Turning for Home

by Barney Norris

  ‘You must understand, Kate,’ Dad would explain, on the nights when he had to come into my room and comfort me, ‘your mum does a very high-pressured job to pay for all these things we have. We’re very lucky your mum is so wonderful, and works so hard for us. But she has to bottle up all the stress while she’s at work, or she wouldn’t be able to do her job. So you have to remember that when she comes home she’s very tired, she’s very stressed, she’s had a long day and she needs some peace around her.’ I learned from Mum the idea that life was a punishment for something everyone had done to her, life was a burden to be borne.

  Dad’s work drove him less fiercely. He was good at it, and he cared about it, but it didn’t consume him, and he found ways to switch off and take holidays. He qualified as a teacher, and stayed in the same school all his career, and worked his way up over time – he’s head of Geography there now, but that’s not really the story of his life. His real life happened in his evenings, his weekends, his time away from work, when he liked to be with me and Mum and read books and listen to his CDs, when he liked to go out walking. My parents have always been defined by very different things. Perhaps they were first attracted to one another because they showed each other such different visions of what life could be like. That can be attractive when you’re at the beginning of everything. Since they got married, though, one vision has always been in the ascendant. Dad’s happy in Mum’s shadow, so he’s never quite been able to disagree with whatever she chooses to do, or mend his family where it seemed to be breaking.

  When I was a child I spent a lot of time in this place, visiting Grandma and Grandad; we’d stay for weekend after weekend in the summer, and come for Christmas and half-term. But those visits tailed off as I got older. That means the ghost of the distant past is all I see today – walks in borrowed wellies, lemonades on the bench outside the pub, snowmen on the green wearing hats Grandad didn’t know he’d donated. There are no more recent memories to build on, to soften the sense of loss. And how could there be? I’ve been more or less out of the world for the last few years. I haven’t been living, only floating through time, pinned in my body, with not much real experience of anything but my anxiety and the hollow sadness at the heart of me to show for the years that are lost.

  On good days it can become beautiful, all this reminiscence. As I walk through the landscapes where my sunny childhood days played out, I sometimes feel like I’m living them again. I’m trying hard today to hold on to that sensation, because when I let my mood get dark, it makes me feel the past as an undertow instead, and as I look around me, memories of the times I ran down this road as a child seem to reproach me, gurning out like old graffiti that hasn’t quite been washed off a wall. Like the memory of a crime on an anonymous street corner, where bunches of flowers mourn and die. I walk back in the direction of the house.

  Lizzy’s been my friend since university. She’s from London, and she used to spend the weekends at home rather than staying in halls. She’d invite people over to eat dinner there, real food with vegetables in it that hadn’t been cooked in a microwave, so I spent a lot of time at Lizzy’s house while I was a student. That was where I first met Joe, her brother, one hungover Sunday morning. That was where I first kissed him, one drunk Saturday night.

  Joe was a little older than me, about to graduate from Bristol while I was in my first year and getting to grips with London. He would come home sometimes when he wanted a night out with his friends from school, driving across the country with the radio roaring for company along the roads. He read English like I did. I think we both knew we liked each other the first time we met. We had too much in common for nothing to happen between us. That age when anyone with a little chemistry between them ends up falling into bed with each other.

  I used to love visiting their home. I liked their parents, because other people’s parents always seem less complicated than your own. It’s like experiencing the idea of home as it might look in a brochure, never having to look at what’s swept under the carpet, never having to do any of the chores. I hadn’t realised before then that my own home was unhappy, but I had to confront that fact after my first evening at Lizzy and Joe’s. It made me feel at sea to be in the middle of so much laughter.

  ‘I wish they’d stop making Bake Off.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve got a better idea anyway. Bake Off’s rubbish.’

  ‘It isn’t!’

  ‘It’s definitely rubbish. Wanna hear my idea?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Who Wants To Be A Milliner? It’s Bake Off for hats.’

  The friendship I had with that family taught me the world could be a little more beautiful than I had suspected. They made me think things could turn out all right. You could fall in with a group of people who seemed to fit around you, and make you feel the world was welcoming, and look forward to a whole lifetime of knowing them all.

  Then trouble rose up and claimed us. This was the second lesson I learned from Lizzy and Joe and their family, and this one was harder. Sometimes things don’t turn out all right at all. Sometimes, no matter what you might have wanted or planned, trouble comes for you, and there’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it. And all of the hopes you might have cherished need revising in an instant.

  The magnolia tree at the top of my grandad’s road is blooming. I didn’t notice the flowers on it before. I suppose I was looking at my phone. The blooms shine like bright shocks of flame, and I have to stop and stare at them, drink them in. The good weather’s coming; there’s blossom on the trees again. Surely everything can be better now we’ve all come through the winter?

  A car pulls up next to me, its engine still running, and I look through the window to see Aunt Laura smiling out at me, resplendent in a floral print dress that would have been loud in July.

  ‘Hello, dear,’ Laura says.

