Houses and creativity: an interview

This is an interview with the novelist Jenni Mills about how a house she lived in has affected her writing.

Jenni Mills – Palmers Hill

Palmers Hill is a house on a hill in a village called Hagley, quite a way beyond the outskirts of Birmingham in the Worcestershire countryside. When we moved there I was eighteen and though we didn’t live there for very long, and though it’s not a house I have ever written about, it informs a lot of what I write. 

Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca begins ‘Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again’, followed by this wonderful description of going along a long drive that’s overhung with rhododendrons. Palmers Hill was a bit like that – you went down a tiny little lane - there was no through road – and through gateposts and up a drive that wound up the hillside between great overgrown shrubs. You came out on a tarmaced forecourt and the house was in front of you, covered in whiteish stucco and looking very much like the grand 1920s house of a rich, self-made man.

It is a big, sprawling place with about five acres of grounds. It had a very thick oak door – a modern version of a solid country oak - with a little glass lozenge you could peer through. You walked into a tall entrance hall with an imposing staircase that went up to a sort of gallery. I may have this wrong, because it’s partly the house I’ve dreamed about for the last forty years.  When we moved there, there was a row of bells for summoning servants, but they didn’t last more than five minutes because my father had them all ripped out. My bedroom was a former servant’s bedroom. Originally there had been a green baize door at the side of the entrance hall where the servants came through. There was a cook who may or may not have lived in. There was a cook’s sitting room next to the kitchen, a tiny little sitting room my granddad would sit in when he came to visit. There was definitely a back bedroom where you could have put a maid. There was a chauffer, who lived over the garage in a room which became mine.

There was then a very big dining room which had an enormously long table in it, which we used to sit at one end of, looking fairly stupid as I recall. Then beyond that at the end of the hall was a beautiful light-filled living room which looked out the grounds of the house. There was a swimming pool in my day, though there isn’t any longer. I happen to know because I’ve seen the estate agent’s particulars. I haven’t mentioned the aircraft hangar.

The story is really sad and someone has written a book about it. I haven’t read it, but it would fill in a lot of the gaps in the story for me. What I’ve heard is the local legend, which probably isn’t true. The mythology my family inherited when we bought the house was that it was built by a wealthy Midlands industrialist, who I think had made his money in aircraft parts or armaments. It was definitely something warfare-related. He had two sons, both of whom flew in the war, and both of whom were killed in fairly rapid succession. And his daughter, who was devoted to these two lads, went mad and was eventually incarcerated in the local mental home. Their father couldn’t stand the sadness of it and shot himself in the wood at the bottom of the garden. We didn’t know this until we moved in, but as soon as my mother went to buy eggs from the local farm our neighbours took great pleasure in recounting the story of what had happened and saying ‘Of course, the house is haunted’. Which I think it was, in a funny sort of way.