My attention was drawn to this 2025 title by a relative who spotted it in a Kent bookshop and thought I might be interested. So – you know me – three clicks and I was in.
And it’s fascinating to read a non-fiction book of this sort when we’re all still trying to make sense of the The Salt Path debacle. David Whitehouse puts his authorial cards firmly and unequivocally on the table. He tells us he has changed some, but not all, names – as we all have to when writing about real people and situations – but that otherwise his book is the unvarnished truth. Towards the end, he also explains, within the narrative, that he has had to fictionalise not only the name but other details about one individual because she is famous and identifying her would compromise other people’s right to anonymity. Fair enough.
A woman named Caroline Lane lived in a mansion block in Margate. Then, unaccountably, in 2009 she vanished. Her flat was as she left it. The neighbours were puzzled and concerned although Caroline had always – with her forthright ways – been seen as standoffish. A few days before her – departure? death? kidnapping? – she had, according to the minutes, upset several people at a residents’ meeting. What on earth had happened to her?
Whitehouse stumbled across this story while having his hair cut in a very ordinary Margate salon at a time when he needed a new project. So he decided to investigate Caroline and her disappearance. He is very good at Margate itself, a town whose fortunes have gone up and down dramatically in the last 40 years or so – from the trendy Turner Contemporary and the coffee shops of the old town, to the run-down immigrant-housing hotels and the lacklustre town centre, long since deserted by most big name retailers. Like Whitehouse, I have long associations with Kent. I lived for nearly 40 years in Sittingbourne. I know the places he writes about well and admire the way he brings them to life as he talks to residents and uses all his research skills to trace Caroline, whose flat is eventually compulsorily purchased and her belongings disposed of.
Saltwater Mansions is a subtle mixture of memoir and reportage because woven into the mix is Whitehouse’s own family background. It is sub-titled “The Woman Who Disappeared and Other Untold Stories” and it does what it says on the tin. His long suffering wife Lou with whom he has two sons, tries to be patient with his Caroline obsession but it sometimes wears thin. Like many of us, he wishes desperately he’d coaxed his own father to talk about the past and the little he knows becomes one of the book’s “untold stories”. The concept also gives him the scope for several fascinating digressions into the histories of some of the people he meets along the way. Beth and Jon, for example, who are the eventual new occupants of Caroline’s flat have a moving “back story”. Beth’s mother Rosa, was a single parent, a professional singer and afflicted by cystic fibrosis which she managed to defy for many years. Her daughter had a rackety, penurious childhood which eventually took them to Margate because it was cheap. There, while still a teenager, she met Jon. It’s a powerful amd moving sub-story in which Whitehouse gives sympathetic heft to all characters.
In the end he does “find” Caroline – sort of. But this is reflective non-fiction not a novel so there is no tidy conclusion. It is, however, a beautifully written page turner. I enjoyed it very much, just as my neice-in-law, a fellow bibliophile, guessed that I would.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: A Lonely Man by Chris Power
