Run for home...

A photograph and a few words

You can have more than one home. You can carry your roots with you, and decide where they grow

Henning Mankell

Today marks the first anniversary of my return to live in the northeast of England and moving into my little house in Blaydon (my photo is some local street art depicting the famous ‘Blaydon Races’). That year has flown by, but don’t they all when you pass a certain age? A week seems to stretch into infinity when you are six or seven, but now, at sixty-seven, a month seems to pass in the blink of an eye. 

I shared a few pieces when my wife Sarah and I began our journey of separation. For those who read my piece ‘Grieving,’ I’m pleased to report I moved expeditiously through the five stages of which I wrote. Although Sarah and I are separated, our relationship is unlike most who find themselves in that position. We message each other daily, speak weekly, and visit each other every few months. Indeed, I’m off to stay at her place for a delayed 'family Christmas’ in a month or so. We may not have the burning love we once had for each other, but we’ve replaced it with a warm, deep, loving friendship. We are fortunate in that regard, as many once-loving relationships end in bitterness and acrimony.

Anyway, this isn’t a meander about relationships but the places I’ve lived in over the years.

Looking back, the longest I've lived anywhere was the house where I spent my childhood and early teenage years. A small, terraced house in the northeast of England. The sort you see in photographs by Tish Murtha or Chris Killip. As a child, my playground was the street, with jumpers for goalposts and a painted set of cricket stumps on a wall. Our ‘football’ was a tennis ball long past its best (I don't know how we got that as the playing of tennis was not a commonly seen activity in the area). It also served as our cricket ball. Getting it to swing was a tough challenge, and Tarmac never did take spin that well (sorry, that will mean little to non-cricket followers - if you follow baseball, then the rough equivalents are probably a curveball and a knuckleball). 

I had a good childhood with both my parents setting me well on the road in life. Although neither was tactile, and I have no memory of a hug or other embrace from either of them. I guess that's why I’m not a tactile person myself. I and my siblings all left home in our teens - not out of a desperate need to escape but with the feeling that now is the time to move on. And wherever I've then lived, I had the propensity to call the northeast home. I guess it's no surprise I returned. After all, don't all roads lead home? 

So, at seventeen, I fetched up in a Civil Service ‘hostel’, as my next abode, off the Bayswater Road in London. I wrote about those early months of adventure sharing a room with four others new to London, in my piece ‘London Reflections,’ so I won't repeat it here, but it’s suffice to say I have very warm memories of that time. 

After nine months in the hostel, I, along with Kym, the girl who was to be my first wife (we were already engaged), and two recent friends, Adrian Window and Kim Foo, decided to rent a place of our own. That place was in Edmonton, north London. I’m not sure what the area is like now, but when we moved there, let's say it was an ‘interesting” place. The three-bedroomed terraced house was nondescript, and nearly 50 years on, I can have sympathy with our then neighbours with four 18-year-olds living next door.

After a year in Edmonton, it was then a move from rags to riches in that, now married, Kym and I moved to a delightful ground-floor flat in Twickenham just across the Thames from Richmond near the bridge. I’d lived in inauspicious places for the previous two years, so this little flat seemed like paradise. And it was little. Comprising a bedroom, a small lounge, a kitchenette, and a bathroom. It also had a pocket garden with a lovely plum tree. My memories are of the flat constantly catching the sun, and we did have a lot of sun that year - the long, sweltering summer of 1976. There was so much sun and so little rain that the Government appointed a Minister for Drought. I’m sure it began to rain not long after his appointment, so I guess that appointment worked. Then again, memories can be deceitful, and I was not yet keeping my daily journal.

While Kym and I loved the flat, it wasn't cheap, even if it was tiny, so we scraped together enough money for a deposit to enter the property market. Not in London, but in Leagrave, some 30 miles north of the Smoke. A two-bedroomed semi for the princely sum of £8,000. The owner selling it as he and his wife were going through a messy divorce. I was still under the age of 21, so at the time, Mortgage Lenders saw me as a ‘dependent’ of Kym; she already had 'the key to the door', literally and figuratively, so I had to sign a form agreeing that if Kym left the property, I would too!

