Echoes of Home

I’m staying with my mum in Buckinghamshire for a few days. Away from my own house, I often find it hard to sleep, rising when the first traffic begins to move and the neighbours start to stir.

At home in Cornwall, the demands of animals usually pull me out of bed before the light has touched the sky, so it feels almost decadent here to lie beneath a heated blanket and read for an hour. I like to open the curtains to the east and watch as dawn paints the world into being.

This morning I was late to rise, and when I drew the curtains the fields were washed in mist. Wendover Woods and the distant swell of the Chilterns blurred into soft shadow, and fences and hedgerows dissolved into the haze.

It was that in-between hour, before the light has quite arrived, when the world seems suspended between presence and absence. Too early to clatter about making tea and toast, I sat in the stillness and felt curiously ghostlike myself. Did I exist here? Who was I? 

Part of this comes, I think, from never quite belonging in my mum’s new house. It is beautiful and filled with the same furniture, plates and cherished treasures that I’ve known my whole life, yet it isn’t the place where we grew up. It isn’t home.

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“Perhaps home isn’t a fixed place at all. Perhaps it’s something we carry inside us—an inheritance of memory, loss, love, and the echoes of all the lives we’ve lived.”

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And that makes me wonder - what is home, really? Is it a physical place, like the 1920s red-brick house in suburban London where my family once lived, or my little cabin home in Cornwall overlooking the fields and over the woods to the shimmer of the sea? Or is it something more elusive: a state of mind, a sense of safety, a belonging to people rather than bricks and mortar?

Dr Johnson said, “To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition.” But perhaps home is also a kind of longing, a nostalgic ache for people and places that are gone, for the self we once were, for the family that existed before goodbyes were said. The Welsh have a word for it: hiraeth. It vibrates against my breastbone like a sob.

I sometimes find myself wondering whether our old family house still holds the imprint of who we once were. The bike scratches on the paintwork, scraps of wallpaper behind the radiators, the faint pencil marks of our heights on the back door. My improvised Sindy House in the old linen cupboard, the liminal space where the hot water tank grumbled at the summit of five empty shelves, and the inside of which I decorated for my dolls to live in (and which I left intact for decades - cherished decorations which my dolls enjoyed and maybe are played with now by another child?)

Of course, the new family has remodelled the house I once called home, walls knocked down, sleek kitchen island installed, rooms smoothed from a warren of small spaces into modern efficiency. The higgledy-piggledy, sometimes shabby but much-loved house of my childhood exists now only in memory.

And yet… if time is a spiral, if past, present, and future really do overlap, then perhaps that house still contains us. Perhaps sometimes the new family hears laughter or squabbles, or thud of running feet on the stairs, or even the faint echo of the Grange Hill theme tune (while one of us kept watch to switch off the telly before Mum came back into the room.) Maybe the back door shuts with the same crash I still hear in my memories and my father’s footsteps tap across the red tiled floor of the kitchen as he fills the kettle?

That is what I try to capture in my novels: this sense of overlap, where past and present bleed into one another and the ghosts of memory tug at the fabric of the now. In The Letter, The Locket, and Oyster Shore, the characters are caught in that same liminal space I felt this morning, standing between presence and absence, longing and belonging, hiraeth and home.

I’d love to know what home means to you. Is it a place you can return to, or a memory you carry, or perhaps a person who makes you feel safe? Do you ever feel that same tug I do? The ache for something lost, half-remembered, and deeply loved?

These are the questions that run through my Rosecraddick novels and if these reflections resonate with you, I think you’ll find echoes of your own story within theirs. It’s a theme I am returning to in the new book I am working on and one that weaves its way through The First and Last Summer. Maybe home is where we all want to be - if we can find it.

I’d love to hear from you: where is “home” for you?