Running for Home
Random thoughts about belonging
Today’s piece is extracted from a book I’m working on, but which I’ve put aside for a little while as I work on a different one, and as I try to figure out exactly what it is that I’m trying to say. In this piece, I’m beginning to think about whatever might have possessed me to come back to the north of England where I was born, after spending more than five decades away. I’m a little obsessed by the idea of home, right now; I’m not sure I’ve fully grasped what it means to me, yet. Though certainly it has a lot to do with the idea of North. I wonder what it means to you all?
Home. What a word. It’s a Humpty-Dumpty sort of word: it means so many things to so many people that it runs the risk of meaning nothing at all. For me, it always begins with a house: a safe place of my own to shelter me. Though clearly that’s not enough, because a good few houses have sheltered and protected me and yet here I am again, still looking for home in another. But safety was hard to find in the first years of my life, and the effects of that still seem to linger. My original home – my mother’s womb – was not a safe place: it tried to unhouse me twice. I clung on with characteristic tenacity and so here I am – but the childhood houses that followed, with a violent father and an alcoholic mother, didn’t much feel like sanctuaries, either.
There’s a tattered black and white photograph of me at the house we lived in till I was six or seven years old. I’m standing in the cobbled back alley with a scowl on my face, clutching an enormous curly-headed doll to my chest as if she might be a shield, a protectress, the only creature standing between me and the land of the utterly lost. This was a small, shabby house in the poorest part of downtown Hartlepool, with a resident plague of cockroaches and no bathroom – just an outside toilet and a small tin bath that would be dragged inside and placed in front of the tiny coal fire on a Sunday, the rapidly cooling water occupied first by a child and then by two adults. My earliest memories of the house are filled with shouting, crying and the sound of grunts and slaps. This was the house in which, at three years old, I took hold of my father by the kneecaps and pushed him all the way to the front door to prevent him from hitting my mother. He left, and shortly afterwards he left for good.
Since then, it seems that I’ve always been looking for a home in which to feel safe. It’s the thing I longed for most in the first four decades of my life: a home that was mine and couldn’t be taken away from me. Not by a person, not by a bank. I could say that it’s been an obsession. I’ve lived in twenty-two different places in the forty-five years since I left home for university at eighteen and for sure, with the benefit of hindsight, that feels like too many. But every single room, apartment or house that I’ve occupied has changed me or challenged me in some significant and necessary way, and has held me for better or worse through hard times and difficult decisions. They’re the unreliable anchorages around which I floated for a while, shedding skin after skin.
Nevertheless, there was neither comfort nor security in any of the half-dozen student bedsits that I occupied during six years of university, filled with other people’s over-used furniture, kitchens and bathrooms shared with random and ever-changing collections of strangers. The first dwelling I occupied alone was in Paris, when I was twenty-four: a tiny, exquisitely lonely apartment in Montmartre in which, through my six months as a postdoc at the Pitié-Salpêtrière, I began to understand all the ways in which I never had fit in, could never possibly fit into this beautiful but merciless city, and perhaps might never fit in anywhere, ever, at all.
There was no true safety in any of the four houses I occupied during my first ten-year-long marriage, with a much older husband who had an obsession with collecting – one that he kept hidden for the first couple of years. One day I came home from a weeklong work trip and found that he’d lined every spare wall of the house with shelves so that he could unpack and display a collection of vintage Bovril jars, old bottles and early-1980s Kellogg’s cornflake packets (they were free of barcodes and as a consequence, it seemed, counted as antiques), a random selection of mass-produced 1960s ornaments and figurines – and so very much more. He declared himself to be ‘The Memorabilia Man’, and for reasons I never quite understood he even placed a hand-painted sign outside the front door confirming it. I felt as if I were inhabiting a neverending rerun of Night at the Museum, but not nearly as funny, locked in the monster-strewn dreamscape of a madman. His obsessive inclinations soon turned to me: where I was and who I was with and why, whenever I was out of his sight.
The headland in Hartlepool, where I grew up.