The house I left behind
Returning to your childhood home can be a complicated affair. Especially when everything has changed, except perhaps you.
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As you arrive into Manchester Piccadilly train station from the south you pass by the same few sights: the ‘posh’ Arighi Bianchi furniture shop on the right; the red-brick terraces of Levenshulme and then the vast industrial wastelands that border the city. Except the wastelands have long gone now, replaced by soaring skyscrapers.
‘Our next stop will be Manchester Piccadilly,’ the nice man on the Tannoy announces, and for no reason whatsoever I start to cry. The man on the seat opposite sees this and I feel embarrassed that a middle-aged woman, such as I am now, should be seen weeping in the middle of the day.
I haven’t been back to the town I grew up in in years. Maybe it’s four years. Or five. I forget. I don’t know why I never come back, only that I don’t. I suppose you could say there doesn’t seem to be anything left of me in Manchester anymore. There are no old school friends to meet with; no relatives that I am particularly close to. Only my father remains in the city; in the childhood home in which I grew up thirty years ago. But the house, like my father, is falling apart.
This is why I am returning. It is the reason most people my age return to the town in which they spent their childhood: failing health. And so, lung cancer has brought me back.
‘Mali!’ My father shouts as I walk through the front door. It is the name he has always given me. Mali means ‘gardener’ in Hindi, which always felt like the strangest nickname on earth for a 12 year old girl. But then Dad was never what you would call normal.
I have taken the bus here and am hot and breathless. It’s a half mile walk from the bus stop to my father’s house. There is a garage by the bus stop, and then a forest where the River Irwell passes through. There use to be a tower block on the other side of the road, and a children’s home further up. A boy we once knew from the children’s home set fire to himself in a lift on the 18th floor of that tower block. His death made The Manchester Evening News. It is one of my most abiding memories of my time growing up here.
The house, like my father, seem smaller now. Growing up it felt such a big house, with long, dark corridors and a huge garden that overlooked Manchester United’s training ground. But the garden has grown tall and powerful now. Trees and shrubs that are 12ft high hide any view that once was.
There are six of us in my family; four children and my parents. Each of us kids had their own bedroom off those corridors. But now each room is used for storage. (Though the rooms and corridors are much brighter than I remember them). Inside there are towers of Kodak photo albums and old clothes we used to fit into. There are framed photos of dogs we once loved and books we once read. Dad refuses to throw anything away, you see. He has ever saved old chocolate Easter bunnies that sit in a glass cabinet like priceless ornaments.
‘So what’s the plan?’ Mum asks as I hug Dad. He feels thin and narrow, like a teenage boy. It has not occurred to me that he will feel different. Then again, I haven’t touched him in years.
I go to sit on the sofa. I remember when we bought this sofa suite. It was very fashionable back then - black with big scrolled arms and deep seats that you fell back on- and it catches me in the same way it did all those years ago.
Mum and Dad got divorced around 2006, but we’d all left home by then for it to make much difference to our lives. I remember their marriage as lurching between moments of incredible tenderness and explosive arguments, and truth be told, I’d always hoped they’d separated sooner.
When I was younger and my elder sister still lived at home, she would on occasion drive me to the countryside just outside Manchester, whilst Mum and Dad thrashed things out. I suppose it was Cheshire we used to drive to- the home of footballers’ mansions and Real Housewives now, but back then it was just country really. A place of smart farmhouses and beautiful sunsets. It was exactly the sort of place I wanted to escape to.
Mum has come up to care for Dad during his first week of radiotherapy. She has hoovered the carpets and mopped the floors. It is Mum’s way of showing she still cares I suspect, and it is touching to see. Dad certainly looks the happiest I have seen him in years.
‘I thought we’d do the garden and then have lunch,’ I say. I have brought shopping from Marks and Spencers because it feels nice to treat my parents now I am all grown up and have a bit of money.
’But first I’d like to look through some old photos.’
Mum brings out towers of albums and filing boxes.
