When the landline rings in our house, nobody twitches an eyelid. Not one of the six adults who live here moves to answer it. It rings and rings, and only eventually will someone look up, sigh heavily, and move glacially towards it, by which time the answerphone has switched on. But the tape itself is full, so nobody can leave a message.
“Can’t one of you answer it? At least sometimes?” I ask of my four grown-up children. “But nobody uses the landline,” they complain. “Only the local paper to check we’ve got this week’s edition, and phone-scam people. Or your sister.”
They have a point. And I am also guilty of not answering. If I do pick up, I say, “Hello, Eva,” before my sister has even spoken. “How did you know it was me?” she asks, mystified. If it is someone trying to persuade me to give up my bank details, I insist I am speaking to Eva, as this works well, Hamlet fashion, in driving them to hang up, thinking me mad.
We all ignore the doorbell, too, despite the fact that our three dogs go crazy whenever anyone approaches our gate. Outbursts of frantic barking and occasional howling make me jump out of my skin at regular points during the day: the postman calls a lot with online deliveries. But nobody wants to go to the bother of running up or down the stairs and finding the keys to unlock the front door. It is double-locked as we never use it, preferring the entrance into the kitchen. It is usually me or Ed who gets there in the end, panting from the exertion of dashing up flights of steps, to be handed a pile of boxes by an irritated and impatient postman. Every package is invariably addressed to one of the children and not us.
“An Englishman’s home is his castle,” is a saying that seems strangely appropriate to our family. Although perhaps not in the way it is intended, but rather in the way a castle is impregnable and fortified. Those from the outside can enter only after a moat has been crossed and a portcullis opened. So when even phone calls and the postman are seen as an invasion by my family, I worry that all of us have developed “castle mentality”.
Perhaps it is my fault. I have always preferred a night in tucked up with a good book to a party. My twin daughters, now in their mid-20s, have inherited my antisocial habits. It takes a lot to drag them to a social engagement. (It has to be vegan, for a start.) Only my two sons venture forth, like knights on chargers, into the city, seeking the holy grail of a perfect night out.
But when your home feels as secure as a castle, and your bedroom has become a bastion against the world, of course it feels uncomfortable, even dangerous, to consider abandoning the fortress. Maybe this goes some way to explain why my three twentysomething children are still living at home.
Of course, there are perfectly sensible reasons for staying at home: impossibly high city rents, and the difficulty of finding a job, let alone one that will pay enough to cover rent and living costs, or that uses your qualifications and provides a career path. But as the years slip past, I wonder if there are other reasons, too – that the longer they stay inside the security of our home, where the difficulties and troubles of the world can be banished, the harder it will be for them to face reality when it eventually comes.
Outside the walls of our home, it is not just a matter of finding rent and surviving alone, it is facing up to the uncertainty of the times, the horrors of natural and man-made disasters, the cruelties and injustices of life revealed in the news. Looking inwards, being among the people who love you, who share your values and who will watch your back, generates a sense of safety and comfort. I don’t believe my children’s late-start into independent adult life is just a financial conundrum. I think it goes deeper, that it is bound up with wanting to stay put in the castle, where life is kinder than the one laying siege on the outside.
Some names have been changed
