Neither Here nor There

March, 1957, St Albans, Hertfordshire

It was an imposing building with a posh past. The ceilings were very high and there was a grand and sweeping staircase I loved walking down, pretending to be a princess. The mansion had a mysterious number of rooms and my mother and I occupied the far end of one of them, sharing the long space with a quarrelsome group of Irish girls – because what was once a Victorian family home was now a hostel for the homeless.

We’d had to leave our cottage when my stepfather disappeared with my younger half-sister – leaving no forwarding address – and my mother couldn’t pay the rent. Much of what happened around this time is a blank, but do remember – aged about 11 and soon to start secondary school – walking a lot of the city streets carrying a small brown suitcase and a radio. We must have stayed with friends or in B&Bs, because we never slept rough.

When I turned 13 in the hostel, the other girls stopped shouting at each other and made a fuss of me and gave me a manicure set. Then a nice man from the council came and we were given a flat on Holywell Hill. A proper address, where I had a room of my own and curtains with roses on them and could do my homework in peace. My sister was found, but was never to live with us again.

I’ve lost count of all the addresses I’ve had since then, but the first was in 1944, in Kensington, London, where my mother waited for my soldier father, who never came back. When she married again, we moved to Germany. The second husband worked for the post-war Control Commission, in Berlin, Bonn and Hamburg. We lived in lavishly appointed palatial apartments seized from Nazi officials…. Then the first return to London, thence St Albans, where the marriage fell apart and the family broke forever in half.

The council flat was home till 1963, when my mother died. Now 18, I was at Sussex University, sharing a room with a girl who was to become a friend for life. There were to be umpteen flats over the years, often at the tops of tall houses, one in the Marais district of Paris. Another near Brighton was shared with a vegetarian married in 1971. When I left – after only 2 years together – he divorced me by post. No relationship can survive a basement with little natural light. Back in London, now 29, I stayed with a friend made in Paris – the same friend whose house I share now, 50 years later – till I found an attic to rent in Chalk Farm.

I was never really a natural nomad and never meant to move around so much, but there was also a sense of freedom and excitement about it all, because I was young and the future beckoned like an open road and I could go anywhere…. no parents, no ties, no furniture – and one day, after all, I’d find and settle with Mr Right and have a family home of my own.

Most people move house around 8 times in a life-time. Some don’t move at all. Like a woman I once read about, a great-grand-mother aged 100, the 5th generation of her family to live in a cottage near Southampton, who slept in the same bedroom all her life. When Georgina Brown was born in 1912, the Titanic was yet to set sail…

The comedian Ken Dodd, who died in 2018, also lived in the house he was born in, in the Merseyside suburb of Knotty Ash.

After the attic, another council flat near Euston station. It was on the 8th floor with only one bedroom and far too far from the ground to set down any roots, but I lived there with two small boys and their father till a second divorce and a move to a two-bedroom flat in Bloomsbury. A flat rented then bought under the Right to Buy scheme. This I sold in 2008, to join my partner, a retired professor, in a village near Wigan in Lancashire – whose wife had Alzheimer’s and now lived in a care home.

When the romance with the prof re-formed into friendship, I left the North and bought a house in the Midlands in a lovely cathedral city – where I loved the long garden and enjoyed the security of walls built to last…. until Covid and the awful isolation of lockdown, so far from my sons in the South and any sure source of support. Which led to the selling of the semi and the final return last year to the only part of this world that’s ever felt close to home. To London, via Wigan and Lichfield.

A zig-zag path, back to the beginning and therefore where all journeys will one day end. A Mystic Meg of my acquaintance said it was ‘typical Pisces, nothing ever in a straight line!’

Which was how, at 79, I accepted my friend’s kind offer of a base and swapped a whole house for a single room in North London – and became a paying guest in another Victorian pile, which also houses four lodgers. Where I enjoy the sharing of the bathroom and the use of a communal fridge…. and sleep on a ‘study bed’ that has to be lowered from the wall at night and put back in the morning, to release a shelf where the desk-top lives. A slightly strenuous routine producing biceps I never knew I had. Meg, who also fancies herself as a counsellor, gave me one of her wise and annoying nods. ‘Every situation brings a gift’…

