My grandparents’ old flat, where I currently live, feels like the budget set of a Downton Abbey remake. Imagine if the family had lost the estate but crammed all the fancy fixtures into an apartment in London. There are stately paintings, heavy wooden furniture and rows of trinkets proudly displayed in glass cabinets despite their negligible worth. Everything has a tassle, a trim, a pattern. It all aggressively matches or aggressively clashes. Friends warned me that the flat would seem haunted; my cousins worried it would forever feel (and smell) like my grandparents’ – but today, when millennials must choose between rent and avocados, surely the positives of a free, large apartment in a prime Kensington location outweigh the negatives?

I moved into the flat with my boyfriend, Adam, last September, four months after my grandfather died (my grandmother died a decade before him). The proviso was that the place would be put on the market straightaway and that we’d move out as soon as it sold. It was my mother’s suggestion – she was sick of her 27-year-old eating all the food and filling up the Sky box at her place, and claimed to have better things to do than pick up after me. I’d have had more grounds to argue with her had she not been Home Secretary at the time. So Adam and I upped sticks to Kensington. We moved into the spare room, because having sex in your grandparents’ old bed is the stuff of nightmares or warped pornos (and the ghost of my pious granny would 100 per cent have cursed Adam’s junk for pre-marital naughtiness). When I gave Adam a tour of the flat, he commented that he couldn’t believe our luck – until he remembered the circumstances. But he’s right, it is the nicest place we’ll live for the foreseeable future. While most of my friends have boomeranged back home or sleep in converted closets, I have a library, a garden square and a wine cellar.

Of course, there are disadvantages to living in a home that hasn’t been done up in 30 years. The décor is difficult to come to terms with. Carpeted bathrooms, for example. How did anyone ever think they were a good idea? I suppose they were once the equivalent of under-floor heating, but it’s safe to say they do not age well. Areas of cream shag have suspiciously discoloured and are now as hard and stubbled as the shaved head of a teenage boy. There’s no central heating, there’s a persistent charity-bin smell, and the fridge freezes its contents (chickpea ice cream is not as tasty as hummus).


After we decamp to the flat, it doesn’t take long for me to start exploring the photo albums stacked in drawers. Looking at dusty pictures, I’m surprised by how fascinated I am by images of my grandparents and other relatives looking so young: my great-aunts sent off to the countryside to escape the war in London; my beautiful grandma – far younger than I am now – smiling with her new daughter; my grandfather (‘Popa’) studying in a library at Oxford University, where he met Granny; both of them driving down the coast in separate matching Mustangs. Somehow I’m still leafing through the captioned pages hours later.

‘Popa’ was Tony Rudd, a war veteran always ready to engage you in politics or awe you with battle stories. He worked all over the world as a banker and journalist, but was best known as a stockbroker. He and my granny, Ethne, were married for more than 55 years. She was the matriarch of our family, a strong woman with stronger opinions, which she had no problem sharing. Most of the time this was inspiring, as when she spoke about history or of being a magistrate, but it also meant she’d berate strangers for using disabled loos and once told a friend ‘not to be ridiculous’ when he claimed he was an atheist. Popa was a recognised figure in Kensington for the patch covering his left eye (in fact, neither eye worked – he went blind in his forties). Children would ask if he was a pirate, to which he’d always respond, ‘Of course, but I’m undercover.’

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There are photos of distant and dead family members in every room. The frames cover all surfaces like packed seats in a stadium, so you have to peer down to see which deceased relative has been pushed back a row by the birth of a new grandchild. And I find surprises all over the flat: the delicate trinket boxes on the mantel, for example, with romantic love scenes painted on their surfaces. Like my grandparents, they’re sweet and old-fashioned and, like them, there’s more than meets the eye. Fiddling with one, I pull back a secret panel to find a graphic sex scene in pastel: corset ripped off, petticoats pulled up, two dogs in the same carnal pose going at it in the corner. These ornaments are all over the house. One has an etching in Latin that translates as ‘Some people just like to watch’.

