Roots and Wings

the pull of home

When I was small, I dreamed of living in an oast. Those kilns were like fairytale towers to me; castles in which I would sit and write, maybe even in the kitchen sink, Cassandra Mortmain-style. The cowls would turn gently above me, bringing a clean aroma of hops and apples into my home. Or I would live in a “beamy” Tudor cottage with roses tumbling over the windows. To reach me, you’d have to fight through densely-packed woodland, or take a boat along the river to my back door. Both types of homes line the lanes of the Kent and Sussex countryside where I was born and where I called home until I was twenty-five.

My own childhood home was not one of these romantic old dwellings. We lived in a 1960s box on the edge of a small housing estate of cul-de-sacs with aspirational names such as Yardley Park, Cheviot Close, Chiltern Way. I was happy there, but I would draw oast houses and Tudor cottages obsessively, dreaming of a future remote from suburbia long before I had the vocabulary to express my desires.

The oasts at Sissinghurst Castle, Kent

When I first left home for a life that has involved a lot of moves (from London to France to the Midlands to Wiltshire and now to Cornwall) I would feel a physical pull back to my home county on entering it, as though I had a magnet inside me that reacted to a force in the centre of West Kent. I wrote about it in A Place for Everything:

In the past, this length of the A21 was where I would feel a warm rush of nostalgia. There is a bridge that crosses the A road shortly after you leave the M25. It is an arc of concrete - hardly a thing of beauty - but to me it has always said “home”. As I passed beneath it I would exhale the word, feel my shoulders go down, knowing that I was going back to where I belonged. Shortly after passing under this bridge, the Weald of Kent is laid out beneath you. A bowl of green and pleasant land which, in my childhood, was full of orchards, oast houses, farms and weather-boarded cottages. It represented to me the ideal of what home was: calm and comforting and familiar. Like Mum on her best days.

Smallhythe Place, Tenterden, Kent

Sadly Mum’s best days became fewer and further between once I left home. She could not cope with the change to her life that came with us leaving her, and her behaviour started to become difficult to understand (or bear). As a result I began to find home suffocating rather than comforting. Rather than looking forward to the deep-seated feelings of belonging I had always had when entering my home county, I would start to feel anxious the moment we turned off the motorway.

As I have already documented, it’s ten years now since Dad died and Mum was sectioned. With that anniversary (and our 30th wedding anniversary) staring me in the face this year, I knew I needed to put some ghosts to rest. So we went on a road trip to West Kent and East Sussex, to visit old haunts and meet those ghosts face to face.

I don’t know what I thought I would feel. I have been back to my home town enough times since both my parents have died, but only ever by train, so I have not driven along those lanes I knew in childhood. I think I assumed that I would simply experience nostalgia for the countryside and those beautiful houses. Perhaps I hadn’t allowed myself to dwell on how exactly that nostalgia would manifest.

What I felt most strongly was grief - but not specifically grief for my parents. It was that deep, strong pull again, that magnet buried in my core, that took me by surprise. In an apple orchard in the rain I suddenly, fiercely, wanted to sit down and refuse to be moved. I wanted to stay, to not return to the home I have made in Cornwall, but to plant myself in the soil of my home county and stay there until I died - to quite literally put down my roots.

Everything whispered to me seductively: “This is where you belong. Come back.”

Everything in the southeast is so vastly different from West Cornwall. On our trip I bathed in the familiar accents (harsh to the unattuned ear, I know), I sank into the landscape, I breathed in the architecture. My husband even commented, “It’s like another country.” I was not prepared for the realisation that this was the landscape that had formed me. It’s where my inner world began to blossom, where I started to dream, where I started to write. Where I became the person I am.

Of course the rose-tinted spectacles were working overtime. Thirty years is a good chunk of a life and much has changed in my home land. The roads are busier and there is more money: the houses have electric gates and CCTV, and the politics were in loud evidence… And I have sprouted strong wings since leaving my roots. I have been formed also by my travels and house moves.

Now I know though. Times might have changed, and I might have moved on, but: “You can take the girl out of West Kent; you can’t take the West Kent out of the girl.”