HOME

Yesterday evening we sat in the garden listening to the birds, and I thought, how interesting it is that I have landed in London, here in the winter of my life.  I looked at the walls of my garden and the surrounding houses and wondered how many London bricks inhabit just this one road, never mind the rest of the city.  I thought about all the brick walls of my childhood and felt myself running my hand over their mossy tops as I scooted home from school, and again, returned to my amazement that London is now my home.

I lived here from the age of 16 to 19 – London in its heyday: British Pop and Mary Quant, mini-skirts and bowler hats.  During those years home was nomadic in terms of postal addresses. I felt most at home on the dance floor or in bed with one of many lovers, cradled after sex, if lucky.

Home: what a complex word.  I left the first one, if you don’t count the womb, at age 13, wrenched from the house, the garden, the neighbourhood, school, friends, and the sea. We moved from the – even then – hip town on the south coast to a small, market town up north whose sole claim to fame was having one of only 3 churches in the land to boast both a tower and a steeple; a church which thankfully convinced me I was an atheist.  

I loved London during my years there, but didn’t consider it home. Nor did Canada or the States ever feel like home; the one lacking humour, the other lacking subtlety…and very few bricks.

Those bricks. I remember my first flight back to England after six years away and weeping as I looked out the plane window to all those brick houses down below.  I’d gone “home” to try and get close to my mother only to find out that I was adopted.  The horror of discovering I wasn’t who I thought I was, was compounded by the fact that during those absent years the UK had switched to the decimal system and while my country folk were already used to the currency, for me the money in my hand was a foreign language.  Yet as English was my native tongue I was judged to be an idiot every time I had to pay for something.  The feeling of being a stranger in my homeland, a stranger in my family, coupled with the loss of my first child in New York eradicated any sense of home I’d taken for granted, particularly because when I left my parents’ home, I knew it was for good whereas when I left my homeland I thought it would be only for 2 years.

In those intervening years I made many “homes” in many towns and countries.  I returned to England as often as possible, each time struggling with a culture that continually moved on in my absence. And yet the profound sense of belonging I felt in Cornwall convinced me that it was the land itself that was my home. For 50 years I envisioned my last home alone in a small stone cottage on the Cornish cliffs.  I saw myself in wellies and a head scarf scattering feed to the hens before going back inside to the fire to read or paint or listen to the radio while watching the wind sweep rain across the fields, the sea my wild and faithful companion.

There is a piece of me that still clings to those cliffs, but after living on an isolated farm in Tuscany for 10 years I know that I’m not made of strong enough stuff to spend my last years in Cornish isolation. London, while never my dream of home, is now, nonetheless, the place where I have come to roost.  The idea of home is being redefined because I think that for people like myself who have lived in four countries on countless roads and lanes, in one room huts without running water, to a cottage by the sea, to 12th floor city apartments, to a Tuscan stone barn, home becomes a composite that cannot exist in reality.  The birds in the hawthorn tree outside the bedroom of my childhood home are long gone.  Likewise, the magical garden surrounding our cottage by the sea. Gone, the Mediterranean garden and Tuscan fireplace of our Italian years. But also, now gone, is the unrealistic quest for the perfect home: the one what would have all the features I most loved from each of the many places I’ve inhabited.

Now I am building my inner home; the internal space where memories and gratitude reside. The place of acceptance that one cannot have everything all at once all the time. Literally, of course, any place that has a dry roof and a bed can give us shelter.  But home represent more than that. Home in the deepest sense, for all of us, means safety.  As such the very idea is ludicrous as there is no such thing as safety.

I have, in my life, experienced being homeless.  Never to the extent of sleeping on the street, but close to it. So, I deeply understand and appreciate the privilege of having a roof over my head, a garden to sit in with my husband, listening to English birds.  Some of the bricks surrounding me as I write go back centuries, but they, too, will one day be gone. 

I’ve struggled to write this essay because I’ve been searching for the ultimate meaning of home. All my life I’ve searched for the perfect place to call home.  I realise now there is no such place.  It’s not about bricks and mortar, sea views, Mediterranean gardens.  Home for me is a sense of peace which only I can build. It’s also a sense of belonging, of community, friends and of course, love.

I am reminded now of this beautiful quote from T.S.Eliot:

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

With love,
Maggie