Baggage. This one’s for you.

Contents
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Kansas or Oz?

The Snail

Childhood

The Pink Sofa

Sociable Weaver Birds

The Tattie Pan

The Pistol Shrimp and the Goby

A Garage Full of Trainers

The Swallow

Letters and Rings

Seeing Green

The First House

The Homing Pigeon

Dignity and Trees

The Cuckoo

A Long Walk

The Hermit Crab

Where Is Home . . .?

. . . And What’s Inside It?

The Bowerbird

A Stuffed Duck and Gold Teeth

Badgers

Kindness

The Man Who Fell from the Sky

The Hippos of Colombia

Carpets and Curtains

The Second House

Birds and Flowers

The Guillemot

Land and Sea

The Common Wasp

A Scottish Glen and Pieces of Blanket

The Echidna

Memories and Feelings

I’m Here

Author’s Acknowledgements

Publisher’s Acknowledgements

About the Author

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Kansas or Oz?
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Home: the word we use to refer to the place where we live. A simple, no-nonsense, everyone-knows-what-it-means sort of word. But contemplate it for a moment or two and it’s not quite as straightforward as it seems. It’s not the same as ‘house’, or ‘flat’, or ‘camper van’. Those are words for things that if we were to be shown a picture of them, we would recognise for what they are. But ‘home’ is different. It is something more nebulous and intangible. It’s not simply a structure with a door and a bed in it. It’s more than that. Something infinitely more precious and hard-won.

Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz tells us ‘There’s no place like home’, but what makes a home? What are its constituent parts? Why Kansas and not Oz? If we are homesick, what is it about the place we call home that is lacking elsewhere? Can you ever, truly, ‘make yourself at home’ – as kind hosts encourage – somewhere that isn’t? Is ‘home’ a state of mind as much as a place, somewhere familiar and comfortable? Somewhere to be barefoot and barefaced? Where you can put your feet on the furniture; eat peanut butter straight from the jar with your finger; laugh, cry, retreat from the world? Is it the place – the only place – where you can feel entirely liberated, where you can truly be yourself? Where you feel safe?

Is home landscape? Is it people? Family? Belongings? Roots? History? Continuity? Is home always a fixed point, a known place, or can it be transient? Or is it a feeling? Something you carry with you wherever you go.

This book is the search for home: what it is and what it means. The stories in the pages that follow are all true. They are formed from conversations with people of different ages and circumstances, who each gave their own unique insight into what ‘home’ means for them. I turned to the natural world for inspiration and answers too. What – if any – sense of home do our wild compatriots have? It turns out, in many cases, to be as strong and as varied as ours. No surprise, perhaps, given that we are wildlife too.

To be invited over the threshold into someone’s home is an extraordinary act of generosity and trust. I understand now, having stepped over so many thresholds in the writing of this book, that a home is the most private and cherished of spaces, one that isn’t easily attained and can’t just be found in an estate agent’s window. And I thank everyone who gave me the great honour and courtesy of sharing their home with me.

The Snail
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Beneath the kitchen window of my childhood home was a thick hedge growing up against the pebble dash. Its dense, dark brown twigs, completely hidden in spring by a glossy cloak of green leaves and pink blossoms, made it a perfect hiding place. Not for me – it grew too tight to the wall and was too scratchy to make it a den – but blackbirds always chose it to nest in. We would watch them from the window, darting in with thin twigs and bits of grass in their beaks and then, after a few days, I would creep quietly around the hedge, trying to spot the nest. Occasionally, I would see and catch the eye of the dark brown female, almost invisible in the protective gloom, just the brown-yellow of her beak giving her away. Sometimes she’d be off the nest, revealing the eggs, four or five of them, bright blue and speckled. It was like getting a glimpse of stolen treasure.

A delicate fragment of blue shell on the ground beneath the hedge was a clue that the eggs had hatched. Sure enough, we’d start to hear the hungry chirps of the chicks as their mother returned to their hideaway with a beak full of worms. Then the day would come when we’d see the fat little fledglings, gapes still yellow, perching slightly precariously on the outer branches of the hedge, waiting to make that great leap into adulthood.

Once they had gone, I could go back to my search for the other creatures that lived on the damp, shaded patch of wall behind the hedge. This was a favourite resting place for snails. Few gardeners are thrilled by the sight of snails, but my brother and I loved them. We would collect them and keep them in an old ice cream carton with holes punched in the lid. We’d line it with soil, put a bit of broken flowerpot in the corner for them to hide in and feed them lettuce. We’d use a dab of Mum’s nail polish to mark their shells and spend happy hours at the weekend snail racing. Not a high-octane spectator sport, it’s true – a snail’s top speed is just over 1cm a second – but such was the innocence of 1970s childhoods that snail racing could easily be the most exciting thing that happened on a Saturday. Plus, snails were curious – almost alien – with eyes on stalks that they could retract at will and their ability to produce slime. And being gratifyingly easy to find and capture, and seemingly unbothered about being manhandled, meant we could while away happy hours in their company. The thing we admired about them most was their ability to disappear into their shells in a fraction of a second, then reappear when they felt so inclined. There was something enviable about that complete self-reliance: that whenever they felt the need to retreat to safety, all they had to do was a bit of muscular gymnastics and retract themselves into their portable shelter.

