Home-going

Estuary of the River Exe, near Topsham, from the train travelling from Lympstone to Exeter, 25.02.2023

‘Home’ is a place and a concept I’ve been grappling with for months now, and have been unable to put thought-to-blog as a consequence, but a recent trip ‘home’ has helped to settle a few things, at least.

Where we are now, in our rented house on this Portuguese mountain, has an inevitable temporariness to it. As testament to our sentimentality, when we first drove over here, we managed to fit an incredible amount of artefacts (photos, knick-knacks) that are dear to us into our much-loved Skoda Yeti – now returned ‘home’ – and attempt to recreate a semblance (but only a semblance) of the home we built in Exeter for over twenty-five years. A home that itself strove to contain both our pre-parent selves and the lives and characters of the four individuals that grew into, through and now (in three out of the four cases, anyway) out of it. Needless to say, the prospect of going ‘home’ presented me with emotions that pulled in all directions: thrill at the prospect of seeing those people I love most, of looking at their faces in the flesh, rather than via a phone screen; of giving them hugs and kisses – ok, I have certain friends who quite fairly refrain from such physical behaviour, but even they permitted me a gentle, quick hug on meeting! But also a sense of trepidation – about whether I’d feel ‘welcome’, ‘at home’; about how I would feel about that West Country landscape that I think I carry in my DNA now, and – most of all – how I would feel about going into our old house when I visited Luke. On the morning I left, Adrian quipped that he hoped I didn’t decide to stay. Never any question of that, it was still clear that we both had questions about attachments – to our old ‘home’ and to our new one.

So what was it like? Honestly, I loved the immediate familiarity of the English language re-appearing on all the signs and emanating from (almost) all the voices as soon as I landed at Bristol. When I hear the bus driver on the Falcon bus to Plymouth reassure waiting passengers that the bus most definitely IS going to ‘Pli-muff’, his voice sounds like it has wrapped itself around Devon’s red, red earth and picked up a pebble washed up onto the beach at Slapton Sands. Heading West into the setting sun, Somerset’s and then Devon’s green hills bask golden. I love it. This is still a little piece of my heaven. Met at the other end by my sister, after a quick, fond hug, we fall into our old, easy chatter, as if no time at all has passed, and no distance has separated us. This becomes the tenor for the whole visit. Time and distance melt away; love, connection, interest in each other resurface. But it was also clear to me that I was functioning differently, and a more relaxed, perhaps more receptive, woman was stepping back into the lives of her family and friends. The stresses of paying the bills, of shivering in houses with heating no-one can afford to turn on*, of being unable to find tomatoes or peppers – these are not my stresses. When my ‘Cornwall’ sister expressed concern at her desire to buy 3 of the 4 peppers she alighted upon in a local store for fear of depriving others – even though one was for her, one for my Mum, and one for the sister I’d be returning to in Devon – these were stresses by association, out of care for my family for whom the discovery of 4 red peppers is akin to a miracle (the £5 price tag was certainly pretty incredible!). And the knowledge that the country is guilty of such cruelty to the weak and the vulnerable, and that that’s a ship they’re all bound to, with little sign of a safe haven any time soon – I’m no longer strapped to that ship. But I am watching it, and cannot stop hurting for all those on it.**

But the house? What was it like opening the gate to the front path, ringing my ‘own’ doorbell and entering a home which now ‘belongs’ to three young adult men, one of them my son? Without thinking twice, it was clear that I was a visitor, a guest who would be taken on a quick tour to be shown all the decorative changes, the new purchases, the half-cleared garden. And I was the landlord, too, checking that the house was still fit to live in, feeling a responsibility to its tenants. But it was no longer my home. And I found that that was actually completely fine. As I stepped into the dark, narrow hallway, all the house’s faults (primarily, the need for a fresh coat of paint!) struck me foremost, and my mind transposed the simpler space we now live in, with its mountain views and birdsong soundscape, as the more favourable option. I waited for some kind of emotional jangling, luring me back in, but in fact it delighted me that Luke has transformed what was our bedroom into his, and has turned it into a kind of archive of his youth and childhood, with the walls festooned with photos of family holidays and festivalling with friends. We always loved this house for its capacity to grow with us as a family – a house whose early days were filled with babies and toddlers whizzing around on plastic toy cars, or pre-schoolers building dens with the recycling (yes, Joe and Jade, I haven’t forgotten!); to a house where Adrian and I would rather shyly return on a New Year’s Eve to a house of partying young adults and then seamlessly join in…now it’s shed those skins, and wears a new one, and it looks perfectly happy in it.

It wasn’t just about place, though. Our new ‘retired’ lives also separate us from the lives of most our friends and family, who are mostly still working and caring for others, and just trying to ensure they can keep food on the table and put the heating on long enough to keep the edge off things. Their daily lives are hard right now; my visit brought respite, I suspect, from the daily grind, and hopefully the prospect of visits to see us in our sunny new land. And so it helped me to understand that we are not now in the same place, physically nor otherwise, as most of our friends and family. We are fortunate enough to have been able to step away from the struggle that is living in the UK right now, and try something else out – explore how else it is possible to live a life, while in the full knowledge of the privileged position we operate in. When I flew out of Bristol airport, I felt clearly that I was returning ‘home’, and when the plane flew over the snowy mountains of Northern Portugal and its fertile green terraced lands, cut across by rivers I knew would not be full of sewage (!), I understood that it’s possible to straddle more than one home and to belong in more than one place. For now, Portugal feels more like our home than anywhere – it’s where we’ve planted ourselves for the time being, and the soil here is welcoming, rich and nutritious!

Flying over snowy mountains on the return flight from Bristol to Porto, 02.02.2023

*Ok, this one I do get! But our house doesn’t really have functioning heating we could turn on if we wanted to!

**Byline published an article today that starkly evaluates the UK’s position as feudal, pointing to the consequences of the systematic erosion of democracy that were palpable to me not just from my most recent time at ‘home’ but from before we left (it was a driving factor in our ‘Brexile’) with most people living there in survival-mode. And we wonder why there is no resistance and why mental health problems are soaring?

“Reducing democratic rights directly reduces the possibility for dissent and for difference. Widespread and increasing precarity through declining living standards, stagnant wages and crumbling social and health services, mean that the focus for many is day-to-day survival. In this environment, wider social opposition is dramatically weakened.” Source: https://www.bylinesupplement.com/p/feudal-britain-how-brexit-robbed [11.03.2023]

#home #retiringoverseas #brexile #makinganewlife #newbeginnings