As a sometime teacher of writing, I am aware that one of the most indestructible genres within the canon of storytelling is Finding The Way Home. From the Wizard of Oz to ET, from Hansel and Gretel to The Incredible Journey, countless works of fiction concentrate on the theme of home and how to get (back) there.
But what is a home? Home is central to the idea of family life – a place where, even though there might be strife, you “fit”. There, you are known, loved and accepted – even though, with the masks of manners and social propriety lowered, you might also be undermined, raged at and criticised.
Many people search for an idea of home throughout their lives, never actually having had one – for instance, people in care, or fostered. I cannot imagine real homelessness, but we often think of it in terms of the physical discomfort of having no roof over your head. Even were they properly housed, though, many of the homeless would still be homeless – alone and disconnected. In this atomised modern world, it is the fate of all too many.
But even those who were lucky enough to grow up in a stable home still must leave to find their own one day. This rite of passage is one of the most distressing – and exciting – things about growing up. I remember to this day the fear and excitement I felt when I left my parents’ house for the first time at the age of 21.
I had found a place to live, but it was not home. In fact, well into my 30s, when I talked about “home”, I still would have been referring to the little terraced house I grew up in west London. In reality this was not home either – it was as much as anything else a place that, however much I was attached to it, I was determined to escape.
Like my elder brother, who wandered the world for much of his 20s, I was unable to find home. When he visited New Orleans in the early 80s, he knew he had arrived home. He’s lived there ever since. As for me, I didn’t feel I had discovered home until I became a father and moved into my first house in a place I loved, the Portobello Road. It was less fashionable in those days but, crucially for me, it was near where my father worked all his life in a greengrocer’s, so there was still a link with family history.
But even that I had to leave (after I was divorced), and make a new home – this time with my second wife. It was then, with her practical skills and love for the place we moved into, I came to understand why once women were called “homemakers”. Nowadays, most would be deeply suspicious of the word, suggestive of domestic bondage and passivity as it is. My wife is so much more than a homemaker, yet I cannot deny that she has made our home with a love and passion and concern that I would be incapable of, and for that I am deeply grateful.
Once, those guilty of capital crimes faced with a choice between exile and death, would often choose the latter. Now I understand why. In a sense, your children, too, become exiles, once they leave home and search for their own place in the world. I hope that however old they grow, they will always feel welcome in my house – as I did in my parents’. Even more, I hope they find somewhere to live that is their own, a place that now only in exists in their imaginations.
It won’t be what they expect – it never is – but whatever its physical manifestation, I can only wish that as they take their place in it, it takes their place in them – and becomes not simply a place to exist, but somewhere that fulfils one of the deepest of all human longings. A place called home.
