Home

Earlier in the week, warm weather persuaded us to open the air vents and attempt to activate the air conditioner. It wasn’t unpleasantly hot, but it is better to find out early on if maintenance is needed.

Sure enough, I was soon on the phone to the fix-it folk who penciled us in for June 2nd. Grant, however, is handy so he poked around for a couple of days and eventually got the air conditioner resuscitated. He recommended holding off for a few days canceling the maintenance appointment – just in case, but it looks as if he has saved us the expense.

Meanwhile – today I have a heater running again.

Perhaps those predictions of a cold summer are not so far-fetched! I am not complaining.

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Yesterday I mentioned Hiraeth – a profound, bittersweet longing for a home, time, or place to which you cannot return.

It got me thinking. No, that’s not quite right. I never stop thinking, but events, or words, often re-direct my thoughts.

From early childhood, I have been often alone and have spent many long hours waiting for one thing or another. What else to do but think? Oh yes, it can lead to trouble, unless you recognise the need to abandon thoughts that become irritants!

In any event – it seems to me that on occasion I have been acquainted with Hiraeth. I understand that sense of longing, but why? I asked myself.

The first time, it was a physical sensation which I could only think of as thirst.

Actually, as I came to realise many years later, it was emptiness, a longing for “home”. That first time, I was at boarding school. I couldn’t call it homesickness because I had not yet been to my parent’s new residence in Thailand, but I missed my mother and having the privacy of a room with my own things.

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Until we went to Cambodia in 1956, I’d only ever known the flat in London and living with my older brother. In June that year, life changed completely and forever. Peter had older playmates, so it wasn’t as if we had been terribly close, but he had always been there. When, suddenly he wasn’t, it felt strange. I had become like an only child – but not.

What I had become was the child not left behind which I felt was some sort of stigma.

The whole family dynamic had shifted and while I never consciously missed the London flat, I missed the way things had felt back then. There had been a pattern to life. There does not need to be, but humans are creatures of habit and patterns keep us comfortable, especially when we are very young.

After leaving Redcliffe Square, we never lived long enough in any one place to develop an attachment, but in any case, from January 1960, I was at boarding school with no fixed idea of what home was. I suppose I thought of it as being in the company of my parents or more specifically my mother.

Four years later, I was sent to live in New York with my mother’s youngest sister, Kay and her husband. There I remained for the next 13 years. I dearly loved Kay who quickly became my best friend. That should have been home, right? There were problems.

So, in the sense of where I resided and where I kept my stuff, yes. Otherwise, it was not. Nor did I any longer think of home as being with my parents, since we had been so long apart.

Much later on, when cats came to share my life, home was wherever they were.

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To some, home is their country of origin: “I’m going home to England”.

It is where I was born and lived until I was 8. I think of myself as English, but there is nowhere over there that I could call home.

People often ask where I am “from” and I say they must specify how far back.

Arriving here in Cambridge, I came from Washington, before that, from Long Island etc.

In England, people believed I was American or Canadian. Here, I am vaguely regarded as one of those other English-speakers:

“I love your accent.”

Basically, I am rootless. Does it matter? No, but I do understand hiraeth. It is more a concept that I yearn for than an actual place or time.

It is not the childhood home or the family life I enjoyed as a kid. It is more the idea of perfection that I would like it to have been.

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Perfection may have been that second carefree year in Cambodia with a good friend and her lovely family. It felt safe and nice in their company.

The way home should.

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