Kissing the last wall goodbye

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Sep 15, 2006 

As a child I thought everyone moved house every few years. From being born to leaving home, I lived in eight different houses - nine if you count the time my mum wrote mid-university term to say "by the way, we're moving and here's the new address ". My early childhood was spent forever packing and unpacking my precious china horses and, literally, kissing the walls of each old bedroom goodbye. How else could I mark the ends of these all too brief relationships? But there was one summer - the summer of 1972 - that made even that old life look fixed and stable and solid. It came to define for ever the way I thought about home.

I was nine when I moved with my parents, sisters and a bunch of pets to a large Victorian farmhouse in the flat, mauve fields of Nottinghamshire, England. We had an orchard, outbuildings and 10 acres of land that we rented to a local farmer. I was in heaven. I was a girl in a book. I roamed the fields at dawn looking for clay pipe heads; we put on plays in the barn and fished for sticklebacks in the stream; we dressed up as gypsies and wandered the hedgerows hoping to get lost. It was an idyllic place to be nine, 10 and then 11 years old and I think I knew it.

But my young, feisty mother was more and more unhappy with my older, introverted father. In the evenings they smoked and drank and argued. Sometimes worse. He said if she left she couldn't take anything - not a stick of furniture, not the dog, not her daughters. Though outwardly life went on as normal, I lay awake at night in my attic bedroom surrounded by David Cassidy posters and china horses and waited, heart banging, to see what would happen.

What happened was this: she left him in the middle of the night while he was away doing the seaside stint with us. (They were holidaying separately by then.) She hired a removal van and took half the furniture, the hamster, the duck and, yes, the dog. The next day she drove to the Suffolk hotel where she was meant to take over the holiday reins. But, as soon as she'd waved him off - he had no idea he was returning to a literally half-empty house - she told us she'd left, that she'd bought a house, that we were going there now.

"Now? " we cried. "But what about the holiday? "

We sobbed all the way back.

We arrived at the new house - a Victorian terrace in the red light district of Nottingham - in the airless dark of an August night. It looked horrid, it had gas fires, it smelled of cat. It was not what we were used to. But Mum had (secretly) been decorating and there were our very own beds, cosy and familiar, waiting for us. There was my sister's yellow teddy. There was my best doll, eyes widely smiling as if nothing had happened. Our duck was quacking in the yard and the hamster was busy on his wheel. We drank some milk, then cried again, then slept.

In the morning things looked brighter. We discovered a secret ivy-clad alleyway between the houses. And a newsagent's shop round the corner. We'd never lived so close to somewhere you could buy sweets. I felt anxious about my Dad, all alone, but a vague heaviness (the weight of parents who hated each other?) lifted from my chest. I realised I could imagine living there.

Meanwhile the police called: our furious father had reported us missing. Mum showed them we were safe, said that all she wanted was some time with us before the inevitable court battle started. The police agreed to stay out of it. But Mum didn't want us found too soon. Our grandfather owned a spare mobile home just outside the city, so suddenly off we went. We thought we were on holiday but the truth was we were in hiding.

Actually, I didn't care. I remember a week of eating Spam and instant mashed potato, of sleeping in bunks, of not having to listen to grown-ups fighting at night. I remember kids bombing each other in the swimming pool, the smell of disinfectant from the shower and toilet block, the feeling that this strange summer might just go on for ever.

I also remember a kind of euphoric confusion. Where exactly did I live now? Part of me already missed our scruffy new home in town but another part of me still dreamed about the unimaginably vast and now irrevocably lost spaces of our old country home. I'd thought I'd live there for ever, that life was perfect, that I was safe. But I realised with a bump of shock that I'd never felt more alive than in this ugly mobile home where I had to walk a whole block to use the lavatory. How was this possible?

Our mum said home was not about the place but the people in it. "You can make a home anywhere, " she told us as we drove back into Nottingham to the (already old) new house. "You just need a little bit of imagination and a lot of hope.

"Think of The Sound of Music, " she said. "We're walking over the mountains. The adventure is just beginning. "

I looked at her and saw that she'd got thin but that all the shadows had left her face. And I realised I believed her. I never kissed another bedroom wall after that.