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One of my strongest memories of the time when I lived near Hampton Court is of going to sleep in my father’s office on the second floor, listening to the sound of his typewriter and watching the sky slowly turn a deep shade of royal blue. From his desk in front of the window, he would have seen the whole length of the garden to the river. He would have seen the heron that perched every evening on the cedar tree half way down the garden, and its mate sitting on top of the weir.

To the right of the cedar was a small rose garden separating the two lawns, both cut in neat stripes. When asked at school what her father did for a living, my older sister Ann, who was then about five, said: “He cuts the grass and sometimes he writes articles.” He cut the grass wearing an increasingly tattered Oxford University or Harlequins rugby shirt and, if it was hot, a straw boater. Once, instead of cutting straight lines, he cut Ann’s name in the bottom lawn, but when she saw it she ran back crying into the house.

On the far right-hand side by the river was a line of weeping willows, where people from the pleasure boats would stop to pee when they thought no one was looking, and where my mother once found a couple making love. Now, there is a high, chain-link fence along the whole length of the garden bordering the river, which deters intruders but spoils the view.

To the left of the house were the garages, some greenhouses and below them a kitchen garden and eventually a row of copper beeches leading to the river. The gardener (who wore a brown felt hat and a striped shirt without a collar) once caught an eel in the river and put it in the water tub by the greenhouses. Later that morning, my mother went to dip a tray of bedding plants in the tub and got a rather nasty surprise.

One bonfire night, my father bought fireworks for a party and spent all the money on six very expensive rockets which he let off from a milk bottle on the terrace. One had a broken stick and, instead of going straight up, travelled very fast parallel to the ground about head high, up the lawn as far as the cedar tree, back again and through the doorway to the kitchen courtyard, where it exploded.

I often dream about the house. The form it takes in my dreams often bears no resemblance to its physical reality, yet it is always immediately recognisable. Sometimes, the river has broken its banks and the water is lapping against the steps of the veranda. Sometimes, there is a small square of wrought-iron railings in the middle of the top lawn with white marble steps leading down to a crypt. Once, part of the house had been converted into a restaurant and I was sitting alone in the deserted dining room wondering if I would ever be served. Often, I am wandering about the house in the middle of the night to the consternation of the current owners. Once on a cloudless night by the river, I met the gardener who told who told me to go away as I didn’t belong there anymore.

In dreams, the house becomes a living, conscious entity, watching the proceedings almost with the expression of a chess player who has just made the winning move and is waiting to see how long it takes you to realise.

The house is not a source of comfort. Perhaps it is a place where something terrible once happened or will one day happen.

It was, certainly at the time I knew it, a very unlucky house. The previous owner had gone bankrupt, and it took my parents a year to get vacant possession, so that when we moved in the grass on the lawns was waist high. My father’s political career and his personal life both came badly unstuck during the time he lived there.

My mother’s parents lived in the flat in the basement. I remember almost nothing of my grandmother, who died of cancer shortly after we moved in, younger than I am now. Afterwards, my grandfather went to the horse races almost every day. When he came home, he would say he had “broken even”, and eventually he broke even so often that he couldn’t meet his debts and the bookmakers sent the heavies round to demand payment.

As well as being what the columnist Paul Johnson later called “the last true amateur in the Parliamentary Labour Party” (I think that was meant as a compliment) my father wrote parliamentary sketches for Tribune and the New Statesman and sporting essays for the Spectator, forms that he effectively invented or reinvented and are now found in every newspaper. But journalism, even the best, rarely lasts and now his work is almost entirely forgotten. Occasionally in Hay-on-Wye, I find old copies of Lilliput with articles of his, still as fresh as ever.

At Hampton Court, he was then at the high tide of his creativity when written words came easily, which was just as well as he was probably not capable of sustained effort at anything other than manual work, but none of his work paid much and his debts multiplied as chaotically as the cats that overran the house and garden.

