.
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Tom Griffiths3/20The chairs in the library are Gillows, recovered by the family when they moved in. The bookcases came from another family house that was sold.
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Tom Griffiths6/20The tapestry supposedly belonged to Napoleon's daughter and depicts fictionalised views of Versailles. The bar is a Cassoni, a Renaissance wedding casket with Florentine panels.
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Tom Griffiths8/20Pictures waiting to be hung in the hall.
Tom Griffiths9/20The dining area of the kitchen. The curtains are in a fabric by Jean Monro.
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Tom Griffiths17/20Vanessa on the steps of Bywell Hall.
Tom Griffiths18/20The family's fishing hut.
Tom Griffiths19/20Rita Konig advised Vanessa on the blue paint.
Tom Griffiths20/20The table in the fishing hut set for lunch.
