Browsing the Bookshelves

I love the house I grew up in.  It's just a normal house, in the middle of a rather quiet, rather ordinary and somewhat declining, small market town in one of England's most overlooked counties. Really, there's nothing very special about the place. Except that it is where I grew up, and I want to go back. Not to the area, or the town, but to the very house where I grew up.

It's not an attraction which I can explain. It's just there. The place is home. My home. I sometimes feel very sorry for the people who live there now. I don't know them. I don't even know who they are. But to me they are tenants. Just temporary residents. It can't be their home, because it's mine. In my mind they don't really belong there.  Some freak of nature or accident has allowed them to sneak in, just for a while, to borrow my home.

I remember vividly the evening my parents sat my sister and I down to help them make a decision. I must have been eight or nine. They calmly explained to us that if we wanted to keep our ponies, we had to move house. We'd recently lost the use of the land the ponies had been kept on and the only way to find new land for them to graze was to move house. My sister voted to move house. I voted to stay put.  We moved.  It was a defining moment which coloured much my attitude to both my sister and my parents for years. Of course, I was wrong. If I think about it rationally now, I suspect that my parents really wanted to move themselves and it wasn't just a simple matter of seeing what the children wanted.  I'm sure they wanted a bigger garden -they certainly got one, and they've made it very beautiful. My to my childish mind, at the time it seemed that my sister had been allow to have her way, as always, and that my parents care little for me or my opinion. I know that was wrong, but that's how it seemed at the time.

I swore then that I would buy my home back one day. Even though the resentment disappeared many years ago, I still intend to have my home back.  Did I say it was nothing special? Well, that's not quite true. It has literary associations - which of course as a nine year old I knew little about and cared less. But it was the childhood home of William Hazlitt, poet, essayist and friend to S T Coleridge. It still has his name. Hazlitt House. My home.