Snails are born with their shells, hatching from a clutch of small, white, circular eggs that are laid in a shallow hole in the ground dug by the adult. Snails are hermaphrodite – at a push they can self-fertilise, but would rather not. If they find a mate, which they do with the briefest of foreplay, each fertilises the eggs of the other, which, at a snail’s customary pace of life, can take anything between four and twelve hours. Once they hatch, their newly born offspring will eat the eggs they have emerged from, absorbing the calcium they contain to harden up their soft, transparent shells. The shells grow with the snail, the whorls of the shell widening as the snail gets bigger, so it is always the perfect size and fit. And the whorls are always on the right-hand side of the shell, which allows mating to happen unimpeded. Although there are anomalies. A snail was once found in a garden in south-west London that had whorls on the left side of its shell. This is so rare, the finder deemed it worthy of study and sent it to a biologist at Nottingham University. The students named the snail Jeremy, after the left-leaning politician Jeremy Corbyn, and requested a nationwide search for another ‘leftie’ snail with which it could mate. They hoped this would help in their study of genetically inherited traits. A mate was found for Jeremy, but none of their offspring followed their parents’ left-sidedness.

‘The snail is the animal that carries its home on his back’ is among one of the very first things we learn, along with ‘E is for elephant’. But it is not strictly true. Snails are not, in fact, as footloose and fancy-free as we might imagine, happy to go, albeit slowly, wherever their mood takes them. Frustrated gardeners have long held suspicions that snails have the ability to come back, even after being tossed unceremoniously – and somewhat scurrilously – over a neighbour’s fence. One woman became so convinced that the snails in her garden were not new intruders but animals that were familiar with the rich pickings to be had there that she challenged biologist Dave Hodgson at Exeter University to prove, scientifically, whether or not snails had some sort of homing instinct. And they do. Snails can find their way back to the place they consider their patch and have to be taken 20 metres or more away from it before they lose their bearings and fail to return. So gardeners have two choices: either to get better at throwing or to accept that to the snails they find there, their gardens are home.

Childhood
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I was born in London but it was never home. Perhaps my parents had an inkling, even though I was barely six months old when we moved to the Berkshire countryside, that I wouldn’t thrive in a city. Mum always joked that London wasn’t big enough for me. Had I been born a couple of decades later, I may well have been described as ‘hyperactive’ or diagnosed with ADHD, but happily for me, I was never saddled with the burden of a formal condition that required dealing with. My parents’ instincts were to give me space and freedom built on a solid foundation of stability. So my childhood was spent in a Victorian house, with rattly windows and uncertain plumbing, down a pot-holed stone track. It had a big garden, surrounded by the fields of the adjacent farm. We had neighbours, not immediately next door but all within walking distance. It wasn’t a village, more what the French would describe as a lieu-dit – a small collection of houses that spread back from the bank of the River Thames. And we all knew each other. I have no doubt that the overwhelming feelings that accompany my memories of childhood – those of comfort and security – come as much from the people who lived around me as from my immediate family.

I remember them all still, even though I left that house over three decades ago and my parents sold it not long after I’d gone. It is the people, rather than the house, that I feel nostalgic for. Glamorous Sylv, who raced along the track like a rally driver in her gold Golf GTI and threw legendary parties. Rita, who had fled Germany in the war and now lived quietly with her friend Gisela. She gave me a kitten, a tiny bundle of tabby fur, for my second birthday and told me stories in her gently accented English while we ate the cinnamon biscuits she always had in a tin in her kitchen. She never told me about her past, I’m not sure she spoke of it to anyone, but it was present in an intangible way – in her eyes, in the way she held herself.

Rosemary was fiery, with long red curls and a sharp tongue, which perhaps accounted for her largely silent husband, Victor. But in the right mood, she was gruffly kind, if always a little scary. There was a huge mulberry tree in their garden and when the berries were ripe, we had an open invitation to go round and pick as many as we wanted. My brother and I would sit beneath its dark green canopy feasting on the sweet, fragrant berries, our fingers and tongues stained red-purple by the juice.

Rosemary had a horse, an enormous flea-bitten grey called Rush Hour. I think she liked horses rather more than she did people, so when, at the age of five, I developed a burgeoning obsession for horses myself, she did everything she could to encourage it, including hoisting me up on to Rush Hour’s broad, bare back and leading me along the lane, laughing that I looked like ‘a sparrow on the rock of Gibraltar!’.

