Danny Robins: ‘Everybody’s house is haunted’

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My first home was in Whitstable, Kent, but my earliest memories of home are when we moved up to the northeast when I was a child in the 1980s. My parents were left-wing vegetarians and we found ourselves in the middle of a council estate in Washington, Tyne and Wear during the miners’ strike. When I was eight, we moved to leafy Jesmond, a lovely area of Newcastle, into an old Victorian house.
There’s a degree of replicating your childhood home when you are bringing up your own family; my current house in Walthamstow, east London, is Victorian. You can walk into any Victorian house and know where you can find the bathroom and the bedrooms. We have an addiction to Victorian houses in this country. My wife, Eva, is Swedish and she can’t understand it. They are so inefficient, she says — and that is the worst thing the Swedes can say about anything. They lack the useless romance and sentimentality that we have. In Sweden, people buy new houses because they are more efficient.
It was at Christmas while I was back home for a visit from studying at Bristol University. I had been out with friends and I got back and felt I was having a heart attack. I thought I was dying. I literally saw angels coming down to collect me. Now I recognise this was a hallucination, but then it felt horribly real. Luckily my uncle, a doctor, was staying the night and he told me it was a panic attack. It kicked off a year of thinking I was going to die at every second. That all-encompassing debilitating fear of death lingers in me to this day, and my interest in ghosts is linked to that. They are the opposite of the idea that we fizzle out; I find that the most frightening idea of all. I was drawn to ghosts in an optimistic, hope-filled way, really.
Yep — never seen one! I live vicariously through the stories I am told.
We are all haunted by the house we live in. Whether you are a sceptic or a believer, you are haunted by the layers of people who have lived there when you remove its physical layers of wallpaper, paint, decor and design. The previous owner of our house was a proper East End widow. She had been there 30 years and her husband’s family was there 40 years before that. When we moved in in 2012, we ripped out everything she had done and replaced it with the aesthetic choices of another generation. For a long time, we had the feeling we were sleeping in an old lady’s house. Until recently, the kitchen still had all her old-lady stuff: twee old fashioned tiles with fruit bowls. It felt like being in someone else’s kitchen for ten years.
It’s a shed-cum-man cave-cum-glorified garden office at the bottom of the garden. It’s where I write and record. It gives me that element of distance from work. The ghosts are left behind in the shed. That’s important to my family. They absolutely deplore what I’m doing. They hate it. They find it very scary and they don’t want to talk about it at all.
My wife was once certain that I had been murdered in the garden. She couldn’t find me and there was no light coming from the shed. She locked the back door to protect herself from the murderer. All the time I was just sitting in the shed with these new blackout blinds. Through the back door I asked, “Are you all right? Why is the door locked?” And she was like, “You’re alive!”
Our street is famous in the area for these 90ft gardens and it was something we fell in love with. We moved in a month before my eldest child was born and we did that mad thing of attempting to build your nest before your first child. We had three builders in the house when my wife went into labour. We weren’t ready at all. We brought our son home into this building site of chaos.
We’ve been doing a kitchen extension and a loft extension. I wrote 2:22: A Ghost Story [playing at the Gielgud Theatre] about a couple renovating a house based on my house and my area. And the money I’ve made from it allowed me to do that renovation on my own house. It’s a weird art-imitates-life-imitates-art thing going on.
Pre-children, me and my wife had a basement flat in Kentish Town [in north London]. We took the Christmas tree out in January and went away. All the needles had fallen off the tree and collected in our drain. There was torrential rain, the drain filled up and all this water flooded our flat. We’d just had new floorboards down and they all started to buckle and bend up. There was this huge swelling under the floorboards where all this water had collected. That was horrendous. That made us weep.
Before I met my wife, I kept painting walls bright green. I had a place where all the wiring in the room was in plastic tubes on the wall and I painted them red and yellow and blue and it looked like a Tube map across the white walls. I was obsessed with pictures of myself. I had a portrait commissioned of me that was Ice-T hip-hop album cover-meets-Gainsborough. It was an act of total indulgence.
I lived in a house next door to the Hawley Arms in Camden, just at the point when that became the coolest pub in the country. One of the Geldof children and Amy Winehouse were thrown out of one of our parties. We’d wake up with vomit on our doorstep every day but you knew it was vomit from trendy indie kids who had been next door. The building used to literally shake when the train came past. It was like living with a poltergeist.
Listen to the Uncanny podcast on BBC Sounds. Danny Robins’s book Into the Uncanny is available from dannyrobins.com