Looking back at the houses I've lived in over the years, it seems like a game of 'Snakes and Ladders'. As I climbed the corporate greasy pole while marriages ended and others began, I climbed the housing ladder, too, eventually arriving at a five-bedroom place. Then it was to slide down a 'snake' to a ‘one up, one down’ in another 'interesting' area, this time in Luton. Then I found the ladder again and moved to a spacious flat in Hertfordshire, followed by various other houses (including one with a swimming pool), a lovely bungalow with a beautiful garden (Sarah’s work, not mine) and finally, back down the snake to this two-bedroomed place in Blaydon. When it comes to buying houses, my life has come full circle from that first two-bedroomed place with Kym nearly 50 years ago.

I didn't like the five-bedroomed house I mentioned when I first saw the details while house hunting with my second wife, Veronica, and suggested we didn't bother viewing it. Then, a few days later, while I was chairing a meeting, my secretary came in to tell me Veronica needed to speak to me urgently (these were the days before mobiles). I apologised to the attendees and took the call. In an excited voice, Veronica told me I just had to see a house she’d fallen in love with, so I agreed to see it that evening after work. As one of the owners opened the front door of the house to me, they greeted me with the words, “If you do not buy this place, I think your wife will divorce you.”) We bought the house, and yes, it was the one I had not liked on paper. Still, it didn’t take long for me to see its merits, and I enjoyed the next sixteen years living in it. But alas, despite buying the house, the latter part of the earlier owner's prediction came true. Veronica still lives there, and in case anyone is wondering, we are on friendly terms, too. We keep in touch and swap occasional messages.

I mentioned the ‘one up, one down’ in an 'interesting area' of Luton. An area in which a neighbour told me not long after I moved in that I needn’t worry about petty crime. It made me ponder, and then I discovered I was the only one of my neighbours who kept regular working hours. Yet everyone around seemed affluent. My neighbour opposite always had a new high-value car outside his modest place. It was not the same car either; they changed about every three weeks. He was a big chap. The sort you’d want on your side if trouble broke out. Also, on the warmer evenings, I noticed other neighbours - again sturdy fellows - sitting on plastic chairs outside their homes. They were 'dressed down' but in designer gear and would sit chewing the fat in, at times, a loud banter. They were pleasant enough with shouted greetings if they saw me, although I did not receive an invitation to join them. Whenever I saw them clustered, it did call to mind another New York 'family' sitting outside a fictional Italian Deli / Bar from a very popular TV crime series of the late 1990s / early 2000s. Whatever my fellow neighbours' occupations, it was true that there was never any petty crime or other disturbance in the year I lived there.

The house with the swimming pool was a lovely Edwardian place. Sarah was a keen swimmer; those who read these pieces will know I am not. Given my fear of bodies of water, I used to get nervous just looking at the pool from afar. One thing that Sarah and I did notice when living there was the keenness of people to visit us in the summer. I’m not sure it was all down to our hospitality!

Despite moving so many times, I hate house hunting. It’s the sense of intrusion I feel entering someone else's home and the story that might lie behind the reason they are selling. Sometimes, it’s a positive of needing more space. But often, it's a sadder tale of divorce, death or financial issues that are demanding the sale. Probably because of this I'm also hopeless at house purchases, wanting to just buy the first one I see. Fortunately, my partners have all been far more level-headed and considered. They, rather than me, have found us some lovely places (the one-up one-down is what happens when I'm left to myself).

I think my house-buying approach made Sarah nervous when I embarked alone on my quest to find a place in Newcastle. With her encouragement, I drew up a list (there were seventeen possibilities on that list), and given I knew Newcastle and its surrounds, I knew the 'interesting' places to avoid. I then spent some days looking at each of the properties and narrowing the list down to the final two. It was then more advice from Sarah, whom I called to play devil's advocate on those two; that telephone conversation allowed me to decide, and I must say I don’t regret the choice at all. A lovely little house and small garden in a quiet neighbourhood with friendly neighbours and public transport only a short walk from my doorstep. The city of Newcastle is a 10-minute train journey in one direction and the rolling Northumbrian Hills 20 minutes in the other.

They say house moving is one of the most traumatic things you can do in life, so I guess I’ve had my share of such trauma. Still, I can now say I've put that particular angst well behind me.