Home – a place of solace, safety and belongings

My mum was in her late 80s – she died in 2018 at almost 92 – she had Alzheimer’s and she would often mention wanting to go home. As many people with Alzheimer’s do. She was in three care homes – one in Yorkshire, two in Oxfordshire – and she would say with urgency in her voice – Rosemary, I want to go home.

The impossibility of her moving back literally to her old house tugged at my heart strings but eventually I came to realise that she wasn’t talking about her home in the village of Menston where she’d lived for thirty four years, she was talking about somewhere intangible inside. It seemed to mean an internal peace because Alzheimer’s made her anxious and she felt lost. She’d often to say to me how strange it was to be in the place that she was. I admired her for being able to say that. It was entirely reflective of the pragmatism that imbued her life.

It’s not so obvious to me where my home is. Of course, my flat in Harlesden, London, is my beloved home and has been for the last thirty years. Yet when I go to Yorkshire, when I get blown about at the tarn below the moors in Ilkley or eat fish and chips at the Maypole in Otley, I settle down internally in a way that feels like home. My waters relax, something inside my body tells me I am home now. And yet I haven’t lived there for forty seven years!

At this point, I have to mention a regular strange occurrence. Without me knowing on a conscious level - friends in London - often turn out to be people who come from the North. I am wont to say these days that there’s an underlying geographical attraction going on. The pull of the Northerners. Do Southerners have it too? Take one female friend – I met her at a Tantra Festival in Catalonia which was wild to say the least… one divine pleasure after another plus so much laughter – and I discovered she’s from a village a couple of miles away from where I lived for the first eighteen years of my life and that she went to school in Otley where I was born. Another friend from my tennis club mentioned that her sister lived in Yorkshire. Yorkshire is a very big place – I said. It turned out that her sister lives in Menston, yes, the very village where I grew up.

I could go on.

It’s uncanny and a thing. I am attracted to people who come from up North and often very near to where I was brought up.

And now I have a second home in North Wales where my partner, Asanga, lives. I’ve been travelling up to his fourteen acres of wild land near Criccieth for thirteen years. And there’s a moment when I turn into the track that leads to his farm house - where I sigh for a few seconds and imbibe both the beauty and the familiarity. It feels like another home. A place of solace and reflection. I often feel contentment in that coming-home-to-self-way as we sit on his outside sofa and listen to the abundance of birdsong. His home feels like a little bit of heaven and like my second home.

second home

living in my lover’s house

is like learning latin in the dark

the drawer for his measuring spoons

the dials on the hob electric not gas

the practice needed for wheelbarrow and wood

how to recognise a bill hook

undo the squirrel-proof birdfeeder’s rusty nut

parse the ancient heating system

undo the debris of his family

interpret the nuts in the stair cupboard

the etymology of the log burner

the painted lady behind the heavy curtain

Often when I’ve been away too long – I have a yearning to go home to Harlesden to be surrounded by the objects that make me feel safe. When my mum died, one of the only objects that I took – because I don’t have much space – was my dad’s desk. It is so reassuring – he died in 1984 – to have it with me. I am working on it right at this moment. It was in our living room for over forty years. It has a soothing presence in my life.

Even though my father, George Henry Rouse, often didn’t have a soothing influence on my life. In fact, his violence towards me as a child is what makes me feel unsafe sometimes. But this is how memory and magical thinking works. Now the fictious memory of him as someone safe and something that belonged to him – is able to make me feel safe.

I’ve got a wire egg cutter in my kitchen drawer. I took that from mum’s house when we cleared it out while she was in a care home . I hardly every use it for sandwiches but I adore having it there, it takes me right back to our first home, a Victorian terrace house and shared raucous meals or the picnics that we so often had with our grandparents around Otley. It is soothing.

London, Yorkshire, North Wales – where is my home? I feel as though they are all my homes although Harlesden is my main heart home and place of solace .The sort of home 340,000 people In Britain do not have. It is more than the physical bricks and mortar. It is a place of safety.