  ‘Hello! How are you?’

  ‘I’m all right. What about you, have you come through all the trouble?’

  I should have stopped being surprised by now at the insensitivity people are capable of, but it still amazes me. With Laura, it’s usually only an attempt to be kind, and the words coming out wrong, when it might have been better if they hadn’t come out at all. Aunt Laura comes from a very different generation, when the world didn’t know what to say to someone like me. Perhaps she believes being blunt about weaknesses is the best way to deal with them. Perhaps that’s all part of grasping the nettle and keeping a stiff upper lip and so on, and I’m just a snowflake if I let myself think otherwise.

  ‘Yes, sort of. I hope so.’

  ‘Are your parents here yet?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘You’ve come over from Bristol, have you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Last night?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you’re here, there’s plenty to do.’

  ‘Looking forward to it,’ I lie. Of course there’s always loads to do, and I always find myself enlisted whenever I come to these birthdays. I’ve let myself forget that, since the last time I was here.

  ‘See you in there in a minute, then. How is your grandad?’

  ‘I think he’s feeling … thoughtful.’

  Laura stares through the windscreen at the house a few yards ahead of us, and nods to herself. When she’s serious, she looks just like Grandma. ‘Yes. All right. Well, I’ll see you in a minute.’ Then she drives the stone’s throw down to the drive, and turns in through the gates.

  I watch her go, and don’t start walking till the car’s out of sight. This might well prove to be a very long day. I find Aunt Laura exhausting sometimes. She always makes me look after the bar at these parties: she’s decided for some reason that it’s my thing; she thinks I love doing it and talks to me about it like it’s a treat, a nice job where I get to chat to everyone and be the centre of attention. I hate looking after the bar.

  I didn’t really want to spend today in charge of anything at all, I
wanted to be quiet and stay out of sight, but of course I won’t have any say, I’ll have to go along with the flow of things, however much I’m dreading it. I’m really not sure I can face it all when I think about the day looming like a mountain up ahead. But there’s nothing to be done now, I’ve committed myself. And perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps I’ll end up enjoying whatever the day holds. Stranger things happen at sea.

  I look up at the house as I walk back towards it and try to imagine what it would feel like to have really lived in this place, spent a childhood here like Mum did, rather than only visiting and playing here through the summers. It’s strange to think Mum’s mind must be shaped so differently from mine. For me, this house has only ever been a getaway. It’s always stayed magical and unusual; there’s a sense of holiday about it, because those were the times when we used to come and stay, and the memories cling on like cobwebs at the eaves of the windows. Visits to this house made me think of the Faraway Tree: each time I emerged through the branches of the journey here, a new adventure was waiting, the whole face of the house and the barns and the field and the garden would be rewritten by the weather and the gardeners and the people who visited. For Mum, as a child, it must have all seemed so much more ordinary, no matter how unusual it really was to spend time in a big house like this. It must have just felt like the way the world was supposed to look. What must that do to a person? How would that skew them away from seeing the world as it really is?

  People’s childhoods are the sources and centres of their lives, the frame of reference for everything else they ever do. Every decision a person makes happens in the context of the world they’ve come from, the things they started out with, what it felt like and looked like to be them when they were young, and what that taught them to want. People are always working to tend the fires of their vanishing or vanished youth, to love the past back into being by always choosing whatever helps life seem more like it did at the start, when everything was still before them, waiting patiently in the future. That’s how people hold on to their identities, and hold together their images of themselves, by remembering, playing out the feeling of their childhoods like a high clear note from a clarinet cutting through the hubbub of their buzzing adult lives. The world my mum longs for must be so very different from the one I know myself, no matter how much we think we share. The house I grew up in must have seemed shabby and small compared to a childhood spent running round this garden. Life, when it arrived, must have come as a disappointment for her. I used to think the house I grew up in was as big as the whole world, because of course there was a time when it was the whole world to me, and it filled the span of my imagination. It must have been just a starter home in Mum’s eyes; a step along the way to other things that took her closer back to the feeling of childhood, even as she travelled ever further away from this place and the centre of herself through indifferent, relentless time.

  I don’t know what to do about Sam. Perhaps he’s only a dream I’ve been having. Perhaps the whole world isn’t really happening, but is only a fantasy I’ve spun out of memory to try and make sense of something else. Perhaps in my real life I’m standing somewhere in a long line of people. Or my teeth are falling out. Or I am running through the dark of a wood. Perhaps I’ve got lost in a forest and am scrambling for a way out here, through the clenched, splintering teeth of my imagination.

  from Interview 23

  So we flagged the bus over and got everyone out, and they all came quiet cos they were scared, you see, they weren’t military, they had no weapons. We lined them up against the side of the bus, and none of them tried to run. Maybe they hadn’t worked it out. Or just didn’t believe it would happen, I don’t know. We asked were any of them Catholic, and one guy put his hand up, I think maybe he was the driver, I don’t remember so clear now. Maybe it won’t surprise you to know I don’t have so clear a memory of this; it gets blurred, it gets cloudy. But we pulled him out the line-up, the Catholic guy, and then we opened fire. Sure, it felt like a serious thing. But did I believe we were justified in what we did? Yes, I did. Afterwards, people had to disown us. It was seen as going too far. But we knew there were people higher up who were privately sympathetic. We had messages sent our way, some intermediary, a guy none of us had ever met. He told us no one was going to condone what had happened, but none of us was getting kneecapped.

