Opinion

Anita Robinson: No matter where I travel, I can't wait to come home

There comes a point in every stay anywhere, near or far, when I want to go home. Picture by Brian Lawless/PA Wire
There comes a point in every stay anywhere, near or far, when I want to go home. Picture by Brian Lawless/PA Wire There comes a point in every stay anywhere, near or far, when I want to go home. Picture by Brian Lawless/PA Wire

I’m a homebird. No matter how good the company, the quality of the cuisine, the comfort of the bed, the generosity of my host, there comes a point in every stay anywhere, near or far, when I want to go home.

Is it just me? Is it only a female thing? Yearning for the stability of the familiar, the sight of my own things about me? The familiar click of the key in one’s own front door opening upon the reassuring smell of home conjures a feeling of satisfaction, security and deep, deep peace. Until I notice all the things I neglected to do before leaving. Yes, I meant to leave the house pristine – an almost superstitious compulsion inherited from my mother, who obsessively swabbed, dusted and tidied before bedtime, in case she died in the night and we’d be mortified when the neighbours came in for the wake. I espouse these tenets more in theory than practice. If the place is relatively clean and reasonably tidy – it’ll do.

House pride has skipped a generation. Daughter Dear is my mother re-incarnated. Her surfaces gleam. Bright sunshine does not reveal a miasma of dust-motes floating in the air. I’m wakened each morning of my Christmas/New Year visit by the whine of a vacuum cleaner. She has two kitchen cupboards devoted entirely to cleaning products. I often feel she’d rub me over with a damp cloth if I stood still long enough. On the morning of my departure I came downstairs packed and ready, to discover all traces of my tenure eradicated – my bathroom towels already revolving in the washing machine, the newspapers I’d been reading in the recycling bin, the cushions plumped and tastefully re-arranged in ‘my’ armchair, where the cat had proudly reclaimed his territory. Talk about ‘Here’s your hat and what’s your hurry?’!

I remember reading ‘The Wind in the Willows’ when I was ten and being struck by a passage about Mole, who’d long deserted his old home to share a more exciting life by the river with his friend Ratty. Walking the woods together one day, Mole’s nostrils are suddenly assailed by a familiar scent – the smell of home. Scrabbling furiously in the earth, he finds the entrance to his old burrow and is overcome by emotion.

It made a lasting impression on me. I was reared on a busy city street, lulled to sleep nightly by the comforting rumble of big transport lorries driving through the dark on their way to Belfast docks. At eighteen, I spent the most unhappy year of my life, ‘resident’ in teacher training college. Hollow with misery, I cried silently in the dormitory every night, yearning for home. Other students, inured to hardship by years at boarding school, took it in their stride.

My first married house was a three-storey Victorian terrace with corniced ceilings and two marble fireplaces, overlooking the river on the same street as my old home. It was beautiful, hell to heat and clean, but I was looking out on a view familiar all my life. I remember saying one day, “I’ll just run down home for something.” “This is your home now,” the Loving Spouse gently reminded me. And so, for eight years it became.

With my mother’s demise, we built a house on a semi-rural road outside the city. On moving day I wrote on the bare floorboards of the living-room, “We were happy here,” then wept all the way to the new house. I couldn’t sleep for the loudness of the country silence. There was nothing but the braying of an old donkey in a neighbouring field, the odd car passing and an enormous garden we didn’t know what to do with.

That was thirty years ago. Now, we’re merely a suburb. Our erstwhile quiet road’s like a racetrack, much beloved by boy racers on motorbikes – and you could wait till your hair turns grey to drive out onto the main road.

I opened my own front door last Wednesday and inhaled the familiar smell of home, marginally less fragrant than Daughter Dear’s perhaps – but East, West, home’s best….