The Renovation

Built in 1889 for the family of a tobacco clerk, the terraced house on Cotham Vale had passed through so many hands that, by the time Hannah and Sam Okoro bought it, almost nothing original was left. Someone in the seventies had covered the fireplaces with plywood. Someone in the nineties had painted every room a color the real estate agent tactfully called "heritage mustard". Having spent two years saving for the deposit, Hannah and Sam could afford very little except their own labor, of which, they assured each other, they had plenty.

They started in the spring, working evenings and weekends. Stripping the wallpaper in the back bedroom, Sam found four earlier layers beneath it, the oldest of which was a faded pattern of roses that Hannah thought rather beautiful. Lifting the carpet on the landing, they discovered floorboards which, once sanded, turned out to be the color of honey. It was slow, dusty, exhausting work, and they loved it more than either of them had expected.

The discovery came in June. Measuring the upstairs rooms for new radiators, Hannah noticed that the numbers did not add up. The back bedroom was nearly a meter shorter than the room beneath it, a difference for which there seemed to be no explanation. Sam tapped along the end wall with his knuckles. Most of it sounded solid. One section, about the width of a door, sounded hollow.

Behind a sheet of hardboard, nailed in place and painted over at least three times, was a narrow room no bigger than a wardrobe. It had a small window, long since bricked up, and a single shelf, on which someone had left a cookie tin. Inside the tin, wrapped in brown paper that crumbled as Hannah touched it, were about thirty drawings in colored pencil, each of them signed in large, careful capitals: PEGGY, AGED 8.

The drawings, most of which were dated, had been made between September and December 1940. Some showed ordinary things: a cat on a wall, a woman hanging out washing, a tram. Others were harder to look at. There were airplanes in a black sky, searchlights, a street with half its houses missing. On the last one, dated the 25th of November, Peggy had drawn a family of four sitting together in a tiny room with a window, under which she had written: OUR SECRET ROOM. MUMMY SAYS WE ARE SAFE HERE.

Neither of them spoke for a long time. Sam sat on the floor and turned the pages very slowly. Hannah went to look up the date. The night of the 24th of November 1940, she read, had brought the first of the major air raids on Bristol, during which much of the old city center was destroyed.

Contacted the following week, the local history society was able to find the family in the 1939 register: a tram driver, his wife and two children, the younger of whom was a girl called Margaret, known to everyone as Peggy. It took another month, and the help of a very patient librarian, to discover that Peggy was still alive, living in a care home in Weston-super-Mare, and that she would be ninety-four in the spring.

They visited her in September, bringing the tin. Peggy, whose eyesight was poor but whose memory was not, held each drawing close to her face and named things in it they had never noticed: the cat was called Smudge, the woman with the washing was Mrs. Lacey from next door, the tram was the one her father used to drive. When she reached the last drawing, she was quiet for a while. "My dad built that room," she said at last. "On the bad nights, the four of us sat in there and sang. I'd forgotten I ever drew it."

Hannah and Sam never finished the back bedroom in the way they had planned. Having talked it over, they decided to leave the little room as it was, with its shelf and its bricked-up window. On the shelf there is now a framed copy of the last drawing, beneath which, in Peggy's shaky handwriting, two more words have been added: STILL SAFE.