‘There are more!’ Dad shouts and Mum shuttles back and forth between the rooms.
There are pictures of Mum with the exact hair style I now have, and old passport pictures of Dad in a cream turtleneck jumper. It’s easy to think your parents are a different species to you, but when you look back you realise they were just the same as you or I. There are images of us all as toddlers on beaches I do not remember; and donkeys we must have ridden.
I pocket some of the pictures to frame when I return home. The sideboards and mantlepieces of my own home shoulder no photographs from the past, only who I am now. There are framed pictures of my graduation day, wedding photographs and long walks my husband and I have taken with the dogs, but little else. It is as though my life began the moment I left this place.
‘This is your great grandfather and grandma,’ Mum says producing a black and white picture of two people I have never seen before. The couple are side by side, leaning against a boat on a pebble beach. I presume it must be The Isle of Man, since that is one of the few things I know about my maternal grandmother (‘Nana’) and her side of the family.
My great grandfather was a performer in the old music halls, Mum tells me. But he was a drinker and worked as a dustbin man in the end. It makes me smile because all my siblings and I are creatives, dashing Dad’s hope that we would all become the doctors he never became. My sister is an author, my brother works in TV and my younger brother is a marketing whizz. We have often wondered where this artistic streak came from. Now I know.
‘And here’s your Nana,’ Mum says handing me a picture of a young woman in a dress tied sharply at the waist. Mum always said I had Nana’s legs and it is true- thick, runner’s calves. They were probably not considered very beautiful in her day but they would be very fashionable now amongst the squat-obsessed younger generation.
Nana died, very suddenly and tragically, about a month or so after I was born. Mum always says, ‘you got me through Nana’s death, you know’, and so I was given her name (Muriel is my middle name) as a living legacy, I suppose.
But the pictures of Nana are dark. It’s hard to make out her face in most of them. In fact most of the photographs are blurred or carelessly taken with heads cropped and crucial family members missing. I want to pinch every one of them with my thumb and forefinger, so accustomed am I now to phone cameras which allow you to Zoom in and sharpen the past. But I can do no such thing to the images of my childhood. It makes me panicky, like the life I once lived here in Manchester is draining away.
The photo albums are almost done now and I have very little to take back home with me. ‘But I need pictures of Jess and Perry and Tess….’ I say, recounting the names of pets I once adored, but who are now only a dim memory.
That afternoon the sun shines for the first time in days in Manchester as Mum and I set to the garden. Dad sits and watches us, getting up occasionally to run a hoe over the moss that has gathered along the path. Dad has taken to feeding the foxes his leftover curry. And the birds his mango skins. He even feeds two mice every night (Mum says they are, in fact, baby rats) laying out their food in little plastic containers. Growing up I never saw my father as a tender man, but seeing the little take-out boxes all lined up it makes me see that he now is. Perhaps he was back then.
On the far side of the garden there is a white building. Dad built it in the summer of 1995. It looks like a very grand summer house, with an ornate balcony and big, wide windows. The summer house sits on two floors, but Dad, for reasons unknown to me, never built stairs connecting the upstairs and downstairs. As a result you have to walk up a hill in order to access the top. This of course meant no one ever used it, and instead of a summer house it became, over time, a very posh shed for tools that were forever being stolen. Dad was always doing stuff like that. Like the time he build a bedroom in the basement, but the bed was on a plinth so every time you woke up you hit your head on the ceiling. Or the stained glass windows that were inserted back to front, so every time it rained we’d watch the colour drain from the glass. It’s funny now, but it wasn’t back then. Not when you want your family to be like every other family.
From the ages of 0-12 I remember being very happy at home. We lived in a different house then- a long, thin Victorian house with a big garden out the front. There were children from the neighbouring cul-de-sac who I used to play with, and whose parents knew my parents, so Dad and his wild tantrums didn’t seem such a secret. But in 1990 we upgraded to a house down the road that we called ‘the bungalow’ which is the house in which Dad still lives. It was a bungalow only in that it was on one level. The truth is it was a rather grand house with a couple of acres of forest out the back. I remember two gay gentleman had lived there before us, which seemed very new and exotic to me back then, especially when I saw they had installed a chocolate brown jacuzzi bath in the bathroom. (Dad later converted this into a pond, which over time became a death trap for local wildlife.)
