By Julie Myerson, FT.com site
Published: Jan 12, 2007
Half past three on a raw January afternoon and the sky's already burnt around the edges. In less than an hour it will be dark. And Nina has only been here 40 minutes but already her two-year-old is squirming in her lap and demanding to go home.
"Except she doesn't mean 'home' home, " Nina tells me as she tries to control Izzy with one hand and balance a cup of Lapsang in the other. "She means our old house. "
"Really? " I say, surprised.
Nina and her boyfriend and their three girls moved a couple of months ago from a small-ish house to a much bigger one three streets away. The new house has a proper garden with a swing and it's also big enough for the eldest to have a bedroom of her own. Nina sighs.
"She was OK to start with. Hardly seemed to notice that we'd moved. But then, about a month ago, she started waking up every night. And every time I went in to her she just sobbed that she wanted to go home. "
"What did you say? "
"Well at first I didn't really say anything. I was a bit surprised but I thought perhaps it was a middle-of-the-night thing and, you know, maybe the less we actually talked about it the better. John said she was bound to forget. But when she said it again the next night and the night after that, I told her that she couldn't, that it just wasn't our home any more. I told her that other children lived there now. "
"That was brave, " I say.
Nina blinks. "It's the truth. "
"I know, but still. "
At the mention of "other children ", Izzy's thumb has slid into her mouth and she's shuffling closer to her mum.
"Well, in the end, " Nina says, "I had to go back to the old place to collect a couple of things we'd left and so I let her come with me. "
My eyes widen. I'm not sure I'd have done that.
Nina shrugs. "The moment we went in that door she didn't hesitate. Just raced straight upstairs to their old bedroom only to find, well of course, there were all these other kids playing in there and " - she flicks a glance at Izzy, who seems to have forgotten everything and is carefully pulling off her shoes and socks - "I thought she'd be devastated but she wasn't. She just got down on the floor and joined in with the game. It only got a bit tricky when we had to leave. "
Nina puts down her cup and ruffles Izzy's hair. "'I had to carry her out screaming. "
I smile. While I can't help feeling that taking a two-year-old to see her old house is a slightly dodgy thing to do, there's something about Nina. Her own childhood was nomadic. If I thought we moved house a lot, well she moved twice as much and often in and out of rented accommodation, or even from country to country. The result is someone who cares passionately about homes - and can tell you romantic stories about everywhere she's ever lived - but who still inhabits them in a casual and slightly transient way, as if she can never quite trust in her apparent stability, as if she could just up sticks and move on at any moment, which maybe she could.
When I was researching Home, my book about everyone who ever lived in our house in Clapham, and I told my daughter Chloë about the family just like ours who'd lived there more than a century before us, she said: "It's not really our house at all is it, Mummy? It's like we're just the top layer. And one day there'll be another layer on top of us, squashing us down. " I asked her if she minded that. She said she'd let me know.
She never did but maybe I answered the question myself anyway because not long after the book was published we moved. We'd never really planned to go but one day I just woke up and something had shifted. Maybe it was to do with layers or maybe it was just that we were finally sick of sharing a bathroom with three teenagers but, either way, I knew the house was ready for someone else.
Now, if I occasionally allow myself to drive past, I have to take a deep breath. It's being done up. The jasmine's gone and so has the lavender and the other day there were smart louvered shutters on the windows. Where the house used to seem to smile at me, now it cuts me dead like the stranger I am.
It's not that I still think of that place as home. I have a new home now and I'm very happy there. But now and then, in the deadest bit of the night, there's a part of me that wakes just like Izzy and cries out, simply because I can never go back. And in my dreams I can imagine how it might feel to be standing at that oh-so-recently-familiar front door and have it magically open and be allowed to race right up those lovely old stairs and straight back into my sweet old life as if nothing had happened. As if we could all continue just where we left off. As if there was no new layer of people just waiting to squash me down.
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