‘By the time I was 30 I’d lived in more than 25 places – including a car showroom’
M y earliest memories of home are of saying goodbye. They are of moving at someone else’s request, picking up, packing up and driving away. Sometimes it was because of “regeneration” projects, demolitions or old-fashioned evictions. When I got older, the precarity of early childhood moves stayed with me, as I found home between the cracks of the housing crisis.
I have lived in a lot of different places – more than 25 by the time I was 30. I’ve lived over a car showroom, in student halls and cramped rooms with my family in other people’s houses. I’ve made my home on floors, in temporary accommodation, in a cottage in the countryside and above a Snappy Snaps shop.
As a result, I have often wondered about how we make home. Sometimes it is an interior detail, a pastel throw. Sometimes it is a postcode you remember then forget, then remember again at 3am, lying awake and wondering how everything has changed except the cracks in the ceiling.
The first address I learned was thanks to the labour of my mum. I went over it again and again, the way a child does, letting the words curl in my mouth, creating muscle memory, so if I ever got lost, I could find my way home again: W13 OSB.
This was in 1993, when my mum, my brother and I finally settled into a third-floor flat on the Green Man Lane estate in West Ealing. The exterior walls were coated in grey concrete and scratchy pebbledash. On hot days, the sun would create blurry heat lines rising from the ground, making the whole estate look like a mirage.
At seven, I was mesmerised by the small, jagged shards of the pebbledash glistening in the sun like geodes of amber and obsidian. I would imagine the building as a pulsing vessel for spiritual energy. In reality, pebbledash is a
Read more on theguardian.com