  Robert

  THE HOUSE WAS built by the master builder Thomas Cubitt in the mid-nineteenth century. Another building had existed on the same site previously, but it was empty when Cubitt bought the land for what would become his family home. He pulled down most of the house that had stood there before and started again.

  Cubitt had just completed his work building Buckingham Palace, and was therefore flush, and thinking about setting himself up for his old age. The work in London had been done so recently, in fact, that he used offcuts from the palace in his home – to this day, there are doors standing in the hall which were first made for kings and queens to walk through. People always seem to be impressed by that, although I never give it much thought, having lived here as long as I have done. And having seen enough of kings and queens at the dinners my work used to oblige me to attend to think little more of them than I do of other people. The only differences between kings and queens and anyone else being, I think, the scale of the responsibility they bear. Under all that, they’re like anyone else. The most brutalised drunk and the Queen of England are the same inside, once you get past the skin of their lives.

  It must have been a charged time to try to build a big house like this. I imagine the impact of the potato famine in Ireland and the failure of the crop everywhere would have been rippling black and livid across the country, as the age-old protectionism that had preserved this part of the world in its quietness was stripped away to solve the grain shortage in Ireland, and the sedimented rhythms of life fell apart for the people of Hampshire and the whole south – the whole country, I suppose. I can’t speak for everywhere, only really knowing the south myself. There had been an explosion of violence bursting through those years, always the herald of change the world over, and Cubitt would have had to be wary of that. Machine wreckers had burned barns and smashed threshing machines when they saw what was coming: the move into the cities, the end of their world. Others had brawled against those rebels in turn, arguing the other case, demanding faster change. I read somewhere that Thomas Hardy remembered running round with a toy sword when he was a child, baying ‘free trade or blood’ to the terrified garden.

  In the area around this house, the rioting saw some men deported to Australia, and others hanged for violence. None of their protests worked in the end. The poorhouses must have been booming in those years, and the farms packing up and caving in when Cubitt started hiring labour to build his house. The work would have been taken up with great resentment. The men who took it on must have known it would only sustain them for another year or so. They must have seen the day coming when they would have to move up and give in to the town. I wonder what that felt like. It is surely a strange thing to live to see the end of the world you were born into.

  Although it’s perfectly possible that old world hasn’t ended at all, I suppose, but has simply gone underground for a while. For all that the history books record the flight to the cities as if they’re telling the end of a story, I still sometimes feel that I see the descendants of those same workers in the village pub if I ever go in there for a drink. Men who believe things differently. In the White Horse, they still prop up the bar, people with bodies sculpted into distinctive shapes by the work they do, whose life is organised around a totally different way of thinking to my own. The men I say hello to in the pub seem to have no real feeling for progress, for comfort, recognition, gain. What matters to them above all, I’ve found in the conversations I’ve had drinking there, is that they will be able to keep living where they’re living. Their existence is built around the idea of home above everything else, so they take whatever work’s availabl
e to keep them in the right place, rooted like laurels in the soil they were born into. Perhaps you could say that hidden among these drinkers the pre-industrial poor have limped on into the twenty-first century, keeping their heads down so no one tries to stamp on them, riding out the capitalist interlude and living as people have always done in this part of the world, clear of progress, clear of change, waiting for their time to come again. Waiting for the day when the petrol runs out, and the nuclear rain starts falling, and everyone goes to market by horse and cart again. That might be how the whole long story of England finishes in the end, though I suppose that’s romantic, I suppose that’s fanciful.

  I’m pontificating again. But just imagine it. Perhaps the whole world I’ve been part of, and tried in my own small way to prop up, the glorious world of London streets and speculation and concert halls, will be proven in time to have been an illusion, a dream, and a day will come when old truths, old ways will spring back up out of the soil?

  I watch Kate walk through the gates at the front of the house and out into the road, taking her phone from her pocket as she goes and staring down into it like Narcissus into the water, like Orpheus losing himself in the memory and the dream of Hades. People move like drunks when they look at their phones while walking, I always think. It terrifies me to see them so hived off from the street and the day and the world around them, lost in fascination at the world behind the screen of their phone, mining narratives woven on the other side of the world for their sustenance while people who might have been their soulmates, might have been their friends, if only they’d looked up and talked to each other, have to sidestep round them because no one notices any more whose way they are getting in, whose car they are stepping out in front of. My old form teacher wouldn’t have stood for it. I was always taught that people ought to look where they were going.