Pat and Keith lived alongside the river, had two children a little younger than us and a boisterous, long-suffering Labrador. I was rather in awe of Keith, who worked in the music industry, had long hair, a pierced ear and wore T-shirts with the names of bands on. We’d go there sometimes after school and have tremendous water fights fuelled by cans of Coke and Sherbet Dib Dabs.

In sharp contrast were Maggie and Kit, both immaculately elegant and benevolently formal. A hug from Maggie would envelop you in a perfumed cloud of diaphanous florals. She always wore beautiful dresses, even in the wettest, muddiest depths of winter, and for my sixteenth birthday, gave me one too. It was her favourite colour – turquoise – and made of gossamer-thin layers of chiffon, light as air, a dress for Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I suspect it was a gentle attempt to encourage me to be less of a tomboy, which, however much I loved Maggie, was not destined to happen. But I made up for it with my unbridled adoration of Bruin, their beloved golden retriever, who she would entrust to me for walks in the field across the lane from their house.

Our nearest neighbours, who lived on the opposite side of the track from us, were John and Joy. They had three freckly, fiercely clever children, a few years older than me, who were an endless source of fascination and discovery. They kept tadpoles in tanks and chrysalises in jars. They grew all sorts of exotic plants, like bananas, and every windowsill in the house was crowded with pots and seed trays. They had a piano and a small, noisy machine that transformed ordinary pebbles that we collected in the lane and from the gravel pit at the top into shining, smooth, gem-like treasures. John had built a swing that hung from the branches of a big tree behind the house and we would take turns to swing as high as we could, every part of our bodies straining, bare legs flung forward, propelling us up and up until it felt like we were flying.

It was this family who rescued us late one night when Mum heard a strange noise coming from upstairs. She opened the door of their bedroom to find the bed engulfed in flames. With great presence of mind, she shut the door, bundled me and my brother into blankets, scooped up the cat, and we made a mad dash in the dark, through the mud and the puddles to the safety of John and Joy’s house. My hazy memories recall it being hugely exciting – an adventure rather than a trauma. We set up camp on the floor of their sitting room and Joy made us hot chocolate. Our house survived. We went over the following morning to find the firemen had heaved the burning mattress through the window; it lay in a sodden, still-steaming, black heap and everywhere smelt of smoke and wet soot. We couldn’t move back for a week or so, but for my brother and me it didn’t matter which house we were in. All of them were familiar enough to feel like home.

I left home when I left school. Bar those first few months of my life, my entire 18 years had been lived here, sleeping in a little single bed, tucked up under taut sheets and heavy blankets until duvets became a thing. When it was cold – and in winter the house was so cold there was often ice on the inside of the windows – we had hot water bottles and slept in jumpers and socks. Every spring, I’d witness the claret-coloured leaves of the cherry tree outside my bedroom window unfurl and watch pink-breasted bullfinches feast on the buds of its blossom. I knew the hedges and bushes where the blackbirds and robins nested and would peep in to count the eggs and spy on the chicks when they hatched. I walked, cycled, rode a horse down every lane and track and field for miles around.

On hot days, we’d play in the sprinkler and cycle down the towpath to the lock where the kiosk sold ice lollies for 10p. Or an unruly gang of us would ride bareback to the village, where a slipway led into the river and we’d ride into the dark waters of the Thames, holding fistfuls of mane as anchors, and swim with the horses. I climbed – and fell out of – every apple tree in our little orchard and gathered their fruits in the early autumn for apple crumble. I learned to chop wood and light a fire, and at weekends we’d toast crumpets and have mugs of tea while we watched The Muppets. On Christmas Eve, my brother and I would go with Dad to buy the Christmas tree, which we’d all help to decorate, battling to extricate the tinsel and tangled fairy lights from the playful claws of the cat. We’d hang the same stockings, year after year, over the fireplace, leave a mince pie and a glass of whisky, which never failed to be gone by Christmas morning.

If I was rooted anywhere, it was here. I knew nowhere else. And yet I was consumed with wanderlust and a need for independence. I was as happy to leave the house, the community and the countryside that had made up my home, as I was living there. And when my parents sold up three years later, I felt no pang, no compunction to try to persuade them to stay. It had ceased to be my home. I’ve never seen it or been back to the area since.

Why was it that somewhere that offered the safety, security and familiarity that are the foundation stones of a happy home life was so easy to leave? By choice, I have nothing – no childhood toys, or pictures, or pieces of furniture – that I grew up with. So what, if anything, from those formative years helps shape my idea of home now?

It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home,

A heap o’ sun an’ shadder, an’ ye sometimes have t’ roam

Afore ye really ’preciate the things ye lef’ behind,

An’ hunger fer ’em somehow, with ’em allus on yer mind.

It don’t make any differunce how rich ye get t’ be,

How much yer chairs an’ tables cost, how great yer luxury;

It ain’t home t’ ye, though it be the palace of a king,

Until somehow yer soul is sort o’ wrapped round everything.

From ‘Home’ by Edgar Albert Guest