How do you define ‘home’?

Some sixteen years after I left the family home to create my own, my parents moved to a bungalow in another village. I never lived there, but when I visited, I’d say something like ‘I’m going home to Mum and Dad’ because somehow they themselves were synonymous with the concept of home. I mentioned this to a friend recently and she thought I was mad. But then she probably does anyway.

My husband’s parents still live in the house where he grew up. If we’re visiting them, we might refer to it as his ‘home home’ as opposed to ‘home’ which is where we live.

I have a complicated psychological relationship with the house I grew up in. I loathed it the whole time I lived there (eight to eighteen) because it represented being uprooted from a place I yearned for so much it eventually became a fiction of itself.

Nevertheless, that house was ‘home home’ until my parents moved out. Now it’s just somewhere I once lived.

There’s a concept of what ‘home’ should be, just as there is an idea of ‘family’ or ‘parent’ or ‘Christmas’ should be. For many people those concepts are hollow shells. They ought to be a happy things, yet aren’t. I’m lucky in that for me, they always mostly been happy and still are.

As an author, I think of my characters’ homes a good deal, because I feel it frames them. Some of the following I’ve explored in my books, some I plan to. What have I missed?

• Can a character feel at home if they hate the house but love the person/people in it?
• Can a character feel at home if they hate the person/people in it but love the house?
• Can a character feel at home anywhere if they’re rootless and/or running from the past?
• Can a character make a home in a new place if some of the people around them don’t want them there?

In Mr Rosenblum’s List by Natasha Solomons (alternative title: Mr Rosenblum Dreams in English), Jack and Sadie Rosenblum are refugees who flee Germany in 1937 for London where they are given a book of instructions on how to assimilate. Jack is determined to follow it so that he can blend in, leave the past behind and become an English gentleman in a new home. Sadie doesn’t want to forget her lost home, her lost family, or submerge who she is. When Jack moves them to post-war Dorset to build a golf course, she is even less happy, especially as the locals have mixed views on German Jews living in their village. Among other things, the book explores a concept of home. Will it forever be somewhere Sadie has lost and can’t replace? Can it be the place Jack has moved them to even if they have to fight to be accepted? Or can they create something else? Set not far from where I live, and inspired by the author’s grandparents, it’s an interesting (and often funny) read.

I have friends with hundreds of years of ancestors buried in their local graveyards. I sometimes feel sad that those friends have roots that I don’t.

I’m a mixture of Scottish, English and Irish with a few odds and ends chucked in. All of my ancestors over the last two hundred years had itchy feet. It would take years to work out where I ‘come’ from and visit everyone’s graves. While I might feel a little rootless, the greater feeling is a sense of freedom.

I’m not tied. I’m not obligated to tradition. I don’t have to follow my ancestors in their beliefs or lifestyle. I’ve been free to change and adapt and grow without feeling I’m betraying anything or anyone.

I wonder if my itchy feet ancestors felt the same?

One great-great-grandfather chose to leave not only a country but a community behind for a new life in England. I know he was valued by his new community and loved by his new family. Did he yearn for the previous place: its scenery, its language, its familiarity? Or was he happy creating a new home in London?

My Scottish grandmother moved shortly after marriage from Glasgow to Herefordshire and then Greater London. Surprisingly, for someone born and brought up in a city, she preferred Herefordshire and never quite reconciled herself to London. She spent two periods of time during WWII in rural Scotland, along with (among others) my mother then returned to London. Eventually she moved to Wiltshire. Where was home for her? I don’t know. How she felt about Herefordshire is the only personal information she ever shared with me.

Home is certainly not a geographical location to me. Largely it’s close family and close friends. But it’s also something else because ‘home’ needn’t mean people.

When I lived alone, my flat was no less ‘home’ because I was on my own there most of the time and was, to some extent, very lonely. I loved going ‘home’ to that flat. I loved living to my own rhythm with my few belongings and my sunny kitchen.

Home is being myself. I don’t have to put on a front, or attempt to be extroverted. Lucky enough to have family and friends who accept me as I am, I can express or discuss my thoughts or frustrations or doubts or faith without fear of judgment even if the other person doesn’t understand or agree.

If I’m alone, I can enjoy my own company, pottering about in silence without music or radio, listening to garden or weather noises, letting my thoughts wander, being creative.

For me ultimately ‘home’ is feeling safe.

In a world which seems to be currently insane, perhaps it’s worth remembering that for the vast, vast majority of people a safe home is fundamentally all they want. Surely that’s something everyone has a right to.

What about you? What does ‘home’ mean to you?

Copyright (c) 2024 Paula Harmon. Words not to be reproduced without the author’s express permission. Image credit ID 39788971 © Passengerz | Dreamstime.com