Houses and homes

Now that it seems we are likely to be moving again, I’ve been thinking a lot about houses, and about the notion of home. About the strange concoction of objects and circumstances which conspire to make us feel at home – or not. I’ve written about this before, most notably in The Enchanted Life, but as I grow older, and after every new house I’ve lived in (and there have been too many over the past decade), my perspective shifts. And so I’ve been wondering again about the times in my life when I’ve truly felt at home. Not as a child, because the houses we lived in were neither safe places nor beautiful (or even cosy) places. Here’s how I described that time in The Enchanted Life:

For all of us, though, home begins with the building we live in: the place we return to, to sleep each night. Home means shelter – but sometimes it shelters sorrow. Home isn’t always associated with good memories. Our childhood homes may or may not have been safe places; they may or may not have been places where we flourished. There was a room in a red-brick house on the rough edgelands of a council estate in the north-east of England where I remember waking up for the first time. It housed an enormous dark wardrobe which might, one day, have led me to Narnia if I hadn’t been too fearful to open its door. There was another house with too many cockroaches, and another with too few hiding places, and I do not believe that I ever felt truly at home until, at eighteen, I left it.

I returned to some of those houses recently, in the far north-eastern town on the shores of the North Sea where I spent the first ten years of my life. I returned to the houses we lived in, to the houses my grandmother and my aunts lived in. I returned to narrow streets of boarded-up houses, the site of my original trauma: the violence, and then the ripping away. There is a tattered black and white photograph of me at around four years old, clutching a doll almost as big as myself in the cobbled back street behind one of those houses. The street is empty; I look defensive. My mother had just cut off my long, wavy blonde hair and, now sporting a classic pudding-basin coiffure, I was horrified and miserable, and had lost all sense of self.

A good fifteen years ago, while reading an otherwise beautiful book, The Poetics of Space, I grew angry at its author, Gaston Bachelard. In essence, it’s a book about the ways in which buildings work on us: ‘the house’, Bachelard writes, ‘is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind.’ And this is surely true. But he evokes such an idealised image of childhood, of our past, that I couldn’t recognise myself in some parts of the book at all. ‘… [I]f I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace’, Bachelard writes. But no house sheltered and protected me and allowed me to dream in peace. Home was a place that, more often than not, I dreaded arriving in, and the only daydreams which flourished there were my daydreams of eventual escape.

As a teenager, I would often walk the streets of the city we lived in while my mother was drinking at home. I liked it best at dusk, when the lights had just come on and I could peer inside other people’s houses, imagining them living laughing together. There was one house I especially loved. It was small, but it had a garden full of roses, and the room you could peer into as you walked past was lamplit. There seemed always to be a fire burning, and art on the walls. We didn’t possess a lamp, only harsh overhead lights which picked out the tobacco stains on empty magnolia walls.

Perhaps all of this is why the only thing I ever really wanted – the one thing which I knew would finally make me feel safe – was a home of my own. But when I married for the first time, the houses we lived in turned out not to be very safe places, either. They were troubled places, and I could find no sense of sanctuary in them. It wasn’t until I’d left that marriage, and took out a mortgage on the first house I was able to choose for myself and finally to inhabit alone – in Louisville, Kentucky, where I was living at the time – that I came to understand how it might be possible for a house to feel like a sanctuary. More than a sanctuary: a temenos, a temple. A sacred space dedicated to the uncovering of myself, for the first time now undefined by my relationship to others. No longer a daughter, no longer a wife. A place in which to discover who I was, and who one day I might become. A house that might be a dwelling-place for the soul. My soul.

When I returned from America and went to live in my father’s country, Scotland, I designed and built myself a home from the wreck of a dilapidated old croft house. For a full two years after I bought, I imagined that new house into being; once it was complete, I spent seven years living in it – the first four of them alone. I knew it intimately, because I painted or papered every inch of it. Every wall, every door, every piece of woodwork. Painting myself into the place, dreaming that I’d be there forever. We’d grow old together, that house and I. And even now, twelve years and four more houses on, I can’t imagine how I ever brought myself to agree to leave it. So it continued to go – for three more houses, and three much-loved places in which I also learned to feel at home.

When we decided, at the end of 2019, to return to Britain from Ireland, I had an image of the house I wanted to live in. It would be an old house, to reflect my elderhood – a far cry from the rather bland 1970s bungalow we occupied in Connemara at the time. It would be a house that had grown into itself, and nurtured generations. It would be a benign house: not grand, but with good bones and a whole lot of character. A house that had dug itself into the soil in a way that I hadn’t been able properly to do since I’d left the Isle of Lewis, back in 2014. I wanted to dig in again, to literally home in. I wanted to learn from this house how to come home to myself in the newness of my elderhood. I wanted a place where I could rest, to mourn too many things that had been left behind, too many much-loved places that had been lost. This would be a house in which I would finally learn to balance the often-contradictory needs of aloneness and togetherness which I’d wrestled with all my life.

And so I found Rock Villa, or Rock Villa found me. Once called Capel y Graig – Rock Chapel – this old house has been a benign presence, with its tall, old and strong yew sentinels. It has held me safely through the pandemic, and safely through my journey through the Valley of Death. Chapels and yew trees understand Death; what finer place could I have found to learn, finally, to befriend it? But this hasn’t been a house in which I would find myself; it has been a house in which, in a sense, I lost myself. Like so many chapels and churches, so many other sacred places, it has sheltered the unhomed in me, as I came face to face with the likelihood of my imminent dissolution.

I sometimes think that if I could pick up this beautiful old house and take it with me to wherever we go next, I would. But Rock Villa belongs here, in a way that I do not.

The Enchanted Life again:  

Sometimes I think I’ve had too many homes, but every room, apartment or house I have chosen to live in during my adult life has challenged me or cherished me, and reflected back at me a fragment of who I am – or who I run the risk of becoming. A tiny room of my own in a hall of residence at the University of Liverpool, reverberating with all the uncertainties and inadequacies of my first year cast out into the world, alone. The bay-windowed bedsit in a quiet street in Muswell Hill where I finished up my PhD and had my heart properly broken for the first time. A Parisian apartment in Montmartre which, for six months, was altogether too beautiful to be true. The first place I ever owned: a tiny, characterless terraced house in east London, where I never could find the remotest of ways to feel I belonged. The perfect refuge of a dilapidated Connemara cottage which saw the crumbling of my first marriage and which never, ever let go of its hold on my heart. A beautiful but impossible old farmhouse in the hills of Kentucky, a lonely lakeside house in Georgia, a croft on a heartbreakingly bleak island at the farthest western reaches of the British Isles. Each of these buildings, and too many others to mention, has gathered into its walls a piece of me. I am scattered in fragments through a multiverse of homes.

What fragments of myself have I scattered in this one? Which bits of myself will I leave behind? I don’t think I’ll know until I’ve finally departed.

When it comes time to move north again, I don’t know what kind of house I will find. Of the dream house, Bachelard writes: ‘How­ever spacious, it must also be a cottage, a dove-cote, a nest, a chrysalis. Intimacy needs the heart of a nest.’ I have always needed ‘the heart of a nest’. A nest to make completely my own for the time I am in it. But above all, I will want this new home to reflect a true homing, as I return to the place that made me. A place that my ancestors will recognise, and a house where they too might feel at home. Where I can invite them to my table – because in any Hero’s or Heroine’s Journey, the Return to the home place is all.