My house story

All the places I've called home

I’ve lived in 12 places since I was born, although the places I’ve felt at home number many more than that. They count the crook of my husband’s arm, the camps the kids built in the living room for family sleepovers (yep, we were all in there), the little stool next to my gran’s chair in her living room. 

Heartscapes, homescapes, histories, house-stories.

Home as a cradle

Until I was three or thereabouts, I lived with my mum and grandparents near Manchester, in the north of England. Even after we moved out, their house was a second home. My cousins lived in the same street and we ran between the two houses, playing hide and seek in the wardrobes, discovering the Christmas presents my gran had hidden. When I stayed overnight, I’d cuddle into my gran’s side of bed in the morning. My grandad would watch the horse racing on TV from his corner of the sofa. I remember the black tiles in the bathroom – I would draw pictures in the condensation when I had my bath. Once, my cousins and I found a baby bird in the road and tried to rescue it before the coaches that took the workers to and from the nearby Linotype factory drove by. 

When my gran and I went to the shops, we’d walk through the park and the ‘secret garden’, full of roses and an aviary where we’d watch the birds. When I went back with my best friend to stay for a week as a teenager, I showed her the grassy slope I’d rolled down as a child. After my grandad and then my gran died, my cousin bought the house. She put in a new kitchen and bathroom; the black tiles disappeared. It was her home now, rightly so, but it didn’t feel the same anymore.

Hope & Habitat

My mum married when I was three and we went to live a bus ride away. (I remember getting on the bus wearing a daisy chain on my head. The driver gave me a roll of the paper used to print the tickets.) This house had a separate dining room and my favourite time of day was sitting there after school on my mum’s lap while she read me a story. Looking back, I can only think she chose that room because it would have caught the afternoon sun. Golden days. I played under the gate-legged dining table (folded down) and pretended it was a caravan.

This house was the groovy, hopeful enclave of our new family. I remember the white box of the TV and the Habitat chairs with wooden frames and low-slung brown corduroy seats (I wish I had them now). I would lie in bed picking at a rip in the wallpaper, making it worse and getting told off for it. I remember being caught reading after lights out; the giveaway was the still-hot bulb in my bedside lamp. There was an unkempt but lovely garden, and I would be lifted over the back fence to play with my friends in the neighbouring house.

Thin ice

At nine we moved 200 miles away to the southeast, when my stepfather took a new job. The house had a parquet floor in the small hallway (I would tie dusters to my feet and ‘ice skate’ to polish it). There were leaded glass windows, and a few of the diamonds had stained glass flowers in them. The Habitat chairs were replaced with a gold velour three-piece suite. Mum worked longer hours, so the dining room was just a place to eat dinner, not read stories. This was the house where things both unravelled and became knotty and difficult. The atmosphere was dark; friends didn’t like coming round, so I would go to their homes. It was a relief when the marriage was over and my mum and I found a new home of our own. 

Teens, transitions & painful returns

I was 14 when we moved to the first-floor maisonette. I fancied the boy next door and would watch him arrive home from my window at the front of the flat. We decorated my bedroom with blue-flowered wallpaper and matching curtains. My mum worked across the road at the university, and I wondered if she could see me at home as she went about her day. I’d lie on my bed and listen to the radio, pretending to revise for exams. Later, when we started clubbing, my mum would let all my friends sleep over in the front room. When I left for university, I didn’t think about how alone she must have felt, but I realise she always had the radio on, filling the flat with music or conversation. After halls and a shared flat, my third year at university was the only time I have lived alone; renting a loft flat with beams across the bathroom ceiling and a bed beneath the sloped roof of the main room. I pinned up fabric, so it was like sleeping in a tent. I ate crumpets and watched Twin Peaks, propped against giant cushions.

When my mum was ill with cancer, many years later, I began to visit my teenage home frequently again, sleeping over, taking her to appointments, watching Inspector Morse on the TV with her. My old bedroom now had yellow-flowered wallpaper and was filled with her painting and sewing materials. When she died, this was the home that took weeks to empty. Boxes of books taken to Oxfam, fabrics given to her quilting group, papers sifted. We took lots back to our house; I regret many of the things we discarded. Recently reading The Clearing by Samantha Clark, about emptying her parents’ home, brought back the tender sadness of that time. (Do subscribe to her Substack, The Life Boat; it’s wonderful.)

