Have I really been here for almost six weeks? It seems like much longer. This feels very much like home now. The house in Swindon is no longer home, it’s the Swindon house and I don’t miss it. I don’t miss Swindon as a place but I do miss my friends there, school life and my WI. I’ve never felt attached to any one place before now. After a few years I get restless and want to move. Home has just been somewhere where I happen to live. A roof over my head. Bricks and mortar. An address.
I grew up on the outskirts of Bristol in a suburb called Kingswood. The house was a new build when my parents moved into it in the late 1950s. It had two bedrooms, a living room, kitchen and a bathroom downstairs. We had a front and back garden, a garage and a shared drive with our neighbour Mrs Parker. It was my parent’s pride and joy. Neither earned much. Dad was a chippie and mum did various jobs, mostly piece work in factories. They had saved hard for the deposit and owning their own property was important to them. I remember it being decorated very much of the time. I watch Call the Midwife and it’s a bit like a nostalgia trip seeing the homes featured on it. They remind me of what our little house was like inside. Mum loved her orange carpet, black sofa and formica kitchen table and chairs. the main feature of the living room was the TV. Tiny by today’s standards and of course only showing programmes in black and white. My sister and I shared a bedroom decorated with wallpaper covered in nursery rhyme characters. That was until the early 70s when red, purple, orange and shocking pink came into fashion and our candlewick bedspreads were swapped for pink nylon ones to cover the orange brushed nylon sheets from Brentford Nylons. You should have seen the sparks fly when we got into bed in our brushed nylon nighties. The curtains were swapped for purple nets and a red roller blind and the pretty nursery wallpapered walls were swapped with psychadelic patterns in orange and brown. How we ever slept is beyond me. Talk about being over stimulated as well as coping with all that static electricity!
We lived on a road that was essentially one big loop. Turn left out of the road and there was Rodway Common. Turn right and you went past the Brain’s faggot factory. I grew up smelling offal cooking from Monday to Friday. There were lots of children in our road. We were mostly the same age and went to the same school. I had no need to stay indoors. We played with our friends outside in the street until it was time to come in for bed. The road was our playground. We could have a game of rounders without having to stop very often to let cars pass. Back then, there was only one car per family. The man of the house used it to get to work so until 5.30pm when they returned home, there wasn’t really any traffic during the day time apart from the odd tradesmen, the Corona van and occasionally a rag and bone man with his horse and cart.
When I was twelve we moved to a village between Bristol and Bath called Pucklechurch. The house was only a few years old and I thought it was just so modern. It had a feature brick wall as well as an open tread staircase in the living room. The road that served the houses was at the back and a pathway was at the front. Nobody used their front doors. It was only the postman and paper boy who walked up the front path. Everyone else came in by the kitchen door. For the first time in my life, I no longer had to share a bedroom. Being the eldest, I got the biggest room after my parents. My sister had to make do with the box room. My parents still live in the same house. There have been changes over the years. They added a conservatory and upgraded the bathroom and kitchen but it’s still like going home whenever I visit. My sister lives around the corner from my parents in an identical house. She has a semi-detached house where as my parents live in a terrace.
Village living became city living when at eighteen I packed up my worldly possessions and moved to London to train as a nurse at Charing Cross Hospital in Fulham. For six months I lived in the nurses home attached to the old West London Hospital on Hammersmith Broadway. I had a tiny room and had to use the shared bathroom and kitchen. There was a lounge with a TV but nobody used it as we were too busy going in and out of each others rooms and catching the bus up to Oxford Street. It was a bit like Call The Midwife except without the bicycles, We did wear capes though. Oh, how I loved my cape! From there I moved over to the hospital staff accommodation at Charing Cross where we shared flats. Much like students do now in Halls. I nearly got kicked out of my flat when I painted the kitchen red, green and white. I begrudgingly painted it back to boring magnolia.
Abercorn House. My first taste of living independently. It’s now a backpacking hostel.
