Twenty years on and I can still remember the growing feeling of dismay as I read through the survey of our new house, paragraph by paragraph, crack by crack.  

My husband-to-be came to the rescue with an anecdote told to him by a surveyor friend. It’s the surveyor’s job to point out the flaws; it’s your job to remember why you fell in love. Affection is all well and good but we were determined not to let heart rule head entirely, so we called on the services of  a structural engineer who reassuringly reported that any subsidence was historic.  

Along with the keys came a tantalisingly fat, brown envelope packed with paperwork. Most of the deeds were typed and dull (apart from ours, of course, which we found utterly thrilling). But the older records were things of beauty – the elaborate, neat script of a practised Edwardian hand. This was not a particularly old house by some standards, but poring over the pages from the early 1900s offered a tangible link to the past that made me feel grounded as the latest in a long line of custodians.

The  name of a Miss E M Slade features on documents from 1907  – it’s hard to decipher the complicated text which appears to have a lot to do with rents. Her signature is there, alongside an impressive wax seal. I like to imagine her in her long skirts brushing the floors and staircase which I now set to with a vacuum cleaner.   

For me the house has been a solid, if slightly cracked, witness to successes, failures, new life and bereavement, all the time percolating a gentle mood and offering a place of calm whatever raged outside. Just as it did, I like to think, for Miss E M Slade.

LK, Norwich

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