At one time we had 24. I remember my father trying to drown a litter of kittens in the river, but he was not very good at practical things and he forgot to put a weight in the sack. I remember standing beside him on the bank and sharing his sense of uselessness as we watched the sack slowly float downstream, and we heard the kittens crying long after the sack had disappeared into the mist. Sometime later from the garden of the Mitre Hotel, I saw a cat swimming under Hampton Court bridge, but I never imagined it was one of our kittens come of age.

But we lived well and there were plenty of parties. At night, I would often be woken by the sound of laughter drifting up from the dining room two floors below. In summer, socialists and literary figures from Chelsea and Fitzrovia played cricket on the bottom lawn. Michael and Jill Foot came to dinner and stayed for six months.

The room below my father’s office housed a billiards table and a dumb waiter to the kitchen below. My mother said you could put the dirty plates in it after a dinner party and wind it half way down so that you didn’t have to see the mess first thing in the morning. I always wanted to sit in it and be wound down to the kitchen, but I never did, and certainly won’t ever do so now.

The kitchens were two rather gloomy rooms smelling of burnt toast, which we fed to the pet rabbits in the kitchen garden, and gas, which leaked from the enormous black range. One of the cats had kittens on the kitchen floor, much to the horror of Michael Foot who had just come down for breakfast. (Another had kittens in one of the drawers of my father’s desk.) It was when my father and Michael were eating breakfast that the heavies from William Hill came round to dun my grandfather, but they went away empty handed, disconcerted to be confronted by two MPs or, more probably, two friends of Lord Beaverbrook.

Out of sight from the window in my father’s study was a path that snaked its way through the shrubs and trees to the right of the top lawn. Half way along the path was an air-raid shelter where we kept chickens and where the gardener once caught a rat. It was caught alive in a “humane” trap, a galvanised wire cage with a door that opened inwards but not out, posing a problem of how to dispose of the contents.

The rat was enormous and not afraid of anyone, and it stared through the bars with a look of defiance. The largest of the tom cats was brought, but on seeing the rat it walked slowly backwards, never taking its eyes off the cage until it was at a safe distance to turn and run. Then the gardener brought a tin bath and began to fill it with water, whereupon the rat lost its bravado and began to scream.

The weir on the opposite bank looked like a flight of steps covered in deep green moss, and the water flowed over them so evenly that it looked like glass. Only at the bottom step, where the water reached the river, was there any sense of movement. To a child who couldn’t swim, they were fascinating: it seemed impossible to walk down the steps without slipping to certain death in the deep water.

The other night, I dreamed I was in the dining room looking out to the river. The sky turned wild, and black clouds swirled like ink poured into water. I saw a wave coming fast upstream, and suddenly the entire house was underwater; the glass in the window stretched and bowed inwards but didn’t break. The water subsided but the structural integrity of the building had been destroyed, and it trembled dangerously with every step I took.

I suppose the reason why I was sleeping in my father’s office was because I was afraid to sleep in my own room.

My room was on the top floor under the eaves. Above my bed was a small inlayed wooden picture, long ago lost, of a circus with an elephant balancing on a ball in the foreground. Ann and I used to sit on the bed in pyjamas and dressing gowns while our father read aloud Moonfleet or Treasure Island, or poems by Walter de la Mare.

The room had built-in cupboards about three feet high along the sloping side walls. If you crawled along a cupboard into the darkness, right at the end you found some more doors leading into further storage space under the eaves. This had been forgotten by the previous owners, and when they moved out they left behind various objects which I later retrieved from the darkness. They included some wartime gasmasks and a box which my mother took away when I showed it to her. Many years later, I discovered it was someone’s ashes.

But the oddest thing about the room was that there were holes in the wall. They were about a third of an inch in diameter and about three quarters of an inch deep, drilled or punched into the plaster, and I would often wake up in the morning to find another one or two had appeared. Like most things in the family, this was treated as something of a joke, but my mother took it seriously enough to go and speak to whatever was causing it, saying something along the lines of “I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing here, and we don’t mind you being here, but we have small children in the house and if you upset them we’ll have to call in a priest and have you exorcised.” It was, perhaps, an unorthodox way to talk to a poltergeist, but from then on there were no more holes. But I continued for a long time to be uneasy about sleeping in the room.

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