After I qualified I lived in shared flats in Putney, Tooting and briefly in Bristol, which was a disaster and I quickly returned to London.
In 1984 I took the huge step of buying my own home. I was on a staff nurse’s salary and had no deposit and yet I managed to buy a two bedroom flat with a garden with a SW19 postcode which covers Wimbledon and the surrounding area. Something that would be pretty impossible these days. I bought the flat for £36,000 . Two years ago, the same flat sold for over £500,000. Crazy!
I had no spare money to buy new furniture and the bathroom suite remained avocado green but it was a lovely flat and it was mine. I shared it with my boyfriend who paid the bills whilst I paid the mortgage. One day though he announced in a cocktail bar in Covent Garden that he wasn’t coming home with me and our relationship was over. I was devastated. He must have felt guilty as he carried on paying the bills until I sold the flat. There was no way that I could afford keeping it even when I got a flatmate to help with the costs. I still can’t believe that I gave him half of the proceedings that I’d made on the flat sale and I let him keep the washing machine!
Before I had sold my flat, I had moved in with my new boyfriend who had a flat a stone’s throw from the runway at Heathrow airport. I had to get used to the sound of airplane engines and the smell of aviation fuel. We rarely ventured into the garden! Within weeks we had become engaged and when I had the money from my flat sale we bought a house in Hampton, a walk away from the River Thames and Hampton Court. It was almost identical to my parent’s house back near Bristol. We moved in and discovered there was no heating apart from a gas fire. How on earth did we fail to not notice that small detail when we viewed the house!
We lived there for three years. We married and our two boys came along. Tired of suburban life we decided to move to the country. It wasn’t the best time to move. Mortgage interest rates were through the roof and house prices were rock bottom. We ended up in negative equity. Our little house was worth a lot less than our mortgage. Meanwhile our mortgage repayments were huge and I was no longer working full time after having our second baby. We decided to go ahead and move despite the fact that we weren’t in a good place financially to do so. We sold the house to a housing association before we had found our new home so for four months we put everything into storage and moved in with my husband’s father. He lived in Barnes, a leafy affluent area in south west London. Big houses, designer shops, yummy mummys in designer clothes. I hated living there and felt really isolated. I had a lively toddler in a house that wasn’t toddler friendly and a father in law who was lovely but didn’t lift a finger. My husband didn’t enjoy living there either and chose to work long hours, arriving home after the boys had gone to bed.
We moved to Rolvenden Layne in Kent in the summer. The house wasn’t my choice but by then I would have moved into a shed. I just needed our own home. We moved into house that was part of a quadrant of farm buildings. An upside down house meaning that the living space was upstairs and the bedrooms downstairs. It’s position was idyllic. At the end of a lane with views across the fields and the steam train track. The original farm’s oast houses, dairy and farm house were behind our garden. The village was pretty and we had fabulous neighbours who became close friends. It was a wonderful place to live and the boys grew up enjoying a country life.
Our home in Kent. Just part of the building. Not all of it. And the pretty village we lived in.
We lived in Kent for ten years until the commute to work became too much for my husband and we decided that we needed to live somewhere along the M4. I never wanted to live in Swindon. I didn’t like the town but my husband persuaded me to go for a new build on the edge of the town. We could get a lot for our money compared to pricey Kent and he loved the idea of buying a six bedroom house. It wasn’t what I wanted but to keep him happy we bought it. And that’s where I lived for over twenty years. The boys hated living in the town. They had left behind all of their friends and everything that they knew. My husband didn’t like Swindon either and chose to spend most of the week staying in London. After four years he announced that he was leaving. Fortunately I had fabulous friends who were a brilliant support at a difficult time. But life got better and I met Mr R. He moved in and then we got married.
In 2017 we were in the carpark in the Penzance Sainsburys and decided that we wanted to live here. Six years later I saw this flat advertised on Rightmove and on a whim booked a viewing.
And this is where we now call our forever home.
afiftysomethingme 