Longing for Home

I went on holiday recently. It was a wonderful trip; a gift from a kind friend who was heading over to his Italian house and invited me to tag along. We stopped at some beautiful places: first, a medieval French town, then down to the south coast of France for a Roman coliseum.

There was a botanical garden near Genoa where we wandered amongst lush planting, wending our way down to the sea. We visited some of the ‘cinqueterre’ - villages on the Italian coast and hopped between them by train. The sea was the bluest blue and the weather perfect in April - like the best English summer day.

After five days we got to the house in Tuscany where we had another glorious week to stay. At the midpoint of the holiday though, homesickness hit me.
It feels so odd to say that; I think of it as something that you feel as a child. I was desperately homesick when I first left my Northumberland home to go to University in the South. Going hundreds of miles away to a new city and new people was daunting and I was very miserable for the first few weeks.
I went on to live in London for over a decade; I had a house there, for a while, a marriage. But whenever I went back up North it felt like coming home. In fact when I talked about home, I meant here - the house I am in again now, the house in a little village in Northumberland.

Being away felt like I’d been uprooted; I tried to ground myself a bit by doing some writing and drawing. The landscape was stunning. The countryside was full of spring flowers. But they weren’t my fields, my flowers. They weren’t the ones I feel completely connected to. I felt like a stranger. For some reason I kept thinking about John Clare, that poet of the English landscape. After four years in an asylum in Epping Forest, where he’d been sent after his mental health seriously deteriorated:

Improved in health and driven by homesickness, he escaped in July 1841. He walked the 80 miles to Northborough, penniless, eating grass by the roadside to stay his hunger

I think I understand his desperate need to get home. I need this place. It is somewhere to which I feel viscerally connected. I have not found that anywhere else; my work as an artist is rooted in it. Over lockdown I started wanting to make a garden which made me feel even more closely connected …to the house, the garden, the wider landscape. I want to map my little world, to focus on the detail of it. I keep writing ‘my and mine’ but that isn’t what I feel so much as a sharing of this place - I live alongside all the other lives here, the mice in the walls, the birds of hedge and field that use the garden and shout at me for disturbing them. The trees that will outlast me. It is a haven here and going away from it made me appreciate it all the more, and how incredibly lucky I am to have it. How desperately sorry I am too for all those who have to leave their homes behind.