My parents’ house feels like it was commissioned by a wizard, but built by an architect who didn’t believe in magic.
It is full of secret cupboards within cupboards, it looks like a little chalet house from the front but is secretly three floors. It has a colossal garden (where I held my wedding almost a year ago) and a huge kitchen, plus a pantry bigger than my bedroom. But somehow at the same time it has the overwhelming whiff of a builder who just wanted everything slathered in eggshell Apple White.
When they bought it, the previous owners had made some truly jarring design choices, which my parents have tried to remedy. Orange bedrooms with grey and purple checkerboard carpet, and hot pink sheds. The terrifying hallways of mirror tiles (presumably to make the narrow corridor to the kitchen look wider?) The house has character, but the character is a middle-aged man called Arnold.
My house, on the other hand, has absolutely no character, baffling or otherwise. It is a 2015 new build that we moved into in 2022. I searched fervently for a Forever Home. I grew up in a succession of magnolia and beige Army houses throughout my childhood, and I was desperate for my children to have a family home to return to like homing pigeons throughout their lives. But buying houses is hard and shit sometimes, and the houses I loved best (cheaper, more broken houses, but houses I became obsessed with) slipped through my fingers. When we found this one, it wasn’t love. It was “Well… it’s the right size, and it’s in budget.” Which, I accept, is still a massively privileged position to be in, but committing your life savings and the lion’s share of your income to a debt for a house that’s “the right size and in budget” when there were other houses I adored just felt a bit sad? I mourned those houses. Snowdrop Cottage, and the house that ran on coal – I still think about you and your enormous, unruly gardens.
The strangest thing about the two houses I was most in love with was that they were both fixer-uppers (cosmetically, structurally they were fine) and were both probate properties. Both still contained artefacts of the occupants who had spent most of their lives, and crucially the ends of their lives, in those houses. Maybe that added to the sense of forever-ness that I was craving? If this was the kind of house where those people lived for their forevers, maybe it could be our forevers next?
This house is not my forever house. But, honestly, it was the right house for this part of our lives. Firstly, when we moved in Alex and I had four broken bones between us, and didn’t have the physical capacity for wallpaper stripping and paint rollers, we were disasters. And right now, although I itch to have my own space, I am grateful that we live scooting distance from some shops and the kids’ nursery, and that I can get my mobility scooter in and out of the house independently. It’s the right house for right now, and for that I am grateful.
When I try to imagine my Forever House, the picture is very clear in some aspects, and blurry in others. I don’t know that I especially care where in the country we end up, though I’d love to be an easy drive from the sea. I want a room of my own for my things. Away from hands, claws and paws, I want some space. I don’t mind if the rooms are a little small and snuggly, as long as there is lots of outside space. I don’t need a whole country park, but enough room for chickens, ducks, quails, flowers, and a little shady area of trees where I can plant a little carpet of bluebells. I want years, and years, and years to put down spring bulbs in the lawn as a gift to myself, so I can look out into the garden when the weather is miserable and have snowdrops bursting out for my (always glum) January birthday, and a fireworks display of crocuses as a chaser.
I also know that this dream house may never be mine, even if it does exist (and RightMove leads me to believe that it does, I have found numerous versions of it.)
There are so many “what ifs” between now and any future house move, and I’ve created a great many logistical issues for myself now. How on earth would we move the aviary? What will we do with the fish if the new house doesn’t already have a pond? What if the chickens don’t like the new garden and try to Homeward Bound their way back to the old one? A great feathery exodus. What if even the perfect house doesn’t ever really feel like home?
Strangely, when I think of My Home my mind often returns to my grandparents’ house, which was sold something like 10 years ago, I can’t remember, and I haven’t been back since. It smelled of smoke – smoke from the Aga and my Morfar’s pipe, and garden bonfires. When I imagine it again, I imagine being mobbed by dogs as I cross the threshold, dogs that have been gone for so long now, but whose fur I can still imagine sweeping my palms over. I remember the table that dominated the floor of the kitchen, which I did not realise at the time was in fact two tables, always dressed in a tablecloth. One of those tables is in my own kitchen now (and despite my best efforts is not always dressed in a tablecloth and does have Crayola graffiti on it.)
I remember Easter Egg hunts in their garden, the little wooded area with the fallen log we’d balance-beam across. The fungus growing on stumps that my parents called “dirty crisps” and told us would “make you ‘ick”. I remember finding a pink cuddly rabbit toy in the attic and being allowed to keep it. Selena Bunny in my daughter’s bed right now. (There is more Selena lore, maybe I’ll share it sometime.)
It was also a house where two slightly volatile people lived. Where my mother and her siblings grew up, not totally happily. A house that was drafty, with rooms where children were not welcome, and where accusations of misbehaviour and misdeeds flew about and caught whoever stood in the way.
But, in a childhood that could be packed up in trunks and cardboard boxes at short notice, it was a solid, immovable orbit point. I think it’s still likely I have spent more Christmases there than anywhere else. And when I think of home, despite its shortcomings, it is in the background of the view. Though, the more I think about it, it’s less the house, and more the garden. And the big, blousy flowers on the terrace. And the comforting predictability of the meals (heavily salted carrots will always remind me of my Mormor.)
I sometimes wonder what my children will think of as their childhood home. It is highly likely that this will be the first one that they both remember. I wonder what will be most resonant and memorable for them.
I think about that a lot.