Where do you feel at home?

Thoughts on home: Is it one place, or maybe there’s more than one place where you feel at home. And what makes it home anyway, what does that feel like?

Photo by Brian Ritchie on Unsplash

This proved to be a tough piece of writing to pull together. It’s taken countless drafts, lots of copying and pasting, deleting and moving to ‘spare copy’ as I try to lift my head out of the weeds and work out what I think. I spent a lot of time listing the homes I’ve lived in along with key dates before realising that this is less about geography and front doors than grief, loss and holding on.

Sometimes the writing is messy though and there isn’t a clear cut answer or beginning and end, but I hope it makes some sort of sense.

This house in Ilkley has been home since July 2018 in the sense that it’s the address on my driver’s licence, and bank and mortgage statements land on the doormat with my name on them.

I love our home among the trees, that in less than 10 minutes I can be climbing Ilkley Moor, hopping across becks, walking on rocky paths and amongst the ferns, staring up at the wide-open sky.

I love walking down the hill into town, passing the kid’s school and waving to the baristas in La Stazione, knowing that they’ll already be making me my large flat white and upselling me a toasted teacake before I’ve set foot inside.

I love going to work at Oliver Bonas, familiar faces, friends and the children coming in and giving me a hug, staying for a quick chat, colleagues adding a new layer of friendship and connections to this life here, but it hasn’t always felt like this.

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Back in January I spent a few days at my sister’s home in a village in between Frome. and Bath. I’d caught the train from Ilkley, changing at Leeds and Bristol Temple Meads where I found myself catching the commuter train I used to get when we lived in Bath and I worked for Lloyds TSB in their offices on Bristol Harbour. The train line passes along the bottom of our old road.

We moved into the Oldfield Park corner of Bath in 2001 and our Victorian end of terrace was home for 13 years. It was the first house that Andy and I bought together. We were married in Priston Mill just outside Bath in 2002. The boys were born at the Princess Anne Wing at the RUH in 2003 and 2005 while the youngest was born in her bedroom overlooking the back garden in 2009 while the boys slept in their bunkbeds.

Our neighbours were our friends - adults and children alike. The children went to the local primary and we were regulars at the butchers and greengrocers on Moorland Road and Harry at Oldfield Park Bookshop was my go-to for ‘What can I read next?’ book recommendations and a chat. Victoria Park was our playground, the mellow yellow Bath stone and Georgian grandeur of Royal Crescent and The Circus on our doorstep.

It was the family life I’d hankered after since a teenager and I thought we’d live in that house if not forever then for a long time. Why would we move? But life isn’t like that, and in the summer of 2014 we relocated to Bournemouth.

A relocation driven by a combination of debilitating chronic fatigue (me), redundancy (Andy), a new job in Bournemouth (Andy) and trying to bring up our young children (both of us).

The idea of a slow seaside family life where we spent our spare time on the beach together rather than living separately seemed like the obvious, sensible option.

We lived with Alum Chine’s sandy beach at the bottom of our road and the gazillion photos on my phone show how much we loved beach life. The children barefoot or in flip flops, towels thrown over their shoulders walking to the beach after school, jumping off the prom into the sand while the dog bounded into the sea (and the children too sometimes).

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From Bath to Bournemouth to Ilkley Moor

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The disconnect between the external and internal landscapes

But while the external landscape soothed, the emotional landscape was quite different because those three years will also forever be associated with the deaths of my parents and grandmother between May and September in 2015.

Three messy, complicated years, overwhelmed with grief, panic attacks, anger and confusion before redundancy hit again in 2017 and after being presented with a job opportunity in Skipton and a lack of jobs in the south, we landed in Yorkshire.

Morning dog walks on the beach after school drop off had become my anchor points, the rhythm and ritual and backdrop of the blue sky and sea soothing me during those three years, so I figured I’d just swap beach walks for moorland walks and sooner or later all would be fine.

Reinvention and change can be exciting, exhilarating even, but not on this scale and not like this, especially with the final blow - a breast cancer diagnosis six months after moving to Ilkley.

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All of this makes this house in Ilkley my 22^nd (give or take) home which gives me a batting average of one house move every two or so years of my life - so far. I compare this with my husband who’s up to ten, I think and whose parents live in the house they moved to when he was a pre-schooler. When we visit them in Bristol we sleep in his old bedroom (it’s been redecorated since!). His sisters live a few roundabouts away on the ring road whereas my siblings are now in Cardiff, Frome and Tokyo.

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Holding my breathe while trying to take one step at a time

I think this feeling of not knowing where home was or where I was meant to be really landed after I finished cancer treatment in January 2019. There was initial relief that the invasive stage of treatment was over and I attempted to move into recovery mode albeit while adjusting to daily doses of Tamoxifen – hello menopause.