London lights

In between, I’d moved out, married and created a series of new homes. The first was a former council flat in central London. How lucky we were! I was 24, living within walking distance to… everywhere. Over Blackfriars Bridge to my first job on a magazine. To our wedding in St Brides, the journalists’ church on Fleet Street. We took a black cab back home to the flat and ate cake and drank champagne. We would go clubbing on a Saturday night and buy the Sunday papers on the way home to read in bed. We fantasised about living in a cobbled mews like the one nearby. When we found a mews house advertised for sale while visiting friends in Brighton, we bought it and made the move to the seaside. 

Cocooning

This was the home where we had our first child. Steve, the mechanic from two doors down (it was a working mews, full of garages fixing cars) carried our son upstairs in his car seat when we came back from the hospital. Three houses later, we still go back there when our car needs repaired. If our flat was where we trialled and tested what it was like to be married, the mews house was where we shared the shift into parenthood. It was blissful and relentless, trying to keep it all going – the people we were, the commutes, the work, my husband’s art studio, friendships – while moving into this new phase and the people we were becoming. We rebuilt the interior, moved the staircase, changed the kitchen; recalibrating for the here and now. On maternity leave, I’d move around this tiny house throughout the day, my son settled by each change of scene. At night, we would jog up and down the living room, wearing a groove in the new carpet, holding him close as the jolting movement (I don’t know how) soothed him to sleep.

Our youngest child arrived in our next home, a few miles down the coast, where we found more space for less money. I gave birth on the landing, the midwife arriving just in time. This move allowed so much to happen. I stopped the exhausting commute and went freelance; I even had a home office. A modern townhouse, rather than a mews, it still had a garage on the ground floor that my husband could use as studio. I made friends, the kids had birthday parties and started school and nursery, but it wasn’t a fit for my husband. Too villagey; he loves the buzz and anonymity of somewhere bigger. And I was ready to move, too, out of the generous cocoon that had held me for this transition and into our next phase.

Lighthouses, anchors & setting sail

We came back to Brighton, swapping our sensible house for a madcap rental – an in-between fantasy home while we looked for somewhere permanent again. A giant top-floor apartment in a Regency square, it was a property we could never afford to buy but which allowed us to reimagine the life we did want. We had parties and set off fireworks on New Year’s Eve in the communal gardens. I wrote with a view of the sea; my husband worked at the kitchen table. It was also so cold in winter – so, so cold – that we had to undress in the living room and race into the freezing bedroom, burying ourselves under the duvet as fast as we could. The shower leaked into the downstairs flat. But it was full of light and we felt light. There was a buoyancy to our days as we began again, finding a new school and nursery, seeing friends, plugging into a fresh sense of optimism.

We found the house we live in now, moving out of our rented flat with a wrench, but into a place we felt was home as soon as our children slid down the bannisters on our first viewing. We’ve been here for 12 years now. The tiny kids who came round on playdates are now huge teenagers and 20-year-olds. If I get up at just the right time in the morning, I can see the pink of the sunrise through the landing window and it makes my heart lift. My husband works at the kitchen table. My office has a view of the trees in the neighbour’s garden, busy with squirrels and jays. A fox sometimes sleeps on the back step. It’s so cold in here in winter – so, so cold – that I sometimes take my laptop and sit under blankets on the sofa to work instead. The toilet once leaked through the hall ceiling. Our children’s heights are marked on the doorframe. 

But now, we are easing out of this home’s entanglements, gently untying binds and considering what’s next. Change is a slow process for me. I don’t like to feel unmoored; home is my anchor. But I’m getting ready to find my new lighthouse; the place that will guide and protect me as we navigate our next journey. Forward motion, to find a different home, the fit for where, who and what we want to be sometime soon. We’re not sure where it is yet, we’re not even looking. But we’re on our way.

For paid subscribers, tomorrow’s post will look at writing your own house-story.

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