Simon Watson


While my granny was more into cooking than I am (I make pasta three nights a week and Deliveroo the rest), the kitchen is smaller than the bathroom – a layout that reveals how people used to prioritise what was seen over what was used, so the dining room took precedence above all else in the apartment. Here there are crystal decanters for whisky and silver candlesticks. The polished wooden table reminds me of childhood Sunday lunches and Granny’s firm belief that one roast chicken was the perfect amount, whether feeding four people or 14, as her grandchildren desperately gnawed on bones.

There are no Victoria sponges or Yorkshire puddings rising in my oven, but I do keep some traditions alive by having people over for dinner. A Chinese takeaway served at a grown-up table with wine glasses and silver automatically feels like an event. I think Granny would approve – and one unintended benefit of the heavily patterned carpet is its ability to camouflage red-wine spills. Helpful, seeing as there are waves of potential buyers peering in.

Even though I knew my grandmother was obsessed with reading, I find the number of books in the flat astounding. My grandfather used to come across them hidden in his drawers of shirts or in the wine cellar, forcing Granny to secrete them in other spots. Now I find myself putting down my Kindle to explore the spines on bookshelves, my granny’s dog-eared corners still there on the pages. The most shocking find is an unexplained copy of Fifty Shades of Grey. I block this from my mind, pretend it was surely Popa’s carer’s, its presence unbeknown to my blind grandfather. I’m mollified until I find the sequel concealed in a drawer – on audiotape.


But the most surprising find in the house is in Granny’s closet. After trying on an amazing moth-eaten Dior gown, I find a floor-length white dress hanging at the back of the wardrobe. I recognise it immediately from photographs as my mum’s wedding dress. Granny had always claimed she threw it away after Dad left, demonstrating her opinion on the matter. I had a close relationship with my grandma, but as a child, I found her obvious dislike of Dad hard to comprehend. While holding the dress, I start thinking about what its existence means... until I have a better idea. Adam rings the doorbell and I answer Miss Havisham-style, ready for the aisle. His face turns the same shade as my dress.

Granny took care of Popa when his sight failed – out in Kensington he could always be found fondly clasping her arm. It was hard to imagine one without the other, so when Granny died in 2008 it was a shock to everyone, especially Popa, who lost his partner in more ways than most. No matter who led him from then on, he’d never walk with the same confident trust he’d had with Granny. It was the first time someone I loved was gone. I cried for weeks. Popa continued to live in the flat with a carer for another 10 years as his hearing weakened and his sharp mind gradually followed. For him, the flat was the only place he could see. He knew the surroundings well enough to move with relative ease, and he remembered the contents from his past. In a world of darkness, it was the only place with the light on. Everywhere else, he’d have to walk with slow, apprehensive steps and be told what surrounded him, but in his flat he’d sit opposite you in his armchair and talk about the statue on the mantel or the glassware in the cabinet or Ethne’s book above the fireplace. He couldn’t look at them as you could, but he could still see them.

But when he passed away last year, I didn’t shed a tear. It’s not that I loved him less, it just felt different. Part of the reason could have been that I was still in the shadows of sadness from the death of my dad. (Tatler was the first magazine he wrote for, under the byline AA Gill, so even this article brings me back to him.) But I think the bigger reason was the way it happened. When younger people die it usually comes fast – not the death itself, but them ceasing to be. One week they’re there, chatting to you, the next they’re not. But Popa had slowly faded over many years as he lost his mind and his memory. He’d crept out of existence without a sudden bang, so I hadn’t noticed. When he passed away, I forgot to mourn the grandfather he’d been to me as a child: the man who took me on holiday, for whom I would type on weekends, who debated with me over dinner. The flat is a strange time capsule of broken things and dated decor but, living here, I’ve had a chance to reconnect with the person he was, to explore who he used to be and remember the amazing grandparents that he and Ethne always were. Before I moved in to their flat I was excited to have the large space, to use the garden, to host dinners – but, in fact, it’s now the flaws that I appreciate the most. I like that, to me, it feels haunted.