I thought I could finally sink into Ilkley life but instead the reality of living hundreds of miles from family, friends, people and places I knew hit me hard. The uncertainty of trying to sell our Bournemouth home while renting a too-small dark bungalow in Ilkley and competing with umpteen other families all searching for a home to buy while going through chemotherapy put us under immense pressure.

We finally completed on our current home when I was about halfway through chemotherapy after going to closed bids.

Finishing treatment I realised that I’d hit pause on grieving mum and dad’s deaths. I’d been holding my breath while trying to take one step at a time and I needed to exhale. There’s only so much we can cope with emotionally at one time so I guess the floodgates opened as the hospital visits finished.

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I was an alien, unfamiliar to every person living there and unfamiliar with every street; I was unfamiliar, even, with the house we’d rented, despite the fact our favourite pictures were on the walls, familiar rugs were on the floors, and I’d filled a bookshelf with favourite books of poetry. Home, I realised in a very real way that autumn, felt like something much more than putting chairs in rooms.
Clover Stroud, On the way home feels

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Trying too hard to fit in and not listening to myself

The disconnect between the warm and welcoming community in Ilkley, the new friends who’d dropped off food parcels when I was diagnosed, driven me to chemotherapy and bought me coffees to buoy me and how I felt inside was stark.

I had this notion that as long as I was with Andy and the children and had a front door I could lock, my books on the bookshelves, walls covered with mum’s paintings and sketches, I could if I tried hard enough, make myself to feel at home through sheer bloody mindedness.

This disconnect manifested itself in rushing into work and pushing myself physically – Pilates, Couch to 5km and increasingly long walks on the moor – all of which were followed by regular emotional breakdowns with lots of tears and bone crunching fatigue, reminiscent of the chronic fatigue from years earlier.

I was utterly lost and discombobulated on every level, pushing and trying too hard, not listening what my body and heart were telling me and that’s not a great foundation for finding connections, making friends and feeling rooted.

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Clinging onto the idea of where home is (and isn’t)

I think I was still clinging onto the idea that even though we weren’t living in Bath anymore, I could still call it ‘home’. I felt like I needed somewhere solid, somewhere I could tether myself to. Regular trips to see friends were possible while we were in Bournemouth, still giving me a toehold into the community we’d left, harder when we were so far north.

Friendships can and do shift when you move away. The mix of quick catch ups while passing in the playground or street supplemented by coffees and meals out give friendships the chance to evolve. These touch points weave together to create a shared history based on shared experiences.

Texts and WhatsApps help to fill that gap - up to a point - but it takes effort. The distance can lead to visits having an air of ceremony, the pressure of expectations making them hard to relax into and gaps can appear, especially when one of you is grieving and feeling unmoored.

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What’s helping? Writing, time and letting go

Writing is helping me to sift through these conflicting emotions and thoughts by getting them out of my head and onto paper. These online writing communities are also a Godsend.

London Writers Salon Writers Hour gave me the space to explore these thoughts from the safety of my notebook and my little writing cocoon. A protective buffer between me and real life where I’ve been free to explore and write it all out. Alone but together is their mantra, and boy does it work.

So writing is helping, and so is realising that it’s going to take time. Cancer and Covid interrupted our settling into Yorkshire life and it made perfect sense when my counsellor said that it sounded like I’d been ‘holding on’ to a lot.

I was. I was clinging on to ideas about life, family and friendships including a fixed notion of what and where home was and wasn’t. She helped me to start letting go, to start releasing my grip, creating space for alternative views and reframing experiences.

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Travelling back from my sister’s home in January a thought struck me. Maybe I just have multiple places I can call home. I know that landing at either of my sisters’ places always feels like home.

I walk through their front doors, smile and breathe deeply. These places are where the external and internal landscapes blend together. We’ve experienced the same losses and life changes, we don’t have to explain ourselves, we can just be.

Maybe along with Ilkley, these too are my homes, Bath and Bournemouth too, even though I no longer live there.

So I guess where I’ve got it is this: what if I stop looking for one single place that’s home but embrace the fact that I’m lucky enough to have a few different places where I feel at home, even if a bit of train travel might be needed to get there.

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I’m also incredibly aware of my privilege in having lived in, still live in, such beautiful places. The story of home has many layers, it’s nuanced and there’s a lot more to my relationship with home than I’ve gone into here. This is very much a starting point, a pull on the thread and I’ll see where it takes me.

But enough about me, how about you? Where’s home for you, where do you feel at home?

Thanks for reading, Harriet

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The first funeral

Bird’s custard hat, scarf and mitts

Have the children forgiven you yet?