It’s certainly a rather alternative lifestyle for the elderly. A capsule wardrobe hangs in the cupboard and a few books sit on a shelf, but most of my stuff’s in storage in Staffordshire. The Room’s my centre now – a base from which to hunt for a home in the capital. I check ‘newly listed’ in Enfield on Rightmove twice a day and the alerts that arrive on my phone. I’ve viewed several unsuitable properties, the size of sheds and shoeboxes…and plodded a lot of pavements…. On a limited budget, I knew it was never going to be easy, but it’s still taking much longer than expected… So an Awfully Big Adventure or Absolute Madness, when all my contemporaries seem so settled…

A Leap of Faith for sure – but also an everyday change of direction, this leaving of one place for another. No wagons west or journey into space, more a trundle of a trip on trains or in cars or vans…

So hardly an epic tale, but rather part of a regular pattern of movement of people with their possessions and dreams. In an average month in the UK, around 100,000 households will move to a new address. A pattern maybe also an echo of a larger story still: the collective myth of coming home. First, the human wondering what’s over the horizon, the venture into the Unknown, then after a series of obstacles – rocks, giants, battles, dragons – the Return to a resting place..

An ancient myth, giving meaning and shape to our experience, drawing us on and easing our aloneness on the earth… But sometimes, even the greatest of stories seems to lose its power – too frail to fight against the forces of the night, when my reality shrinks to the size of The Room, this stage of the journey on pause, for heaven knows how long…

And I’m one of the lucky ones. Mine only a modest form of migration; no perilous trek across mountains or crossing of borders – unless you count the Watford Gap – or waters in a leaky boat. Mine was a displacement by choice. No flight in fear of my life, made homeless by things beyond my control, like war, famine or flood…

Or earthquake, like the one in March, 2011, that struck off the coast of Japan and awoke a Great Wave that swept thousands of trees, homes and people into the sea. One was a man called Hiromitsu, whose wife and village were lost in a matter of minutes. Three days later, he was found ‘sailing’ the roof of his house – which was all that remained of it.

An extreme event, but also a reminder of an eternal impermanence, that we live in a provisional personal landscape, when the shape of the world as you know it one day can change forever the next. A shock diagnosis or sudden death, a partner’s violence or betrayal, wrongful imprisonment…. Or the birth of child or falling in love…

But it’s time to return to the unromantic interior of Islington and the safe and private space where I manage my affairs, a roof firm and friendly over my head. To the unmapped area between this address and the next as yet unknown, neither quite here or there… A pause that feels like a place in itself, a space in time with no clear edges that resists definition. But not a vacancy and nothing like a limbo. An otherwhere!

In-between states can have a special quality, as dawn and dusk both do, neither light nor dark – and a vulnerability too, because it’s getting very late in this day…. and the road grows short. But I’m still mobile with some money in the bank and the capacity to continue till a new home is found. I’m not the bag lady seen only a week ago, raiding a recycling bin, who seemed to be wearing all her wardrobe at once. Or a sleeper on the street, like the one who lives in an undesirable cul-de-sac a short walk away.

Tufnell Park, February, 2024

At the end of the road is a cinema I pass en route to the shops. Once the Gaumont, badly damaged by a doodlebug bomb in 1944, it’s now the Odeon Luxe, which has several exits, one set back from the street, creating a 3-walled space. A recess furnished with a few cans, the ‘doorway’ a supermarket trolley draped with a blanket against the wind. Buried beneath the bedding is often someone asleep on the ground, the only part of him visible a pair of trainers in a smallish size, maybe for teenage feet…

Thousands sleep rough on a single night in the UK. Charities like Shelter say the figures so far this year are the highest since records began, with more people in temporary accommodation than ever before.

Which reminds me of my own troubled young past, not somewhere to stay for long….so back again to the present and this uncomfortable time of transition. And yet a pause always holds the promise of change – like one of those gaps in conversation when something important is said then followed by an eloquent silence, before something new is formed into words and action….

The property market’s a jungle, but the explorer in me has her equipment: smartphone and glasses, credit cards and a notebook, lip balm and a pair of scissors, hearing aids and earrings and a scarf, naturally. I may be a slave to Rightmove – but I’m also free and not just free, but – in estate agent speak- ‘chain-free’, which implies a certain lightness of being…

There’s no house on the horizon yet, but it’s out there, somewhere to look forward to. A key will turn in the door. In the meantime, the quest goes on. The hurdles ahead are high, the task one only I can truly know and complete – but love and friendship walk beside me every step of the way, companions of the heart.