Which home? Which room? There’ve been a few. I think I need to describe my own room – that’s probably easiest to remember, and remember how I felt there too.
We moved, you see. We moved quite a bit. Only in the UK, mind, but always long distance, enough that we were starting afresh each time.
By the time secondary school came round, we managed to stay put. Seven years – in fact, I was the one to leave, rather than the family moving again.
Moving quite a few times has different effects on people. I used to work with a couple of people who’d also moved a lot – both had also moved countries quite a bit. Moving itself doesn’t do one things for you – it’s how you respond to it.
So I’ll tell you that my room in that house, where I spend my secondary school years, was all about continuity. Not moving things. Amassing things, yes, and keeping them all.
A collection of boxes on the dressing table. A series of posters and pictures, fixing the places that meant something to me, including Edinburgh, where I would later to choose to live.
Postcards stuck to wardrobe doors. To a unit that held my record player (yes! ah, the distant past). Flowery curtains – there were pretty much always flowery curtains, and green carpet, you see. How Mum liked to do things.
I wrote from my bed. I had a desk, yes, but it was more comfortable to prop myself up, with a book on my knee, and write from my bed. Easier to spread things out. (Still my preferred option, really.)
What else? The room had a lock. I don’t know that I was particularly worried about people bursting in, but there was a Need To Be Alone, as I think teenagers tend to have.
Two windows. A corner room, in a way. A flat roof outside one of the windows.
A sink. That was good. I discovered contact lenses in my teens. Having a sink to do the daily lens cleaning was very helpful. Apart from the time that the lens stuck to the side of the sink and broke when I tried to move it.
A view. That was really the most important part. It’s what I value today. Writing from my bed, looking out at the sky, at trees. Those days, I would see the run of hills that dominated the town, and at one end, a windbent tree. It felt very Wuthering Heights.
So I would sit there, look at the tree, look at the sky, write some more. I didn’t know then that laptops would make it possible to do the same, some time in the future.
How do you say all of the many things about your childhood? You can’t. You can begin with where you felt safe. Where was a good place to write. Perhaps that is a good place to begin.