It was coming across some long-forgotten items from my children’s lives while clearing out the loft that made me pause. Hundreds of school exercise books full of excitable stories, written before inhibition set in; countless childish drawings, kept as early signs of artistic genius; vast boxes of Lego, a vintage Star Wars set and numerous once-prized action figures, including the bizarrely named Biker Mice from Mars.
All of which had to be ruthlessly disposed of. My husband and I were downsizing – planning to leave our much-loved family home in London for something smaller and more suitable for our advanced ages. The decision was to prove more painful and traumatic than I could have ever imagined.
With UK homelessness rising and thousands of refugees dispossessed, I realise how privileged we are. But my lament isn’t about material hardship. It’s about the grief of losing something so dear to my heart that I was unable for a time to move on.
Downsizing raises some tough questions: how to live this last stretch of life, how to cope with ageing, with loss of professional status and a diminishing role as a mother.
We had fallen in love with our home 20 years earlier when, with two kids growing fast, we needed somewhere larger than our flat. The five-bed Victorian house was like a fabulous dream come true. It felt as if a tremendous gift had fallen into our laps and, over the next two decades, we made it our own.
Now we were considering selling up, for the most sensible of reasons. We were in our 60s, our sons were young adults. The house was draughty, expensive to heat, costly to maintain and would clearly be too big for us two, especially as we grew more doddery.
Bernard, four years my senior and retired, was eager (actually, desperate) to move and worried about leaving it any longer. I, on the other hand, had so far refused to entertain the idea. At the least, I wanted to see our sons settled in their own homes. Secretly, I had thoughts of staying on for ever, with visions of the house echoing to the noise of grandchildren playing with my children’s old toys.
But last autumn, I started to think the unthinkable. Wasn’t it time for less worry over my freelance work, for more leisure, more travel, more fun? Selling the family home was a way of supplementing our flaky pensions and of helping our sons, both struggling with student debts and the prospect of astronomical rents.
And hasn’t the political message been that we elders shouldn’t be hogging so much space?
So it was that in October last year we put our house on the market. Telling our sons was hard. Harry, 26, then living at home, quickly made an effort to overcome his shock, saying it was time he moved out anyway (he found somewhere to rent within months). Max, 21, with a close group of mates in the neighbourhood, seemed more dismayed, demanding that we shouldn’t move far.
Over the next six months, we must have viewed hundreds of houses: none seemed to be right. I have never been great at making decisions and now, facing one of the biggest of my life, I seemed unable to compromise. Perhaps it was my way of sabotaging any move – maybe for me, no other house could match the home we were leaving.
Meanwhile, my husband had made our home presentable – it had never looked so sparkling. By early January, we had accepted an offer. For Max, home from university for Christmas, the move had become distressingly real. I worried that we were being heartless, but Bernard argued that families moved all the time, all over the world.
That January, I started slowly sifting through the detritus of our lives. I took pictures of stuff that definitely had to go: my old school hat made of best-quality felt and lovingly stored in polythene by my mother; the radical feminist mags from my 20s with names such as Catcall and Heroine; the half-dozen badminton racquets we would never use again. Or would we?
Our search for a home became more urgent and, for me, distressing. There was no question that in our panic we behaved badly, even madly, making offers on unsuitable houses and then withdrawing. The endless calls, the pressure from estate agents didn’t help. I grew steadily more anxious: there were fits of uncontrollable crying, sleepless nights, panic attacks. I tried a range of remedies including sleeping tablets from the GP, and valerian supplements the size of horse pills, from an Italian friend keen on herbals. Nothing worked for long.
We were selling our home, but had somehow failed to find another. “Feeling lost,” I wrote in my diary. Work went out of the window: I didn’t have the energy to look for it and, as time passed, I no longer had the confidence: professionally, I felt I had fallen into a black hole. My earned income dwindled to nothing. At least we got to practise living on our pensions.
Feeling desperate, I visited a therapist whom I’d seen during previous difficult times. She helped me acknowledge the sense of loss involved in selling up, the painful enormity of dismantling our lives; and how it had come to symbolise getting old – or, as one friend darkly called it, the endgame.
It was now nearing the end of May and our agent warned us we could lose our buyers. Should we delay the sale and run the risk? Or sell up, put our things into storage and temporarily rent a flat? Bernard – and friends – persuaded me to take the latter course.
Over the next overwrought weeks, we started clearing five floors and 20 years of stuff. Decluttering is meant to be therapeutic, but I had this fear of my life being stripped bare. Would we have room for things we cherished: old vases, rugs, paintings, books? Even the table tennis table, rusty as it was, held summer memories of family championships.
What kept me sane? Singing in the local choir, support from friends, long walks. An urgent call to my therapist, who said that maybe my present home had to go – disappear – before I could accept another.
Our sons joined us at home days before the move. We reminisced about the good times, played some final table tennis, sorted out things they wanted to keep. I can’t count the times I walked through our garden during those last days; it had always been at its best in early spring. Before, all I had seen were its faults: full of London clay, overshadowed by neighbours’ trees and overrun by snails and weeds. Now I savoured its magic and its wildness. I’ll have another garden, I told myself. I will get over this.
Our leaving party, in early June, was a drunken, comforting affair – swiftly followed by two days of professional packing and removal into storage. It was an odd, melancholy time, much of it spent wandering through empty rooms, each of us with our own thoughts. The final afternoon was spent watching football together in a sitting room bare apart from the TV.
The next morning it was done: we locked up for the last time. It was a terrible feeling. “It’s over. The house has gone,” I wrote mournfully in my diary the first night in our rented flat. “We can never go back.”
In the following months, I was haunted by the fear that we would never find another family home, but as I write we seem to have settled on one. It is smaller, but not too small; suburban but with good transport connections. The garden is large enough for a workshop for Bernard. With luck, we’ll be there for Christmas.
The new house, I’m relieved to find, has room for our ping-pong table – as well as my old school hat.