Dad put down salmon pink carpet and installed a big marble fireplace in the hallway. For the first time I had my own bedroom, with floral curtains and a patchwork eiderdown that I adored. Things should have been better in the bungalow, but they were not. Dad became darker and angrier. He could fly off the handle at anything and everything. I meanwhile put myself on a punishing schedule that saw me eating one celery stick and a white bread roll every day; doing 150 star jumps before bed and attempting to memorise entire textbooks until the early hours of the morning. I remember feeling very sad most of the time in this house, desperate to escape a home I felt defined me in all the wrong ways. And so I did what every teenager who is desperate to escape the holding pen of their family home does: when I hit 18 I applied to university on the other side of the country. And I never came back.
Over the decades I attempted to erase Manchester from my life. I sloughed off the flat vowels of my accent and gathered friends who came from Essex, Kent, Hertfordshire, but never Manchester. And I rarely, if ever, went back up north. My parents, being parents, said very little, only that they hoped to see more of me. But then isn’t that what all parents say to their children?
Ten years after I first left Manchester I went one step further and moved my entire life to other side of the world: Australia. Wasn’t that what growing up was all about? The further you travelled the more you had grown. But geographical miles don’t equate to personal development. I know that now.
That afternoon, in between the hoeing and pruning and gathering together the mountains of weeds that were now the majority of Dad’s once beautiful garden, I sat down on an old plastic seat to take a rest. Looking at the house from a small distance- the summer house, the wrought iron gate, the smothered hydrangea heads and the long red-bricked roof, I noticed something that had never dawned on me before. The ‘bungalow’ was exactly like the home I had created for myself 300 miles away on the other side of the country.
There is the same roof, and a garden filled with hydrangeas and at the bottom of the garden a white summer house I use only for storing tools nowadays. (Thought that will change, I always promise.) If things were so bad, I ask myself, how come I’ve recreated the home I left all those years ago?
And that’s when it occurs to me just how easy it is to freeze the past into an idea; a cartoonish version of what it actually was. It’s easy to select the memories that serve the narrative you tell yourself it was. It’s much simpler to think your parents did a good or bad job rather than to contemplate the fact they probably did a ‘good enough’ job most of the time. (If they didn’t you probably wouldn’t be sat reading this now). And as a writer, dare I say it, it’s more convenient to recreate a past that involves struggle and emotional hardship. But most of all, it’s a cliche to presume the family home is a time machine (though Dad has done his best to keep it that way); a place where you will return to the person you once were the minute you walk through the door.
People say you change as you get older; that’s one of the reasons why the past can be so uncomfortable. It’s certainly what I’ve always believed, and the reason, I suspect, that I have stayed away for so long. But there is another truth, far less commonly acknowledged, which is that often we don’t change at all. Of course we don’t tell people this because if we did, what would happen to all the striving and aspiration that an entire society is built around? What would happen to all the self-help books, or glossy magazines, or big new housing estates with adverts that say things like: ‘build the life you deserve!’?
I thought long and hard about this as the train pulled out of Manchester Piccadilly, past the dozens of gleaming skyscarpers that now crowd the horizon.
‘Manchester is rebuilding itself,’ the concierge at the hotel in which I was staying told me when I first arrived. And it’s true, she really is. But she is also the same as she always was.
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THOUGHT STARTERS ….
How do you feel when you return to your childhood home?
Do you agree that we stay the same as much as we change as we grow up?
Did you stay in the town in which you grew up? If so, how has that affected you and the life you lead?
Please leave your thoughts in the comment below and feel free to talk to me and others about this. I cant wait to here your stories