Losing your place
This piece was supposed to be about why I wrote a memoir. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Belonging and particularly about its opposite – Not Belonging. My mother, brought up in an industrial, shipyard town on Tyneside, longed for the Cumbrian Lake District which she’d visited for a holiday. As a teenager she copied some very tacky (for me) lines from Vita Sackville West about belonging to a particular place. In brackets underneath she wrote (That place, for me, is Ullswater.) Her life would take her to it but, thanks to my father’s Irish wanderlust, she spent very little of her life there.
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| Mum holding an invisible me |
Talking about ‘place’ and ‘belonging’ when you no longer belong to that place can become nauseatingly sentimental; all those mournful Irish melodies that haunted my childhood, or the postcard of Helvellyn tipped with snow that my mother had tucked into a corner of the mirror frame in the living room. She used to look at it and sigh. But the linkage between place and person is more fundamental, more necessary than mere sentiment, and breaking that link can be brutal. Simone Weil wrote that ‘to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul’. Perhaps as important as being loved?
The loss of a homeland is a mixture of grief, longing and nostalgia and also a sense of displacement – you no longer know exactly who you are. The Portuguese have a word for it – saudade – which is untranslatable in English. The Welsh call it hiraeth. For the English the nearest is homesickness which doesn’t get close to the loss of identity that comes with the loss of ‘home’.
The displaced Palestinian writer and philosopher Edward Said, living in America, wrote an essay called ‘Reflections on Exile’ [Granta] in which he says that exile is ‘an unbearable rift between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home . . . to be torn from the nourishment of tradition, family and geography’ is severe deprivation.
It was certainly the case for me. I went to London as a teenager when my father went bankrupt and the Lake District farm had to be sold. My parents moved to Lincolnshire where Dad became a farm worker on an estate, living in a tiny house only big enough for my parents and my young brother. There was no room for me. The feeling of abandonment was enormous. I no longer had a home to go to.
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| Displaced: Kathie in 1967 |
But, writing the memoir has made me realise that dislocation was part of what made me a writer. I’d always written poems and stories as a child, but being in exile from home and family somehow made the ambition sharper. Edward Said believed that exiles are drawn to creation, and to literature in particular. ‘A writer is almost always an outsider, nomadic, somehow in temperament – and that no matter where he or she lives or for how long, it is only in writing, in each attempt at a story, at a poem or a piece of text, that he or she can make something fixed in the midst of uncertainty, create a place of safety, be at home.’ [Granta, ‘Out of Place’]
The New Zealand novelist and memoirist, Janet Frame, went even further. ‘All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land.’ [Envoy from Mirror City] We are always writing our way back.
So, I went back through notebooks and letters and diaries and scrapbooks. I sorted old photographs in albums my mother had kept, laughed at some, tried to puzzle out the identities of anonymous faces in others, regretting the fact that she wasn’t there to ask. Why hadn’t I asked more questions when she was alive?
And I revisited places where I’d lived as a child. The farm cottage I was born in is now lost in a complex of converted holiday homes. The croft in the Cheviots above Bewcastle is still there, swallowed by an ocean of trees, home to a forest ranger as the Kershope forest has become a commercial sprawl. The old Bewcastle school has been demolished and replaced by a purpose-built modern structure. Low Ling at Rosley is now the lovely Georgian home it was always designed to be. The places have changed, as I’ve changed, over the time I’ve been away.
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| Rough Close by Gill Curwen |
But Rough Close is much the same. The house was bought by the Curwen family who have used it as a holiday home and preserved it as it was with the addition of wood burning stoves and the conversion of the old dairy into a bathroom. It’s a much more comfortable place to live now. Gill Curwen, who died tragically young, was a painter and one of her paintings of Rough Close was given to me and hangs on my wall. She also wrote me letters, understood my connection to the place and allowed me to stay there with my children. * I will always be grateful to her. Rough Close will always be home, a special place, not just to me, but to a generation of cousins who stayed there when we were a rowdy bunch of children running wild on the fells and letting our imaginations romp through the barns and byres. This memoir is not just for me.
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