As ever at Christmas, I have travelled back to the old house that my family have lived in for the past 40 years.
It’s currently nine o clock, the house is silent, and I am writing this with a small whiskey in hand under dimmed lights. There is an eery silence and for the past hour or so my mind has wandered back over time to Christmases of past, and there is almost a Scroogesque feeling of ghosts of Christmas past.
I was speaking to my father yesterday about the house and some of the things that will happen in the future. I have moved many times in my life. I’ve house shared with fifteen, lived alone, lived with partners, but one thing that has always remained constant amongst all of this is the family house. It’s not a unique house, just your typical terraced house built in the ’70s. Three bedrooms, a back garden is where the socialist takes place, a front garden that nobody ever seems to use anymore.
I thought back to the day where I moved into the house, I must have been four years old. The house before I shared a bedroom with my sister so having my own bedroom was something of an exciting adventure. My parents took the main room, my sister the second sized and I had a small room. When I see it now its more of a box room, but that room was mine, and mine alone with a window that I could gaze out across the houses opposite and the fields going into the next village
As we settled into the house, the room became my own world. Dinosaurs replaced the cuddly toys, which were soon replaced by various science fiction figures. The room was my haven, it was the place where I could be safe, alone and be me. It was the window to my world. The years rolled by and when I got my first ever computer aged 12, A ZX Spectrum! It became even more of a window to other worlds as this gave me an escape to unlimited adventures. In fact, when I look back thirty years ago, it’s not so different to what children do now, except we had no online connection.
We have had the same neighbours next door for as long as we have lived here, they would allow my sister and me to play with their two daughters, hard to believe that those same children are now grandparents. Many people have come through these doors in the past forty years. Generations of my family have stayed, laughed, loved and lost along the way. Some have moved on to be lost contacts, others sadly no longer with us. Friends have been here for countless cups of tea, drinks, food and parties. There have been tears, triumphs and tantrums but the house still remains a place of sanctuary.
I first walked through these doors a wide-eyed four-year-old holding my mother’s hand. Now I sit here forty years later, middle-aged, and it still feels the same. No matter where you are in life or no matter what the world throws at you, your childhood home is always a place of refuge, an area of calm and serenity and when I do leave to go back home it’s almost like looking back at your life.
Of course, there will come a time when it will just be memories like now silence will fall, and there won’t be anyone here to talk to, only those whispers of yesteryear with photos hanging on the wall and flashbacks of youth running before your eyes.
In the decade that I have been living overseas, I have not been home enough. Maybe once or twice a year, but the older you get, and the more things change you realise the old adage “There is no place like home.”
