Most homeowners are content keeping in with the in crowd, but not our interviewees. These pariahs have a different modus operandi. Namely, they get their jollies by recreating time periods in their homes. A bathroom from the seventies, a kitchen from the thirties, an 1880s airing cupboard. It takes all sorts, as they say. Or as our first couple the Thomases would say, waxing 1920s: "That's our weakness now."
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Mr. and Mrs. Thomas own a terrace house in Lewisham. Their living room, a shrine to the roaring twenties, is littered with evocative paraphernalia ranging from a hand-cranked gramophone to vintage curling tongs.
I sat down with Mr. Thomas while Mrs. Thomas prepared tea in the kitchen. The man looked uncomfortable. He had encouraged me to take a seat, but when I planted myself in the Wassily Chair, he started to sweat.
Then Mrs. Thomas entered the room, dancing the Charleston with the tea tray in her hands.
"Sugar, Mr. Paperson?" she asked, in a sing-song voice. She hopped towards us and stumbled on the Persian rug. The teacups went flying and hit the floorboards with a smash. Mr. Thomas started. He was pale. My news sense screamed "human interest"!
"Mr. Thomas, are you concerned about the cost of all these antiques?" I asked.
"No, dear," he replied, by dint of habit, then snapped to: "Cost? Absolutely not. Hang the expense!"
He picked up a newspaper and marched out the door to the back garden.
"Where are you going?" I called.
He shouted back, "To see a man about a dog."
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The next couple had recreated a child's bedroom, 1940s style. It looked run-of-the-mill until I spotted their prize antique: a genuine 1940s child. George was a bouncing 80-something and ostensibly spent his days in a rocker and napping.
Mrs. Wilson smiled, shaking her head, and said, "They're cute at this age."
"Indeed," I returned, at a loss for words.
She then rattled a bag of boiled sweets at the old man, which woke him up. My news sense was screaming "human interest"!
I turned to George and asked him: "George, aren't you humiliated by all of this? Don't you feel that you're being infantilised?"
George sat in repose for a moment, seeming to mull over my questions. Then, hitting on an answer, he fell back to sleep.
Despite appearances, this meeting went better than my first foray into the 1940s. A reading room had been renovated in the style of World War Two by a German couple. I made a hasty exit after hearing the wall behind the bookcase sneeze.
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My final encounter called me to a residence in the midlands. The owners sent us notice they were living in the '60s, lock, stock, and barrel. Not only the decor, but lifestyle and mores too. The door was answered by a bull-necked man in a tunic. He uttered some nonsense in old English (something about "thy" and "ere", or was it thigh and ear?). It hit me then: these people were not living in the 1960s. They were living in the 1060s.
The bull-necked man expressed apprehension at having visitors. The England of the eleventh century is far removed from its modern-day counterpart. He didn't think I'd understand. What I mostly didn't understand was his manner of speaking. His dialect was somewhere between Beowolf and a television adaptation of Shakespeare. What's more, he kept ending sentences with the phrase "and all that" and chuckling to himself.
I was led to a dungeon where a handless boy was eating a loaf of bread, rather precariously, by pinning it between his two stumpy appendages and tearing off chunks with his teeth.
"What on earth is this?" I asked my guide.
"That's my son," he answered, thankfully switching to his native dialect, so I could write a coherent article later.
"We caught him stealing a chicken from the coop a few months ago," he continued. "Justice is swift here. Off came his dannies."
"That's horrific."
"Well, he's a first-time offender. Next time, he'll be hanged."
My news sense screamed, "Go home, Paperson!"
So I did.
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